A resolution was passed by the Student Government Association (SGA) earlier this month to eliminate online fees for mandatory classes that are only offered online. The resolution comes from Academic Excellence Chairman Brayden Young in regard to the $35 per credit hour fee charged for all online courses.
Young completed his undergraduate at NKU and is now attending Chase College of Law in his first year of law school. It was issues with his own course registration that prompted the resolution with SGA.
“A lot of classes that I would have to take, I would go to register for them, and I’d see that they’d be online,” the chairman said. “And when I’d go to find an in-person option, there wouldn’t be one.”
Young said that while he preferred to take courses in-person, he had no option to do so. Then he was hit with a $105 fee for each three-credit-hour class.
“That was just the icing on the cake of kind of a blind side,” Young said.
The chairman discussed his concerns with other students as well as his committee within SGA and found that they had similar experiences when registering for courses. Instead of asking for more transparency on the fees, SGA created a resolution to completely eliminate them.
“It’s one thing if I sit and take a class online because I willingly took it online to be charged a fee, but when I didn’t have the option but to take it online, and it’s required to graduate, we kind of said that an online fee there was just unfair,” Young explained.
Young said the fees become more of an issue when students must take several online courses a semester.
“You’re paying up to $300, $400 in additional fees,” he said. “That’s kind of a mood changer, and we’ve always just seen that that’s kind of unfair to the students.”
The Northerner spoke with students on campus earlier this week about the resolution. Several students expressed gratitude for the proposed change, calling the additional fees unnecessary.
“I think the removal of required online fees is really good,” one student said. “We don’t have to pay an extra fee for something that we don’t even really want. You now have that option and you know you’ll have to pay.”
Another student agreed.
“I think it’s ridiculous to pay more for things that you are already paying for and are forced to pay for. I mean, you’re paying for this class and you don’t have a choice. Why are they forcing you to pay again?”
Although SGA has passed the resolution, that does not mean anything has changed. From here, the resolution will go to the university where they will make a decision.
“This is where President [Lucy] Burns and Vice President [Collin] Jarrell step in with being the executive branch,” Young explained. “They will work with implementing this.”
Young said that the president and vice president of SGA have spoken with NKU President Cady Short-Thompson as well as Diana McGill, provost and executive vice president of Academic Affairs about the resolution.
According to Young, they have “informed [SGA] that there is a massive change in the works on fees in general.”
Although it was his own experience that led to the creation of the resolution, Young hopes that it can be an example to students of how SGA can work to benefit them.
“As of right now, most of the ideas that I have or that we’re working on have come from inside the government, and that’s not really good as being a student government or a student representative body,” Young said. “We want ideas to come from the body.”