Fixed tuition is bad news

When University officials adopted fixed tuition, with great fanfare, they said it would make GW stand out.

Boy, were they right.

Two weeks ago, both The New York Times and Washington Post carried the news of GW’s tuition and fees exceeding $50,000 for next year’s incoming students. Other media outlets have also reported on GW easily being the most expensive school in the country.

Simply put, fixed tuition is a public relations disaster.

I bet most readers didn’t even get to the part of the article explaining that fixed tuition is intended to help students and parents. Readers just see the headlines, read the first few paragraphs and assume the worst.

For students and parents, all this bad publicity may not be worth it. As The Hatchet opinions page pointed out last semester, GW’s fixed tuition doesn’t seem to be providing the promised savings (“High tuition fuels negative perceptions,” Nov. 6, p. 4).

And then there’s the fixed tuition problems of New York’s Pace University, which GW cited heavily in February 2004 when it went the fixed tuition route.

“We thought it would help us attract students, but we kept waiting,” Pace’s president recently told The New York Times. “And people were still dropping out for financial reasons.”

With students and parents pondering whether fixed tuition is beneficial, I hope GW administrators are doing the same thing.

-Michael Barnett, alumnus, Hatchet editor in chief 2005-2006

Beware of the fake fans

As a dedicated and very superstitious Colonials fan, I have proudly stood my ground in the same row at each basketball game since I’ve arrived at Foggy Bottom. However, as I write this letter, I am sad to say that I am embarrassed to be a Colonials fan.

When the GW men’s basketball team lost to Xavier at the Smith Center more than a week ago, America did not see very many real Colonials fans at the game as they tuned in on ESPN 2. Instead, they saw people who looked at the big game as merely an opportunity to drink all day.

With the Colonials clearly out of the game, these students, who had pushed and cut their way to the front of the line before the game, left early. This, in my mind, was a truly disrespectful gesture towards the players and head coach Karl Hobbs who gave us so many great memories during the 24-game home winning streak.

This Saturday game proved my concern from the beginning of the season, which is that GW does not have enough real fans to build a powerhouse program.

-Andy Bergbauer, sophomore