Student Technology Fee RENEWAL

First, is it possible to lose $17/student/term in funds and still meet our current level of technology needs? What does the STF currently pay for? 

If we were able to sustain the level of technology we have on campus currently at the $17/term rate, I don't see any reason to raise it. Given the $2 million budget cuts at WWU and the current economic situation, tuition increases are already on the way and education is going to be more expensive. 

The Student Technology Fee pays for a lot of the technology resources that we have right now. All of the computers in the computer labs in Haggard Hall have been paid for with the fee. Also, if you have ever been to the Student Tech Center, everything in there has been paid with the STF. That includes video equipment, laptops for checkout, software programs, and other equipment.

Also, I believe if you go into Haggard Hall, and go down the hallway, there are different posters on the wall that show what tech items on campus the fee has paid for.

In response to what Luke said, it would be impossible to lose the student technology fee and still have the same level of technology contribution on campus. The $17 that each student pays goes toward the purchasing of a significantly large portion of each general university computer lab, and without the fee maintenance of said labs would become very hard to fund. Also, certain projects are completely dependent on the student technology fee, such as the student technology center. Without the student technology fee, the student technology center would almost certainly have to close, as would many general university computer labs.

In terms of an increase, it doesn't necessarily have to be an increase of a large amount. Even a $2 increase would be immensely helpful and would fund thousands of dollars more for student technology on campus, even though it would only cost each students an additional $6 for the academic year. Since many students pay this amount a day for lunch, I don't believe this would a particularily expensive for many of us.

Thanks for the response, good to hear from someone who works in the STC. It seems that at the least, the $17 fee is vital and should be kept. 

In regards to the $2.00 increase, that sounds reasonable. Though I think we might underestimate the value of lunch. I agree, $6 a student doesn't sound like a big deal, but we do need to consider that other departments also have needs. If the budget crunch continues, students are going to be asked to give up a lot more lunches. 

I appreciate the discussion on the Student Tech Fee and the questions that were raised.  You can always see how the funds are spent by reviewing the student tech fee site at http://www.wwu.edu/stf  There is a history link on the left column.

Here is a brief (and very condensed) version of how the funds are spent:

Fee is split into two components: $15 general and $2 dedicated to the Student Tech Center.  The $15 generates about $550,000 and the University contributes an additional $150,000.  Each year a call for proposals is sent out to solicit ideas. The goals of the proposals must address the goals of the STF:

A. Broaden or enhance the quality of the student's academic experience through the use of technology in support of the curriculum;

B. Provide additional student access to technological resources and equipment that are needed in support of instruction and to maintain and enhance the technological competency of students as it relates to their academic endeavors;

C. Increase the integration of technology into the curriculum.

The proposals are then reviewed by a student led and student majority committee. Recommendations are made to the WWU President and the AS President and funded once they approve.

Typically about 40 to 60 percent is spent on upgrading the various computer labs around campus each year. (This is about half of what we need to have every lab refreshed on a 4 year replacement cycle--so we have some very old machines on campus.)  The remaining funds are spend on projects ranging from an electron microscope to GEO walls to Multimedia podiums to....  See the history section of the STF website for the full listing.

Not having the funds would have a significant impact in our ability to both refresh existing technology and expand our use of technology in the curriculum.

If we were to raise the Student Technology fee to $30 (right between the CWU ($25) and EWU ($35) fees), it would generate about $1,075,000 per year. That is a lot of money but remember the fee would still be lower than the UW or EWU. What could we do with that amount? Here is one proposal:

• Dedicate ~$650,000 to replacing the computers in our open labs, departmental labs, and portable checkout on a four year cycle. This would assure that students would have modern computers to work with during their years at Western. 

•  Dedicate ~70,000 to a permanent technology support professional in the Student Technology Center. This would provide much needed support to both our student employees and allow us to continue to make the STC ‘the place’ for advanced technology on campus.

• Fund a wireless network expansion and renewal. While we have a generally robust wireless network, it does not reach all parts of campus (exterior especially but also some interior areas). We also do not have the most modern equipment which hinders us in providing higher speeds to students and is harder to manage. ~$20,000

• Significantly upgrade our video camera and editing capability. On the President’s discussion page there is a thread about our need to upgrade our video programs. Students are also using video more and we need to keep up with this medium. Increasing the number of cameras and providing advanced video editing software and machines would help students produce quality video products. ~$20,000

• The cost of paper and ink for printers has risen dramatically over the past few years. Our current printing policy for students cannot be maintained at these costs. It would be good to dedicate some STF funds to printing costs ~$25,000 to maintain this service. AND, fund an informational campaign to get students to reduce their printing for sustainability of our environment.

