by Tamara Sears
About this time last year I was sitting in a hotel room at the
foothills of the Himalayan mountains during an intensive Hindi
retreat, listening to some of the other people in my India program
complain that the University of Wisconsin was charging too much for
their College Year in Banaras Program. The program itself cost
$4,547.75/ semester (under $10,000 for the entire year), which
included six meals a week, tuition and fees, a monthly stipend of
$100/ month, which was barely enough to cover rent and food, and
about $110 for traveling on vacations. The general consensus was
that given the extremely low cost of living in India, $10,000 was just
too much to be paying for an 8-9 month program. I found this
conversation to be both interesting and disturbing at the same time,
especially since I was paying not $10,000 for the year, but rather
more than twice that thanks to Wesleyan's newly instituted Study
Abroad policy. I was paying full Wesleyan tuition ($9,565/ semester)
plus a $1,000/ semester International Studies fee in order to spend
my junior year abroad in India.
For those of you who are first or second year students, you
may not know that two years ago, Wesleyan changed its Study
Abroad Policy, for better or for worse, with the intention of making it
easier for students to spend time abroad during their Wesleyan
years. Prior to the change, Wesleyan students were faced with the
task of applying to the programs on their own, paying for them out
of their own money and then filing pages of papers and hunting
down signatures in order to get the credits to transfer. The new
policy served to make the entire process easier by creating a central
International Studies Office to essentially act as the intermediary
force between the students and their Study Abroad programs. Under
the new policy, students pay Wesleyan tuition and the Office for
International Studies automatically transfers their credits and grades
over from their programs. This new policy is especially advantageous
for students on financial aid, since their Wesleyan financial aid
package transfers over, making it possible for them to go away even
if they ordinarily would not be able to afford to do so. For those of us
who choose programs that cost substantially less than Wesleyan
tuition, however, this new policy is disadvantageous, since we are
forced to pay considerably more than the cost of our program. For
students going to London or Paris, or any industrialized city, paying
Wesleyan tuition makes sense, because they are paying for a lifestyle
comparable to what they would find in the United States. For those of
us going to developing countries, where the standards and costs of
living are markedly lower than back home at Wesleyan, paying full
Wesleyan tuition seems ludicrous.
For example, in terms of academic tuition costs, we were
provided with two Hindi classes, a private tutorial tutor and a
fieldwork advisor. Our tuition for our Hindi class at Banaras Hindu
University was about 150 rupees ($5.00) for the year. Although I'm
not sure exactly how much our private Hindi teacher was receiving
to teach our class, I know that he is one of the most expensive (and
well-known) Hindi teachers in Banaras, charging 80 rupees/ hour
(less than $3.00) from his other private students. I was also taking a
music tutorial and paying my music teacher 50 rupees/ lesson (about
$1.67) for 3 lessons a week, and my fieldwork advisor received
2,000 rupees (about $65.00) for advising me throughout the year.
Our academic facilities were not quite the same as they would
have been at Wesleyan, either. There were two IBM computers, fully
equipped with archaic software, and subject to the fickle whims of
the electric company which would experience failure at least once a
day. The eleven people on my program were constantly fighting over
these two computers in our endeavor to finish the 80-100 page
research paper that we were required to write as a part of our
academic program. Because of lack of efficient repairmen and the
inconsistant flow of electrical current in Banaras, we often had
difficulties getting our dot-matrix printer to print well, if at all. Yet I
was paying Wesleyan tuition, just as if I would have had the use of
one of the several top-of-the-line computer centers around campus.
Halfway through my academic year in India, I discovered that
I had both worms and giardia and visited the doctor affiliated with
our program. If I had been ill at Wesleyan, I would have gone down
to the Health Center. As it was, I went to our equivalent in India. The
doctor prescribed me medicine which effectively cured me over the
course of a week and cost about 85 rupees (less than $3.00). That's
about what half a week's worth of Sudafed pills might have cost
here.
During the course of my year, I frequently made use of the
library facilities at the American Institute for Indian Studies. In
order to get there, I usually left early in the morning on my bicycle,
riding down Banarasi dirt roads and across a narrow pontoon bridge,
which spanned the width of the Ganges River, and then through the
village of Ramnagar until I finally got to the library (conveniently
located only 45 minutes, by bike, away). The library had the most
phenomenal collection of Indian academic books and resources that
I've ever seen, and I felt privileged to be able to use the facilities.
