Angelo DiTocco
My recent excessive intake of ice cream and peanut M&Ms from the dining hall hasn’t been too kind to my shape. At the same time, Nikocado Avocado has revealed his shocking weight loss transformation, putting his BMI dangerously close to mine. I can’t let him win, I decided, and off to the East Gym I trekked.
When I arrived at the building, the barrier to entry was quite high. But this had nothing to do with the gym being intimidating—after all, I’d been lifting, albeit inconsistently, for around 3 years now. Instead, this barrier to entry came in the form of ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS PER SEMESTER! As I handed in my sign-up sheet and took out my debit card, I had a thought that I’m sure many others have had as well: How the hell is this not already paid for?
Binghamton University has made some strange choices regarding which charges are slapped onto everyone’s bill and which are left to the students. It’s like a capitalist and a socialist had a divorce and each of them got half the control over the school’s finances. As a child of this economic divorce, I can confidently say that I’m not that lucky kid that gets two Christmases and two birthdays. Rather, I get the worst of both worlds, having to pay for my own stuff and then having to pay for other people’s stuff on top of that.
For starters, I am not getting any slack when it comes to my classes. Pretty much every electronic doohickey I’ve messed around with in class is paid for specifically by us engineering students through course fees. Well, I guess that’s not if you count the Technology Fee, but those virtual machines are so slow (despite this fee’s $400 magnitude) that most of us don’t even bother using them. It’s just the Appletards who need them, with the burdens of their poor technological decisions being carried by the rest of us.
I was going to stop there, but today, I tried to print something out only to find out that the library’s printing servers are down! That’s just another example of how much this fee does for us.
This nonsense is also present within the classes themselves. On one hand, there’s tutoring, which not every student needs, but every student must pay for through the Academic Support Fee. On the other hand, many of my introductory classes forced me to subscribe to certain websites just to do homework, which is not only ridiculous but is also not covered by any universal fees. The lab manuals, too, must be paid for out of pocket.
Getting back on the topic of physical activity, we have not one fee, but two: the Recreation Fee and the Intercollegiate Athletics Fee. Conveniently, these two fees, totaling $360, cover every single fitness-related resource except the one I actually care about, which is the gym.
And all that is not to mention the other bullshit fees that get thrown onto the bill. ID Card Fee? I already have one! Academic Excellence Fee? Why are you punishing me for being excellent? College Fee? I thought that was called “tuition.”
I can only think of two fees that actually apply to me: the Transportation Fee, which covers the buses, and the Activity Fee, which covers the academic clubs. I just wish I’d actually started taking advantage of those resources sooner, but oh well. I would have also given credit to the Campus Life Fee, but that mainly covers Late Nite [sic], and I am not waiting an hour in line just to go stuff a plush and mess around in a bouncy house. I’m a grown-ass man!
Is this everyone else’s fate as well? To be racked with charge after charge for random services that you couldn’t give less of a shit about, only to have to pay for your own stuff afterward? Or was I just given the short end of the stick by being a nerd instead of a student-athlete and being academically capable all on my own? Either way, I’m glad that I’ll be leaving college in a couple of years and going into the real world, where I can be confident that all the money I pay in taxes is going to adequately fund all the services I need. Right?