Kent State's student bills hide the cost of athletics

Kent State's student bills hide the cost of athletics

Kent State’s bills don’t do a good job of explaining what students are paying for, incurring hundreds of dollars per semester in hidden athletic fees that don’t benefit the average pupil’s academic career.

WORDS BY Collin Cunningham

ILLUSTRATION BY Mark Tabar

FINDING YOUR STUDENT BILL on Kent State’s web portal is easy. You simply log into Flashline and navigate to the Student and Finances tabs before clicking on Tuition and Payments, which brings you to a page containing your bills for semesters you’ve attended. What’s unfortunately not as easy is figuring out exactly what you’re paying for.

Some of the fees listed on the bill’s line item detail are self-explanatory. For example, the Legal Services Fee funds Student Legal Services and the Program Fee accounts for your major studies. On the other hand, the second highest amount on the bill, the General Fee, comes out to several hundred dollars per semester and is a bit of a mystery. The General Fee actually helps fund 16 other areas, but for some reason the bill doesn’t tell students what these are.

“That General Fee, that’s not very transparent to me,” says Thomas Watral, president of Undergraduate Student Government (USG) at Kent State. Watral believes universities should work toward explaining how much students are paying for each expense on their bill as well as giving the rationale for why these fees are necessary.

Instead, a student has to navigate to the Bursar’s Office section on Kent State’s website to find an explanation of the general fee. Again, that’s basic enough, requiring only three clicks from the University’s homepage to reach the breakdown, but why isn’t there a direct link to it on the bill?

Some Kent State faculty believe visibility is vital when it comes to how much students pay and where it goes.

“Not only is it important to clearly list the charges on the student account, but it is also important to make sure that students and their families have easy access to tuition/fee information so they are able to estimate their educational costs in advance of a term,” says Stina Olafsdottir, the associate vice president for Business and Administration Services at Kent State’s Bursar’s Office.

It’s difficult to claim transparency when the costs are broken down as percentages of the total bill and not by how much you pay for each credit hour. How many bills have you seen that tell you how much you’re paying in terms of a percentage rather than the actual dollar amount?

“Transparency in whatever we do is important,” says Casey Cegles, the deputy athletics director for Kent State Athletics. “Whether it’s what you’re paying to go to school, or whether you’re paying a bill at a restaurant, I think transparency is important in all aspects.”

If you go to Dairy Queen, you receive a receipt telling you exactly how much you paid for your medium cookie dough Blizzard. Why is a fast food restaurant more clear about how much you pay for a menu item than a public university is in what they require of students to attend classes?

It’s not just students who are affected by a lack of transparency either.

“A lot of our funding comes from state and federal taxpayers, so it’s not just those citizens attending the University who are paying for it, it’s the entire community,” Watral says.

Most of these General Fee expenses are necessary to pursue an education at Kent: access to the health center, transportation services, facilities management. But there’s one figure that stands out among the rest, due to the fact that it is higher in price and is often unnecessary for the average student’s academic career.

Intercollegiate Athletics comprises a third of what students pay for their general fee. This is roughly $25 spent on intercollegiate athletics per credit hour a student is taking. That’s $300 per semester for a student currently taking 12 credit hours.

This is public knowledge, and it’s up to prospective students when they’re choosing where to go after high school in what they want to pay. Students can take action to make things better for themselves and their peers.

“That’s something for students to understand when they’re looking at different colleges, what is included in their fees,” says Randi Clites, a member of the Ohio House of Representatives who serves District 75, which includes Kent and Ravenna. “Getting involved in your undergrad student government could help you understand more about how to make an impact like that and engage and make sure that issues like that are transparent to students.”

General fee breakdown by the dollar

This discourse gets muddier when you consider that the NCAA introduced a rule in 2017 allowing scholarships to fund student athletes’ entire college attendance.

Kent State’s website says there are currently more than 38,000 students enrolled in classes across its eight campuses. That’s an estimated $11.4 million going to the athletic department every semester, some to potentially pay for student athletes’ degrees. Why can’t Kent State’s athletic program support itself? Other schools with larger student bodies don’t struggle with it.

“Ohio State does not use its general fee to support the Department of Athletics,” says Rob Messinger, the director of communications for Ohio State University’s Office of Business and Finance. “Our Athletics Department is self-supporting and actually generates revenue for the university’s academic mission, contributing more than $30 million annually to the broader university.”

Ohio State University, a member of the Big 10 Conference, manages to do this by charging for admission to many of its sporting events, like hockey and basketball games, whereas all of Kent’s sporting events are free for students to enter.

“Knowing what you’re paying for, I imagine you should know that,” Cegles says.

The solution to finding out how to get the burden of different fees off the students’ back is to find more capital, more fundraising outside of the students’ pocketbooks.

Students shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to see obscured fees. Many faculty members don’t find this to be a big deal, but also don’t see how student bills are written. It does make sense why some may not realize this, but can be seen as dismaying from a student’s perspective, especially when it helps support their salaries.

“The University really needs to work on finding a solution on how to pull away from using student funding or at least making it an opt-in type of system where you can opt-in to pay for athletic contributions,” Watral says. “The solution to finding out how to get the burden of different fees off the students’ back is to find more capital, more fundraising outside of the students’ pocketbooks.”

One possible solution is to give students the option to pay for athletics if it directly benefits them or they want to attend games. This would be similar to the Student Legal Services fee, which students can choose to take off their bill in exchange for losing access to Kent’s lawyers.

The largest fee on a student’s bill is the Instructional Fee, which can cost several hundred or several thousand dollars, depending on which classes a student is taking.

According to Olafsdottir, “The Instructional Fee is used to support faculty teaching costs and other expenses an academic department incurs. The Instructional Fee is also used for other operating expenses, such as student service areas, administrative operations, academic administration, technology infrastructure, services and support and upkeep of the University.”

A Business Insider report from 2015 states there are more than 24 schools who rake in at least $100 million per year through their athletic departments. Kent State can take a look at how these schools can find other areas of funding to support its athletic programs, either by taking ideas from another school’s model or going back to the drawing board entirely. As it stands, though, it seems like the opaqueness of the University’s student bills is trying to mask how much we pay to fund athletics staff, events and scholarships.

Today’s college students are living in an era of record high debt, but we’re the ones who have to effect change in the system by taking action and proposing solutions.

“Students need to make sure that once they start getting involved and passionate about something, that they find a way to make sure their voices are heard,” Clites says. “Just bringing awareness to it and giving a voice to it is really important.”

Students can get in contact with their undergraduate student government about this issue if they would rather have their money spent in areas other than athletics. They can either email Watral at twatral@kent.edu or stop into the USG office on the first floor of the Student Center on campus to express how they feel.

COLLIN CUNNINGHAM | ccunni19@kent.edu