College students across the country are self-imposing a fee it seems they wouldn’t mind paying, even if it hikes up education costs by a few dollars in a tough economy. What fee could be so important that students are voting to charge themselves? (Here's a hint: It’s not the Beer-for-All Fund.)
The answer is green fees, a mandatory per-semester or per-credit charge to fund sustainability or renewable energy at their colleges. Varying from as little as $1 per semester at the University of Utah to $40 per semester at Northland College in Wisconsin, the fees are charged to every student alongside traditional tuition addendums like activity fees.
Green fees support various environmental initiatives, be it an Office of Sustainability or an investment in clean energy. Some, like the The Green Initiative Fund at the University of California Santa Barbara, award money to projects that increase energy efficiency, while others operate as a loan the school uses to update its energy infrastructure.
A list maintained by The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education classifies green fee schools into those that invest in renewable energy produced off-campus; those that fund on-campus renewable energy efforts and those that do a little of both.
As the AASHE synopses show, green fees are generally voted into effect by a student government and do not all have a permanent lifespan. For example, the $1.69 fee adopted by the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay for the 2006-2007 school year expires after four years, allowing future students to decide for themselves if they want to pay the fee after the student body turns over.
Detractors (and blog commenters aplenty) are mostly taking issue with the fact that students (or more realistically, parents) are shouldering the cost of improvements that will save schools money in the long run and arguing that universities are cashing in on students’ goodwill. This is a concern to be sure, but these students are willing to literally pay their dues to be taken seriously, especially when that could lead to policy changes: after one year of green fees, the administration at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government took over the cost from students, paying for renewable energy out of its budget and dropping the fee.
However popular they may be with students, green fees are still struggling to pass in states like Florida and Texas, which require public university fees to be approved by the state legislature. In the face of a tuition hike this year, sunshine state legislators voted down a bill that would allow state schools to charge green fees, despite student referendums all over the state supporting the fees.
According to the NY Times Green Inc. blog, youth coalition ReEnergize Texas is currently fighting a similar fight, hopefully with a different conclusion this time.
Source: BecauseAction.com
