Imagine being required to slap a $100-dollar bill on your professor's desk every time you showed up to listen to his or her lecture or participate in the discussion.
While this notion may seem unreasonable or ridiculous, The DePauw Editorial board took the liberty of calculating how much each class session at our school costs - the results we found were humbling.
According to DePauw's website, our college's annual tuition is $40,150 (this amount does not include housing, meals, health fee, housing programming fee or books). Whether a student is here on a scholarship or not, $40,150 is coming from someone's pocket somewhere for a student to be here.
Cut that amount in half, and you end up with tuition for each semester - $20,075. Divide that amount by the number of classes students are required to take (4), and you'll find that each class costs $5,018.75 each per semester. Divide that number by the number of weeks in the semester (roughly 15), and you'll find that each one-credit class costs $334.58 per week.
Therefore, if your class meets three times a week, each session costs you (or parent/private donor paying for you to be here) $111.52. If your class meets twice a week, each class costs $167.29.
Additionally, students who decide to take three classes instead of four do not receive a reduced tuition rate. In the case of the three-class student, a class that meets three times a week costs $148.70 per session, a class that meets twice costs $223.05 per session.
We urge our fellow students to remember that the money has already been spent on these classes. Each time a student decides to sleep in, that money was spent in the exchange for nothing - C-notes are uselessly wasted.
Every time a professor cancels class - Benjamin Franklins unfairly disappear from someone's wallet never to be refunded.
While we sometimes get caught up in our extra-curricular activities or partying, it is important to remember that our primary purpose here is to be students. We've made a commitment to higher education, and we're paying to get something out of it.