It’s Friday morning and you’re hung-over. Better judgment tells you to get up and go to that 9 AM class that you regrettably signed up for, but your head is in a fog and that bed is just so comfortable. You turn your alarm clock off and drift back to sleep. This seems to be an all too common scenario for the average Connecticut College student.
One of your more responsible friends scoffs at the lack of effort; “This is your education, and you waste it away sleeping through class.”
In all reality, missing a class or two probably won’t make too much of a difference in the long run, but this being a capitalist driven society, let’s explore how much you actually “waste” by hitting the snooze button a few too many times.
For the Connecticut College student living on campus paying full tuition for 2009-2010, a hefty $51,150 is paid to the college to take care of just one academic year. This number can be broken up into two lumps of $25,575 for each semester you attend. Of this $25,575, $1,965 is spent on the rooms, giving a space for a student to sleep and live on campus, and $2,442.50 is spent on board, which includes meals everyday, custodian work and other basic living conditions. The rest goes towards your academic tuition as broken down on the table below.
Starting Cost $51,150 = $51,150
Per Semester $51,150 / 2 = $25,575
Minus Room $25,575 – $1,965 = $23,610
Minus Board $23610 – $2,442.50 = $21,167.50
Academic Costs $21,167.50
So now we know that of the costs, $21,167.50 goes towards paying for your classes. Let’s take the situation of an average student and see what this actually means. With the normal course load being four classes, this translates to roughly $5,291.88 per class, per semester.
This being the generic Connecticut College class, it meets twice a week, every week, throughout the semester. When you divide the number of times this class will meet in one semester (29), by the implied cost it takes to attend this class, you calculate $182.48.
This means that for the average one hour and fifteen minute class period you are paying nearly $200 to be there every single time. To put that in perspective that is almost twenty-three times the Connecticut state minimum hourly wage. What else in your life that you have spent $200 on do you normally treat so casually?
Before this turns into a guilt-ridden rant towards Conn’s fine students, let’s flip this argument towards the faculty. Let me paint another scenario. You’re walking to class trying to go over in your head the study materials for the big midterm today. You don’t feel quite ready, but hey, it’s now or never. Walking up to the door, you notice that the room is empty, and a glimmer of hope is lit inside you. There it is, the always praised “Class _____________ has been cancelled today.”
The immediate reaction to this news is happiness, but once again let’s explore the situation economically. According to the Connecticut College website, the average class size is eighteen kids, and with the established estimate of $182.48 per student per class that means that the class in total paid $3,284.64 for a day that they didn’t even receive.
Since it is overwhelmingly the practice not to have a replacement class, literally thousands of dollars are spent on nothing. We should be fair and realize that professors do take the time outside of the classroom to meet with students if help is needed and hold office hours, but still a professor of a large class of over a hundred kids would be wasting roughly $20,000 of the students’ money!
These numbers are just that, numbers. There is no moral argument presented here, but more of a request to think about how your money is being spent. Whether or not you decide to sleep though the alarm next week, at least now you’ll have something to think about as you try and drift back asleep.
