New abroad payment plan hurts students

By Editorial

In the past, Santa Clara's record on study abroad has always been admirable. While other universities make their students withdraw from their schools, seek out unaffiliated study abroad programs and forfeit their financial aid, Santa Clara has consistently made the effort to support study abroad. At a school like Santa Clara, where students are supposed to be educated to become globally aware citizens, it only makes sense.

But last quarter's announcement that the university would be instituting a new structure for paying for study abroad -- which will result in higher fees for many students -- flies in the face of all that.

Instead of paying the university the amount their study abroad program actually costs, students now must pay Santa Clara flat-rate fees based on where they will be going and what type of program they will be attending.

What this means is that some students may end up paying Santa Clara between several hundred and several thousand dollars more than their program actually costs.

Furthermore, the university announced this new payment structure after study abroad applications had already been processed, leaving students with little choice but to pay the new fees.

In an interview with The Santa Clara last week, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Don Dodson defended the new fees, saying that the university wanted to "simplify" the payment structure and not "have to handle the dozens of different rates with dozens of different programs."

While we do not doubt that facilitating study abroad may be administratively difficult, forcing students to pay thousands of dollars in extra fees only because the university doesn't want to deal with the confusion anymore is not fair to Santa Clara students.

Students who choose to attend study abroad programs in Europe will be especially affected by these fee changes, as their programs will fall into a higher payment tier. The difference from their payments will be used to pay for students' fees who are going to developing countries and paying less than what their program actually costs.

While encouraging more students to do their study abroad in the developing world is certainly admirable, where one chooses to study abroad is based on one's own academic and travel interests, not on financial ability.

A wealthy student who chooses an abroad experience focused on studying the root causes of poverty in El Salvador should not be subsidized by a student from a disadvantaged background who wants to study art history in Italy.

While these extra fees may not seem like a lot in the grand scheme of study abroad costs, for students who are already financially stretched trying to pay for traveling to another country, this could mean more loans and more stress. In the future, these fees could even be enough to make some students stay home.

This should not undermine all of the work that the Santa Clara study abroad office does to help students who want to go abroad. From making course approvals easy and accessible to accepting such a high number of study abroad credits that let students graduate early, many people work hard to make study abroad a feasible option.

However, this new fee structure is a cold way to lighten the administrative load, making students pay more and receive nothing in return.

For a university with a commitment to globalized education like Santa Clara, it is simply wrong.