• Finally, we should continue to fund proposals made by faculty, staff and student groups that will address new technology needs. This has been a great way to bring needed and important technology to campus and to make it available to students. ~$300,000

These are tough economic times but this is an investment in your future. With technology use increasing in the workplace, as well as in education, it is important that students have experience with up-to-date equipment and software to allow them to lead as they leave Western and enter the workplace or continued higher education.

What would you like to see? The Associated Students are putting together a task force to develop a proposal. It would be great to see continued discussion about what students want for their technology dollars.

Another idea: at some schools the STF or student government pays for student access to a music service that allows them to download and play music on their portable devices. Is that the type of expense students want their STF dollars to go?

How up-to-date of computers do most students really need? The majority of the things that students do in the computer labs could easily be done on much older and less powerful computers than the computers that are in there right now. I understand a need to upgrade computers that are used for video editing as that takes a lot of processing power and better computers could significantly speed up the editing, but everything else (web research, word documents, powerpoints, etc...) could easily be done on computers that could've been bought for $100 a few years ago. I'm sure the computers we have now were far more expensive than was necessary when they were bought and any future upgrades will be unncessary and needlessly expensive. There is no way I want to pay more money for unnecessary services.

i agree on this note, the money would go to better use to have more wireless coverage but at the same time most students have their own laptops now days. I personally dont have one but the ones we have now are great for school needs. I myself dont want the technology fee to be raised and if so i think it would be better used to get computers on Fairhave College. They are still using very old computers, their wireless is horrible and most classrooms dont have acces to it. Fairhaven is a part of western so why is it being..you could say neglected? Fairhaven students also pay the fee but aren't recieving any of the benefits. Why isnt there more than one printing station available, when the machine is jammed people are told to go to main campus is this right? And why isnt there laptops available to check out?

So do we really need better equipment or do we need to focus on getting our WHOLE campus up to date and providing for all students.

Hi Brenden,

Interesting point... especially if you combine it with the discussion about computer labs in the 'social advice' forum. There the discussion is around the labs being full because many people are just using the computers to check email, work in facebook, etc.  Things that are more 'leisure' oriented than academic.  Achieving a balance of processing power and how a student wants to use a computer can be problematic if one student wants to use it to check facebook but the next student wants to work on a media project with Adobe Creative Suite. This becomes even more problematic in the Sciences and other areas where the compute power is critical (examples: social sciences where large data sets may need manipulation; geography and geospatial data/display; the arts for set and lighting design; etc.). Please remember too that this proposes to upgrade the computers in the department labs as well where there may be very specialized needs that require a more powerful computer. For the general use labs we have tried to hit a sweet spot of ordering capable but definately not top-of-the-line computers.

Remember also that the technology environment is one of the things that prospective students consider as they choose a university. I would worry if they saw a technology environment that did not have at least some modern equipment.

However, your point about paying more for unnecessary services is spot on. That is one of the reasons why the committee that decides how the fees are used is chaired by the Academic VP of the Associated Students and the majority of the committee are students. While not all students use technology heavily, there are many that do and the committee attempts to take all students into account when making funding decisions. They have reduced awards that they felt were too elaborate.

Thanks for the comment!

So do we really need better equipment or do we need to focus on getting our WHOLE campus up to date and providing for all students.

Brenden I have to disagree with your point about not getting better equipment and instead making the whole campus up to date and providing for all students.   I believe this is wrong because we cannot make every student want to learn about technology advances, but we can use money to get new better equipment for students that have a desire to spend a majority of their life dedicated to technolody advancement.  With such people as computer science majors and other science related majors, it is going to be necessary and helpful for them to be aware of the newest techonology for then they graduate.  But if our campus attempted to up date the whole campus the budget as well as the techonology on campus would be stretched thin leaving some departments hurt, and other departments still not using the techonology that they were given.

I believe that by making a legal music service available on campus, we will only worsen the situation with students who need the computer for academics and those who need the computer for leisure. If we start allowing music to be downloaded on campus, we might have far more congestion than we could handle. Don't we have home computers for that reason? I think that this is a great idea if we weren't already having some complaints about full computer labs with half of the users doing something other than homework.

I believe that it is important for us to be replacing these computers in the computer labs on a cycle. As technology advances, even just with desktop or laaptotp computers, we need to keep up .IT's a vital part of our education because we are expected to work with these computers and advanced programs in the workplace. I don't know about everonye else, but I expect to leave my university perpared with the skills to get a job.

A lot of what we do on a computer is basic, like brenden said. Word processing, internet use, powerpoint, etc are all basic programs that can be done on a basic computer. I think that places like computer science, math, graphic design, etc should be updated more frequently because thats what their degree is about is computers. On the other hand, if you are doing communication as your major, having a computer that is brand new will not help you with anything, because the three year old computer can word process just the same as the brand new one. I can understand the logic that brenden is using here.

