Sunday, March 21, 2004

Unjust Fee at U-Mass

According to a CNN article, the University of Massachusetts is charging its international students a $65 fee. 200 international students are rightly refusing to pay, but that might result in their dismissal from the university and the loss of their student visas.

The correct answer is to charge a small fee to all students, not a large fee to just international students. Hopefully that is the solution they will arrive at. This is a blatantly discriminatory policy, but it has obvious causes: U-Mass has been under budgetary strains for the past few years, and has cut its international student budget by $240,000. And the US government has a mandated international student tracking policy called SEVIS, which universities have to pay for. You could find ways to blame both of these policies on the current Republican administration and George Bush.