Granted, it was half-a-century ago when I attended Louisiana Tech, but still, to see the difference between the cost of a college education then and now is mind-boggling—and not a little depressing.
When I was at Tech, gasoline was 30 cents a gallon. Today, it hovers around $2 and has on occasion exceeded $3. My new 1969 Chevy Malibu was, if I recall correctly, in the neighborhood of $2,500-$3.000. (My first car, a ’64 VW Beetle, was a whopping $1,600, right off the showroom floor.) I don remember the prices of a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread then but suffice it to say it was considerably less than what we pay today. My first house, a nice brick home on an acre lot in a nice neighborhood in Ruston was around $11,000-$12,000.
So, based on the price of those items, gasoline and automobiles have increased about tenfold. Homes a shade more than that and while I can’t say for certain, I would assume milk and bread have increased along those same lines.
Not a college education, though. Oh, no.
When I was at Tech, it cost me anywhere from $100 to $200 per quarter, excluding books. That’s because as a resident of Ruston, I lived off campus.
My grandson, who attends Tech and who also lives off-campus in my late mother-in-law’s home in nearby Simsboro, just forked over $3,529.20 to attend the fall quarter.
It would be about half that amount but for a laundry list of obscure fees tacked onto the tuition, which was a more modest $1.851.
And it might well be considerably less than that but for one Bobby Jindal who during his eight disastrous years as governor, managed to slash about 75 percent of state funding from Louisiana’s colleges and universities. Don’t for a moment think that I’ve forgotten that.
[Of course, Eddie Rispone, with his promise of a rollback of taxes, would likely continue down that same reckless path.]
But I digress. The fees. Oh, yes, the fees. I would love for someone to come forward and explain, item-by-item what those fees are for. Here’s the list:
- Building Use Fee: $44.50 (okay, I get that, sort of. But many of those buildings have been “in use” for a long time—and they already have a dormitory fee for those living on campus).
- Academic Enhancement Fee: $16.67. Say what?
- Academic Excellence Fee: $80. What’s the difference between “enhancement” and “excellence’? Someone please enlighten me—and why does “excellence” cost nearly five times as much as “enhancement”?
- Operational Fee: $46. And how is that different than the Building Use fee?
- General Fee: $95.39. I guess they couldn’t come up with a creative name for that one.
- University Support Fee: $594.04. Okay, you have a Building Use fee and an Operational fee. What, pray tell is this for?
- Student Self-Assessed Fee: $327.90. As I remember from my student days, part of this was for the student newspaper—which now is online and not even printed—and for the Tech yearbook, The Lagniappe. Does anyone even get a yearbook anymore?
- Technology Fee: $45. What technology? Wi-fi perhaps? Seems a little high when you multiply that by several thousand students.
- Energy Surcharge: $80. Again, multiplying that by thousands of students…
The amounts given above were applicable to number of hours my grandson is taking. Some of the fees are even greater for students taking more hours.
And there are also parking permit fees for students bringing cars onto the campus, dorm fees for those living on campus, meal ticket fees for students eating in the campus cafeteria, and out-of-state fees for, well, out-of-state students.
And I thought reading all the charges on my cellphone bill was complicated.
Louisiana Voice 
Thank you
& why is online college so expensive since you are not using the building or half these other fees?
That is a VERY good question.
I had a fifty-dollar scholarship from KRUS radio, which got me through the first semester at Tech, and I earned fifty cents an hour working in the Placement Office, which gave me spending money. Those were the days!
Sorry for the long comment, Tom, but the fees do require explanation. The astronomical growth in fees at Louisiana universities is related to state government putting a price control on tuition (but not fees) while at the same time cutting the state higher ed budget by three-quarters. So some of the fees are essentially tuition-by-another-name because the higher ed systems can impose them unilaterally to make up some of their budget cuts. The fees are not high enough to make up for the decade of cuts to higher ed state funding, as witnessed by the many professors and other employees who leave LSU for other states each year and by the crumbling buildings. But they allow survival. The fees are particularly hard on graduate students, who do a lot of the teaching and research at a university like LSU. Those grads on teach assistantships, for example, get a small stipend and tuition waiver to work 20 hours per week teaching undergrads. The fees are not waived, however, and claw back a large percentage of the stipend, which means grads are living way below the poverty line. It’s not only horrible treatment of the grads, who will be the future scientists and other professionals in our society, but it’s institutionally unsustainable because there is no way LSU can remain a Carnegie-R1 research university without thriving PhD programs. And PhD programs can’t thrive with doctoral students who collaborate on research projects with the professors and, in addition, do so much of the undergrad instruction. And that is why United Campus Workers, a higher ed union out of Tennessee, where it has had great success, is having no trouble organizing locals at Louisiana universities.
