International students face a number of challenges when they choose to attend American universities, especially with the new, stricter rules and enforcement in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001. And this month, UW announced it will make attendance here just a little bit more difficult for its international students. Earlier this month, International Student Services (ISS) said that it will introduce a new annual charge of up to $125 for international students. The charge is to offset the costs to the university of the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, the U.S. government's new system for tracking those shady international students as they pursue their educations in this country.
It's not that $125 is a terribly huge amount of money. In fact, it's only around half of what every student pays in seg-fees each year. But why did the university choose to pass an administrative cost off only on to international students?
The answer makes all too much sense at first. With the budget cuts and crunch on the administration to scale back costs, the last thing UW needs is another unavoidable administrative cost like SEVIS. No one wants tuition to go up, and getting money out of the state for even such necessary expenditures can feel like begging Ebenezer Scrooge for just one more coal for the fire. One can just imagine ISS up at the Capitol saying, \If you please sir, the U.S. government has mandated it..."" in its meekest collective voice.
In the end, the least offensive route seems to be to charge the international student. The international student is in a minority, and so perhaps by putting the onus on such a small group, fewer people will be unhappy. After all, it makes sense that if a service only targets international students, only international students ought to pay, right?
This easy assumption is the face of what seems to be becoming a trend in Madison, spurred on by the constant pressure to keep costs down. Students, embittered by the memory of some pretty painful tuition hikes, demand that the costs of attendance be kept down. The administration is too often stretched thin in exactly the wrong places. And we all know what to expect from the state by now. But I fear that the result of all this pressure is an increasingly narrow attitude towards education, a sort of university a la carte where students are conceived as individual education-consumers.
The rise of this attitude is evidenced, as well, in the opt-out referendum currently on the ASM ballot. The proposed system would alter UW's seg-fee distribution from a system in which every student's fees go to fund every student group approved through a viewpoint-neutral process, to a system where every student could ""opt-out"" of funding specific student groups and receive a proportionate refund. The new proposal is a bad idea for a myriad of reasons, but what is most disturbing about it is its narrow definition of what benefits students. In this vision, individual students benefit from organizations with which they participate or agree, but not from the presence of a wide community of ideas both similar and dissimilar to the student's own.
Both the opt-out plan and the new ISS fee, in their narrow analyses of who participates and who pays, miss out on a fundamental aspect of good education-it happens in the context of community. Participating in the daily dialogue of a community like Madison can challenge and change students over the course of their careers here, fostering experience and understanding that mere training in a discipline often falls short of. The best education requires not only classwork, but also a wide, diverse community to which each individual contributes and from which everyone benefits in a thousand small ways.
We are a community of intellectuals and artists, chronic underachievers and overachievers, activists, athletes, educators and much more. Every one of us, whatever our political affiliation, ethnic background, nationality or class, owes something to the thriving and often turbulent community to which we belong. A real education is not just something we pick and choose, but a whole experience that, if it is worth the enormous price, has the potential to change us entirely.?? And it is not something we embark upon alone.
