“Hi. Are you interested in sharing your thoughts on tuition?”
I was asking this question to students as part of a project worked on by the Tuition Advocacy Committee. Whether they supported the Faculty’s policies or not, I presumed students would have an opinion on the matter and share with me their thoughts. I was expecting interesting conversations, where I could learn from the different experiences of my peers. What I got was mostly wide-eyed looks of confusion and a quick dash into the Reading Room.
This is my final issue of Ultra Vires. And in my last article, I want to make a plea with you all. Care. About financial aid. About tuition. Care about making the financial aid system as equitable as possible. Care about how an unsustainable financial aid pot can affect a student’s experience at this law school.
We can differ in opinion about how to make this school the best it can be while also maintaining accessibility. I think that this school would be lacking if we all had the same opinions on these matters. But what we can’t have is student apathy on this issue.
It can feel futile trying to get your voice heard at this school. In March of last year, multiple students attended meetings to give their feedback on the financial aid program. These same students then worked on a white paper on financial aid. That white paper was never released to students. I’m not sure if it even exists in any finalized form. Working group meetings on financial aid were repeated again in the fall. I re-attended and said the same critiques that me and my fellow students have been saying about financial aid since the previous March. I imagine students said these critiques in past years. Yet in the three years I’ve been here, the front-end financial aid form has remained practically identical.
The communication channels between the general student body, the SLS, and the administration are broken. The administration and SLS are structured in a way that provides occasional outlets for the general student body to speak. But they give you no indication of whether or not your ideas were actually heard, and whether your ideas are being implemented. If changes are made to financial aid, I will not know which town halls, which surveys, and which UV articles were influential and which were not. No matter what policies the administration puts into place, they can simply tell the students that this was done “after consultation” without it being untrue.
The communication channels are also broken because the general student body is given little-to-no information about how the administration actually works and what its current projects are. Faculty Council meeting minutes are not on the Faculty website. SLS meeting minutes haven’t been posted on the SLS website since November. We aren’t told what the SLS working groups are. We don’t know which students and which faculty members are put on these working groups. Hell, we really don’t even know what the Dean’s job is outside of feeding us muffins. Ordinary students can’t use the SLS as their advocate if they don’t even know what the SLS and the administration actually do.
I truly don’t believe that these flaws in our communication channel are due to bad faith on anyone’s part. The SLS is given a lot of work. It’s hard for them to then have to do the very thankless job of synthesizing and communicating a summary of this work to students. They are also in the difficult position of having to discern what information is actually worth divulging to students, and what is too speculative or too far into the future to worry about now. Additionally, many SLS members spend multiple years on the SLS. Being on the “inside” for so long can easily make a person unaware of the information deficit that the general student body experiences.
While it will not be easy to better the communication channels between these three groups, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen. And the only way it will happen is if we feel like we can speak up and talk. To each other. To our SLS members. We need to demand that our views are actually heard, and that we are given evidence that the different student views were considered. We need to overhaul our methods of communication. Otherwise, tuition will keep on climbing, financial aid will remain at its problematic and unsustainable status quo, and the only communication we’ll have about this issue will be with ScotiaBank to further extend our lines of credit.