A very informative explanation and I wish complete success to United Campus Workers. Educators need legislative clout and organizing is always the best way to achieve that.
It is my understanding that fees are out of control because universities are not allowed to raise their tuition fast enough to make up for the newest legislative cuts to their budgets. Fees can be imposed without legislative approval. Tuition increases must wait for the legislative approval process.
Correct. As I pointed out in my post, Jindal cut appropriations for colleges and universities by 75 percent during his reign of terror.
God Bless You, Tom! Keep on being a cranky ol’ man. I’m totally with you, though my experience goes back to NLU in 1979. My daughter is a student at [another well-known LA university], and she pays an extra fee for taking an online course when she is not an online student (the course was not offered in-person).
Since I’m an insider on this phenomenon, I’ll try to explain briefly: the Lege will not allow tuition increases, since that increases the cost of TOPS. Fees are not approved by the Lege, only by the Boards. If one university in the LSU or UL system raises fees, then they all raise fees.
Hail to the Fees! Yet another Jindal legacy that keeps on giving.
After my comment above about the reasons for and impacts of the college fee bills I received my ATT bill. Yikes — not only complicated but expensive because I have a gang of teenagers using their smartphones way too much. That made me wonder why so many people think paying that much for cell phones is worth it yet complain about how much a college degree costs these days or how much they pay in income taxes. A degree from LSU is an investment in the rest of your life (or you kids’ lives) and, I would hope, a much higher priority expenditure than a cell phone. Yet people don’t want to pay the taxes it takes to sustain a comprehensive, public research university in Louisiana. Do we want to be like Alaska, Wyoming, Maine, and other states that lack the population to support an R1 public university in our state? Do we want to be the only state in the SEC without even a single public R1, when the others already all have more than one? Apparently so, because with the current gang of nitwits in charge at the state capitol that the people put there, LSU has zero chance of surviving into the next decade as anything more than an R2 university. The rest of the SEC will laugh at LSU even if the football team ever wins the crystal ball again. PS. readers not familiar with the R1, R2, etcetera thing can find it on Wikipedia together with the ranking of every university in the USA.
I followed my own advice and checked the list of R1 universities on Wikipedia. Louisiana is actually not the only state with SEC teams that has only one public R1 university. Arkansa, Missouri, and Tennessee also have only one.
Sorry for being a pest with comments on this story, but you have raised an issue of great importance to the future of Louisiana — college fee bills. And two stories in the Advocate today report on the results (but, of course, don’t get at the causes).
1) LSU drops in the college rankings: “LSU finished 9th among the 14 schools of the Southeastern Conference. It trails Vanderbilt, Florida, Georgia, Texas A&M, Auburn, South Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky.”
2) The LSU doctoral student so tragically murdered while working at night at a gas station could not make it on his stipend, especially after the fee bill took a quarter of it back. So after studying, teaching, and researching all day on campus he went to work a night job in a gas station.
Be assured you are not being a “pest” when you raise valid concerns such as this.
Great job, great memories, and great commentary about Jindal, thanks, comment on your digression, Rispone the Phonie or Phony made richer by Jindal, used a cropped photo of Trump and troops in uniform in one of his campaign ads while claiming to be 100% behind Trump. Such lies, ” everyone has a story, the cowards never tell the truth. Lord Granger guerrilla commander in the Phillipines , P. 267? in Grisham’s “The Reckoning”, might want to recommend to your Methodist Pastor, not the lies but what happened when you try to help us sinners. ron thompson