When I first saw the library, I thought happily to myself: "This sure
is not Olin," and I imagined myself spending hours wandering
through the aisles. In fact, I often did spend hours wandering around
the library, especially since nothing was computerized and the card
catalogue was organized only by author and title. I didn't mind that
so much, though, and my only real problem with the library was that
I could not check books out, which meant that I had to spend one
and a half hours of my day biking if I wanted to do a few hours of
reading. It was a unique experience sitting and reading in the
library, surrounded by graduate students and post-doctorates, but it
was not a Wesleyan experience, and I shouldn't have been paying
full Wesleyan tuition for it.
In term of housing and residential life, my rent last year cost
approximately $35/ month ($315 for the year) for a room about the
size of a Pearl Street Apartment double or a Brainard Avenue single.
I had running water twice a day, from 5:00-8:00 a.m. and then again
from 4:00-8:30 p.m. My bathroom, which I shared with my
housemate, was slightly bigger than a West Co. closet, and my toilet
was a ceramic hole in the ground that didn't flush. The entrance to
my and my housemate's apartment complex was set three steps
above street level directly behind an open sewer, which undoubtedly
was somehow connected to my toilet. I don't mean to complain
because I loved living in that complex, and the sanitary conditions
sound worse on paper than they actually were, but somehow I still
don't feel that I should have been paying Wesleyan over $21,000 to
live in India.
In the late afternoon, I used to go the ghats by the river to
drink chai (tea) and relax in the same way that I would here at the
Cafe in the Campus Center. The difference was that chai and a biscuit
would cost me less than five cents, while coffee and a cookie would
cost me $1.40 plus tax here at Wesleyan. A soda at a sidewalk stall
would cost 21 cents, as compared to a $1.22 medium coke from ARA.
A bountiful dinner at a restaurant would cost less than $1.50,
whereas the equivalent at the Grill would cost at least $5.00-6.00. In
the morning, I'd walk down the street, barter with a fruit-seller, and
buy half a kilo of oranges for 15-20 cents. The equivalent at Weshop
would cost somewhere between $2.00-2.50. So my lifestyle and cost
of living was nothing like it would have been at Wesleyan, yet I was
still paying over $21,000.
I didn't agree with my fellow program-mates who were
complaining about Wisconsin's $10,000 fee. I think that the services
that they were providing us with were well worth it, and I
understand the cost of processing everything from India to America.
I felt perfectly comfortable with the idea that the University of
Wisconsin was receiving $10,000 to accommodate my needs as a
student and as an individual abroad in India, which is a job that the
University succeeded at admirably. What I felt uncomfortable about
was that I was paying over $21,000 in tuition and fees to Wesleyan,
and only $12,500 of it was getting to Wisconsin (approximately
$2,500 for our mandatory summer Hindi-intensive class and $10,000
for the year abroad). My parents work too hard to help put me
through school in order to be pumping that much money into a
campus that I was not even on the same side of the world as. I
understand the underlying ideals: that we enter Wesleyan on a
contractual basis to spend four years as a Wesleyan student and
contribute as such. This all works in theory, but when inserted into a
practical situation, the actual financial costs far outweigh the theory.
Regardless of my personal situation, I truly believe that the
philosophical ideals laid out by the current Study Abroad Policy are
well-founded. When a student goes abroad on a Wesleyan-
comparable program, there should be no question of their credits and
grades transferring. All students, regardless of financial ability,
should have the opportunity to study abroad during their
undergraduate Wesleyan career. It is a part of all of our commitment
to Wesleyan to support equal educational opportunities for all
members of our community. I do think, however, that being forced to
pay at least $10,000 more than the actual cost of my study abroad
program was iniquitous. Other colleges charge a few thousand dollars
in fees to cover the costs of transferring credits and to maintain the
financial status-quo of their institutions. A compromise of three or
four thousand dollars in fees would have been understandable, but
paying as much as I did for facilities that I wasn't using, for classes
that I wasn't taking, and especially for housing that I wasn't living in
was completely unjustified.