By Paul Esau (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: March 28, 2012
There really isn’t any way of escaping this simple fact. Whether it’s in taxes, tolls, tips or referendums, there’s always a beseeching palm ready to receive your dough. The onus is then on you, the man (or woman) with the money. What are you willing to give? When are you willing to give? How much was Caesar’s in the first place?
The question of finances has been particularly salient in the last few months, stretching from December’s SUB building referendum to the recent tally on the Athletics & Wellness Fee (A&W), with a couple CIVL referendums thrown in for small-change. You, the student body, have been asked to make some significant decisions about the future of UFV, and about the amount of money you are willing to invest into this institution.
I use the word “invest” for a reason, because it is gallingly obvious to many of you that you will not be seeing the full benefits of projects like the SUB building or the A&W (actually the potential benefits of the latter, as it has been stymied. Page 20 has details). Some of you have been paying towards the SUB building for years, and will graduate before the building ever opens. Some of you have never seen a UFV varsity game in any sport, and visit the Envision Athletic Centre only as a shortcut between C building and parking lot 10. “At least in the real world,” some of you were saying during the referenda, ‘when you pay for something you get something comparable in return.’
While the logic in this statement sounds reasonable, it doesn’t encompass the full picture of what it means to be a university student and a member of the Student Union Society. The blunt truth of the matter is that if the student body all voted according to the direct benefits to their individual person, very few motions would ever pass. Other criteria need to be considered, one of which I’m going to discuss here.
One of the basic, universal arguments against any fee is that of student poverty, that students shouldn’t be asked to pay for anything beyond our own immediate needs and even that only at the lowest, most minimum cost. Financial insecurity is one of the realities of student life, but it is not a paralyzing force which should be used to refute ideas such as the A&W fee on principle. For university students part of the educational movement from adolescence to adulthood is the need to think beyond ourselves, if only because behind this institution, behind UFV’s abnormally low tuition, there are other individuals thinking (perhaps begrudgingly) about us.
I was exposed to this reality a few weeks ago when talking with a high school friend whose post-secondary path has widely diverged from mine. He moved to Alberta and works as a welder. He drives a truck, shoots guns, and makes enough money to actually pay taxes. He’s also very aware that part of those taxes go to pay for the education of people like me; that he is in a very tangible way financing my Bachelor of Arts degree, something from which he will probably derive no direct benefit.
For every “full-time” student at UFV (roughly 30 credits over the course of the academic year), the government pays the institution $8054. This means that we poor students pay roughly a third of the actual cost of our tuition, while our friends, family and the anonymous masses make up the difference. Most of you may think that we pay too much as students, while some very few of you may be amazed that we pay so little. Either way, these are the numbers.
We, as students, are being invested in by people who do not know us, do not know our potential, do not even know if we will ever repay the investment. I won’t pretend that this investment is voluntary, or even meditated, nor will I pretend that it would be wise to simply “pay it forward” to projects such as the A&W fee. I just ask that we, as students, respect this investment.
We need to move beyond complaining about what we can’t afford, to considering what we are able to invest. Sometimes you are simply building a future for those who come after, and sometimes that’s okay.