Hi,
I certainly agree that getting our WHOLE campus up-to-date and providing for all students is where our focus should be. However I must take exception to your assertion that Fairhaven students are being neglected. While it is true that the STF does not always make an award directly to Fairhaven College each year, over the history of the STF Fairhaven has received 5% of the funding available. Since students do not 'enroll' in a college, it is difficult to calculate what percentage of total student body are in Fairhaven College. A good way to calculate it is to look at class enrollments. This term there are 837 enrollments in Fairhaven (majors & service classes) compared to 49,608 total class enrollments at the University. So Fairhaven has received 5% of the funding while only having 1.7% of the student enrollments. The STF has treated them pretty well. This year Fairhaven did not receive an STF award but they revised one of their proposals to reduce the cost and the President funded it so that students there would have better media in some classrooms. Previous awards have included 2 in 2007 (media upgrade for the auditorium and phase 2 of enhanced digital video services); 1 award in 2006 (art studio upgrade); 1 award in 2005 (video editing); etc.

However, I don't want to diminish your point that we must move the WHOLE campus forward and that includes Fairhaven. That is why I want to see us upgrade student computers on a regular basis so that no one feels that they are forced to use very old computers. The unfortunate reality is that we cannot do it with the current funding available to us.

Thanks for your comment!
 

i think everyone has made very good points. i would not like the fee to go up, but i do understand the need for more services. someone’s idea about the 2$ fee would be VERY reasonable. it just depends if that money is going 1$ to general and 1$ to STC or if those $2 will go just to STC.
i do not go to Fairhaven, but having 1 printer is ridiculous. maybe just rotate equipment around campus (which i think already happens) so Haggard gets updated, then the computers that were in haggard get scattered around campus to the different areas. maybe this could be done to the next new printer bought, the old one could go to Fairhaven so they have more technology.

i dont think we should keep comparing ourselves to other schools. we are not those schools and we have a different group of students, different environment, and different factors that can all impact us as a campus. Changing our fee to match the other schools is silly, UW's fee is so high maybe because they are a HUGE campus, they have way more students that need access to technology. maybe there should be a survey done about how many computer stations there are per student and see those numbers.
i dont think students should have to keep footing more and more of the cost of school maintenance, this should be the job of the school, and they should get this money either through taxes, the government, or other ways aside from bothering the students. i feel that it is so easy to just say, oh we will tack on another fee here, or this fee there. or increase it by 1$ but after a while we end up paying a lot of fees, more fees than some people pay on books in 1 quarter.
making every dollar count is the way to be. our student tech fee pays for services that classes use without making that class have a fee of its own, i like this. i can print a 40*30 poster for free as long as it is class related, this is a nice service that the STC provides. i dont want this to go away, but i also dont want rates to increase dramatically. 2$ is good, 5$ is not.
 

Hi Lloyd,

You are absolutely correct that we should not change our fee just to match another school's fee. I do find it useful to know what others are doing and paying for (for example: at CWU they use part of their STF to pay for Internet access, here we pay it centrally) but I did not list the other schools just to say we should match them for the sake of equivalency.  Rather, I want the discussion to center around what we want to accomplish, then let's figure out how much it would cost and then we can decide if it is a fee we want to pay.

I also agree with your general comment about student fees... let me assure you that I have requested and lobbied for more support from general university funds and the legislature. However, tuition and fees have always been the responsibility of the student.... but I would still, like you, like to see the proportion of state support increase rather than decrease.  I suspect our discussion might have been much different if the renewal vote would have been last year rather than when we are facing tough economic times. That is why it is so important to think about what our technology priorities are for the fund. Dramatic increase or not, we will need to spend wisely!

This forum is just one way for the AS Task Force to gather information and I am appreciating everyone who has chimed in with an opinion.

I think its important that our computers are updated regularly and think that a very valid point was brought up that if our student fees covered music downloads we would just increase the congestion of computer labs.  Our network would also slow down, and that would ultimately just cause more problems I think.  I do think that it is essential to have options.  I'm thankful that there are people who are concerned with our technology needs. Its amazing to have access to software that my now 3-year old laptop wouldn't have the ability to support. Compared to schools I've attended in the past, Western does an amazing job of keeping up with new computers and software.  I am not opposed to seeing a fee increased, especially since I know how essential it is to some majors that we have continual advancement.

A reminder to everyone: the group forming the STF renewal is currently meeting and deliberating over the Student Tech Fee for next year.  If anybody has any more concerns, ideas, questions, or anything, share them here or contact the Task Force via asvp.academics@wwu.edu.  Thanks!