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There’s a lot of chatter this morning about Groupon’s latest deal in the Chicago area: A 60% discount on university tuition at National-Louis University.
Sounds amazing, but the full story isn’t quite as impressive.
The offer is for one graduate-level course. Not one course as in “any one course,” but one course as in “one particular course.” A course that was concocted specifically for the Groupon promotion. It does apply toward a master’s in teaching, but only if, after completing it, you apply for, are accepted to, and enroll in NLU. (Given the nature of the class, it’s hard to imagine it being accepted as transfer credit at any other school.) All in all, this “deal” is clearly more a marketing initiative than an educational innovation.
And that shouldn’t come as a surprise, given National-Louis University’s past…
Until 1990, NLU was known as the National College of Education. It changed its name to National-Louis University to honor to its largest donor, Michael W. Louis, who had made a $30 million pledge to the college the previous year. In 1982 Louis had given NCE three million dollars to create a college of arts and sciences, which the school had also named for him. In 1983 they granted him an honorary doctorate as well.
So. Yeah.
Charlie Webster, the state chair of the Maine Republican party, has produced documents claiming to show that over two hundred of the state’s college students have committed fraud by voting in Maine while paying out-of-state tuition.
This is a lie. It’s an evil lie. It’s just … jeez.
Here’s the deal. If you move to Maine for college, you have to pay out-of-state tution your first year. And your second. And your third. And your fourth. And your fifth. You have to pay out-of-state tuition forever, in fact, until you demonstrate that you have “established a Maine domicile for other than educational purposes.”
And as long as you’re attending college full-time, you’ll be “presumed to be in Maine for educational purposes and not to establish a domicile.” Again: Forever.
You can arrive in Maine fresh out of high school, move into your own place, live there 365 days a year. Work there, spend summers there, get married there. Finish your undergraduate degree, go on to grad school. But as long as you’re still a student, you’re “presumed to be in Maine for educational purposes and not to establish a domicile,” and the burden of proof is on you to show otherwise. (“No one factor can be used to establish domicile,” by the way. “All factors and circumstances must be considered on a case-by-case basis.”)
Paying out-of-state tuition isn’t evidence that you don’t live in Maine, in other words. It’s not evidence of anything at all. Out-of-state tuition is a revenue stream for the university and the state, and as such, it’s designed to put every possible burden on the student who’s looking to get out from under it.
Which brings us back to Charlie Webster.
What Webster is doing here is deploying a state regulation designed to deprive Maine’s college students of their money as a mechanism to deprive them of their votes. There’s no other way to describe it. Take their money, take their votes. Justice, fairness, and the Supreme Court of the United States be damned.
It’s really that simple.
Students at the University of California and the California State University are already facing tuition increases for the fall semester. But new state budget cuts passed this week could mean an additional mid-year hike — and that’s if everything goes according to plan with the budget from here on out.
Tuition has more than tripled in California in the last decade, and fees are slated to rise another 8% at CSU and 10% at UC in the fall semester. State legislators just cut an additional $150 million each from UC and CSU, compounding a combined cut of $1 billion planned this spring. In total, the reductions amount to a more than 20% cut from just least year.
The just-passed budget assumes new revenues of $4 billion for the state which have not yet been approved. If those funds fail to materialize, UC and CSU stand to lose another $100 million each.
Nearly a dozen students occupied a portion of the Rutgers administration building overnight in defiance of an administration that cut off their access to food and water yesterday evening. The group was able to sneak supplies in via a makeshift pulley system, and say they have no intention of leaving until their demands are met.
The group is demanding that Rutgers’ president endorse a tuition freeze, that new scholarships be put in place for underprivileged and first-generation students, that transcript fees be eliminated, and that the university increase “support for the rights of ALL University affiliated workers.” In addition, the group is calling on Rutgers to implement a new shared governance structure for the university. (A detailed explanation of the demands can be found at the above link.)
The occupiers have a Facebook page and a Twitter feed, and the For Student Power blog has been liveblogging their action since yesterday afternoon.
This story is the best short introduction I’ve yet seen to the “New Badger Partnership” — University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin’s proposal to split Madison, the UW flagship, off from the rest of the University of Wisconsin system.
Martin’s plan, negotiated in secret with Wisconsin’s new union-busting governor Scott Walker, would lop $125 million off of UW Madison’s budget, but give it far more operational flexibility on issues ranging from how to spend state money to how much to charge for tuition. The plan, opponents say, is a recipe for privatization of one of the nation’s great public universities.
The plan needs to be approved by the Wisconsin state legislature, and the prospects of that seem have dimmed recently — battles over the state budget and collective bargaining have battered the governor’s standing in the state, and it’s not clear that his party has the stomach for another big fight. Opposition to the plan from the university’s system-wide board of regents is a further barrier to its adoption.
But even if the plan is dropped from the current budget, it’s sure to return in the future, and its prospects are being watched closely by higher education advocates and analysts all over the country. At a time when the principles that have governed public higher education in the United States for generations are increasingly under fire, the fate of the University of Wisconsin is sure to have implications from New York to California and beyond.
Students who oppose the New Badger Partnership will be holding a mock auction of Bascom Hall, the UW Madison administration building, this afternoon, with more actions planned for the rest of the week. I’ll be following the story here, so keep checking back.
studentactivism.net 
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