Students push for more involvement in Teachers College finances amid debt concerns (Columbia Daily Spectator - 9/18/14) #Harlem, #HarlemEd, Teachers College, Columbia University EXCERPT: At Teachers College, where tuition per credit has risen to $1,398, a student movement called Our TC has been canvassing classmates and gathering data as part of a campaign to push TC administrators and trustees to give them more shared governance in the school’s finances. “Debt is an issue that’s clearly coming from the ways in which the administration is making financial decisions,” David Backer, TC ’14 and one of the campaign’s lead organizers, said. “The tuition is too high. We want a say in the way in which these decisions are being made to improve the quality of this institution.” According to an anonymous online survey of 170 students conducted in the spring by Our TC, 81 percent of current students and 96 percent of alumni report having debt. Among those surveyed, the average debt was $60,467—almost twice the $33,000 nationwide average for 2014 graduates as reported by the Wall Street Journal. “I can’t even think about graduating and having to start paying back loans,” one anonymous survey respondent said. “It is terrifying.” Backer, who had been involved in other activist groups while at the college, said he felt organizing to combat student debt was increasingly necessary. “We’re trying to advocate for a vision of governance that doesn’t exclude the experiences of the people that the institution is meant to serve,” he said. “We want to mobilize the student body to be able to communicate how important this is.” So far, Backer said neither the administration nor the Board of Trustees has responded to the group’s requests. “In meetings with the Board of Trustees, which I’ve been a part of, the explanations typically include, first of all, the idea that they don’t need to explain anything to us—that students can’t think and shouldn’t be thinking about these big-picture financial decisions,” Backer said. Backer said that the Trustees frequently blamed rising facilities and faculty costs for increased tuition and student debt. “They tend to put the faculty on the spot,” he said. “They say, the faculty wants this, the faculty wants that, they have to take care of pensions, they have to take care of benefits, and in the end, they say this adds up.” “They take issue with the idea that administrator salaries are too high,” Backer added. “They don’t think that’s true.” TC administrators did not respond to requests for comment by press time. Cathlin Goulding, a TC Ph.D. student and another Our TC organizer, said the way that the college is organized is an obstacle to student activism in general. “This institution is so large that they’re able to keep their students very passive,” Goulding said. “It’s a very passive institution. In my five years here, I haven’t seen an activist group before this one. … My understanding is that because there’s so many departments, that it’s just a very segregated institution, and it’s very hard to congregate and to collaborate.”
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 22:41:14 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015