Shyla Taylor, a physics major at UNR, said she’s at her financial breaking point as a student at the University of Nevada, Reno.
“I already eat $1 pot pies for dinner every night, and that’s almost my entire diet,” Taylor said.
To pay for a freezer-filling supply of such pot pies, housing and university costs that aren’t already covered by loans, Taylor said she works 7 days a week, in three jobs. She’s among some who worry that, if school gets any more expensive, it’ll be impossible to keep going.
That’s where a recent vote comes in. The Board of Regents, a group of elected officials who oversee the university and other public colleges, voted Dec. 5 to raise mandatory student fees.
The most expensive of them is the technology fee, which now charges students nine dollars per credit. Come Fall 2025, when Taylor will be a sophomore, it’ll go up to $18. Taylor, who routinely takes more than the standard five-class, 15-credit load, could have to pay over $300 each semester — for the tech fee alone.
“It’s not worth it at all,” Taylor said. “We don’t need extra programs as badly as we need to be able to afford education. I can’t enjoy these services if I can’t afford to go here.”
Catherine Cardwell, dean of Libraries, stressed to the Sagebrush that the fee wasn’t proposed lightly.
“We’re open to hearing different comments and we really try to be good stewards of the funds that we do have,” Cardwell said. “We’re just getting in this place where it’s going to be very difficult to operate without an increase.”
As it stands now, technology fee money pays for new public computers, classroom technology, software licenses and wages for the people who make sure all of those things run.
According to Ed Huffman, executive director of the Office of Digital Learning, all that comes at a price that’s rising all the time.
Canvas, the now-ubiquitous learning management software, cost the university $244,030.70 last year, Huffman said. He added that most software licenses go up by 5-7% every year.
“Things like salaries are non-negotiable, things like software licensing are non-negotiable,” Huffman said. “It means that we’ll have to cut in areas that are negotiable, so usually that is classrooms and hardware renewals on the labs.”
Sasi K. Pillay, the university’s vice president of Information Technology, told ASUN senators at a meeting Sept. 4 that the university was only able to replace 60-70 school computers this year, of about 300 that he said needed to be replaced on a regular basis.
However, new things are on the list too, Cardwell said.
One of them is set to be Top Hat, an attendance and assignment software platform, which Huffman said was “top of the list to get funded” at the Sept. 4 senate meeting. That means buying an institutional license that covers all students.
Cardwell also said Quizlet, a studying app that allowed students to share flashcards and other resources completely for free before it put up a paywall in 2018, might be on the table.
“We’ve already explored what Quizlet would cost, there was a strong desire from ASUN to provide licensing for that,” Cardwell said.
But Taylor is skeptical. She called Top Hat a waste of money that she said frequently breaks, fails to record attendance correctly and could easily be replaced with a sheet of paper.
Taylor also heavily criticized the idea of buying a Quizlet subscription for every student.
“I can guarantee you that just buying flash cards would be easier than paying for Quizlet,” Taylor said. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t need Quizlet. I do need somewhere to live.”
Truett Knepp, who’s about to declare a journalism major at the university, said he chose Reno because it was his most financially feasible option.
“UNR has always been heralded as a cheaper college,” Knepp said. “Now they’re falling into the pitfalls a lot of UC colleges are falling into.”
Tuition and fees in the University of California system cost almost $17,000 for in-state students. But tuition and fees for a California student who attends the University of Nevada, Reno under the Western Undergraduate Exchange program seem to be catching up. Next year, with all the student fee raises going into effect, of which the tech fee increase is only one, it’ll cost over $14,000.
Students use personal devices while sitting in an on-campus lawn. Digital Wolf Pack Initiative (DWPI) tablets aren’t covered by the technology fee, but much of the other technology students use on campus is.
A friend of Knepp’s was supposed to graduate from the University of Nevada, Reno this year, he said, but had to drop out in order to work full-time to pay off bills.
“That was before this proposal,” Knepp said. “If that’s how it was for some people before, then it’s going to be obviously way worse for people in the future.”
But with the tech fee’s approval, he said, the least the university can do would be to get students access to Adobe products, like Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro, on their personal devices, instead of just making it available on certain school computers.
“For all the Adobe Cloud stuff, it’s still 40 bucks a month, which is egregious,” Knepp said. “For my [Journalism] 108 class, I have lab once a week, I can only get progress done if I come here and work on it.”
Both Knepp and Taylor, however, represent students who would rather have ditched the technology fee increase altogether. But Cardwell said she and other administrators didn’t hear from students who felt that way at all.
Before the fee went to the Board of Regents, Cardwell explained, it was discussed in an advisory committee that has two student representatives from ASUN. The presentation she, Pillay and Huffman gave to the ASUN senate was Sept. 4 — their second meeting of the fall semester.
Cardwell said she wanted to give concerned students plenty of time to offer their input on the fee, and told senators to reach out with constituents’ feedback. Before the proposal went to the Board of Regents, Cardwell said, no one spoke out against the increase.
“We really didn’t hear anything,” Cardwell said.
None of the public comments submitted online for the Board of Regents meeting on Dec. 4-5, where all the new fee increases were approved, were critical of the tech fee increase — or even mentioned it at all.
As the most expensive fee increase proposed this year, it’ll be more than half of the markup that will cost 15-credit students nearly $500 more over the course of the next academic year.
Peregrine Hart can be reached via email at peregrineh@unr.edu or on Instagram
