Student Fees (The Other Tuition)

I know I haven't been participating in the blog much lately, but my research has been moving and I also have a new addition to my family that takes up a lot of my time and effort. I have a few ideas for posts that I have been working on and will hopefully get them posted soon (Spoiler: They include topics such as Faraday Rotation, Philosophy as Science, measuring band gaps, and others).

So on to today's topic: Student Fees.

I am bringing up this topic because the issue of student fees has recently become a hot topic here at UNC. Due to budget concerns the University has been dealing with ways of reducing the money spent by the University. Here in North Carolina the state education budget was cut, meaning that the operating budget of the University was impacted. To compensate they raised tuition, but there is a state statute that says that tuition raises will be capped at 6.5%/year. So they raised tuition but it still wasn't enough to cover costs. So they decided to get inventive and raise student fees to compensate.

So here's the deal. In the physics department our tuition and tuition remission (for out-of-state students) are paid for by either the department, research funds, an/or the graduate school. In addition to this we also receive a stipend, mainly because we are "employees" (i.e. we teach or do research). It isn't much but it is supposed to be enough so that we can live.

The problem comes in with student fees. Student fees are not paid for by my department, but are paid for out of our stipends. This would not be a problem except for the fact that our student fees keep going up, and usually for things that graduate students do not use, or think are completely useless. The most recent proposal would raise our fees by more than $100 per semester and bring our total fees to just over $2200/year, which is significant considering we are only paid ~$22,000/year.

This proposed fee increase (especially for things that graduate students do not use, and in general do not think should be funded by student fees) is generating significant push back from graduate students. As part of our effort we are attempting to gather information about "peer institutions" and how they handle student fees. We are collecting this data to present to the committee that governs student fee increases to show that currently UNC is on the extreme high end of student fees compared to its peer institutions. If we can demonstrate that UNC is out of the norm for student fees then we will have a case to say that the Athletics Department should not be funded by student fees to pay for tutors that write the reports and do the homework of our "student" athletes.

So if you are willing could you send me information about your department, and how they handle student fees. We are looking for information about annual stipend, how much your student fees are (and any differences, for example, do your fees change after passing the qual?), and how they are paid for (i.e. by the department, by the student, by your adviser etc.). If you aren't in a physics department please also let me know what department you are in.

You can leave a comment with the information, or you can email me directly. My email is just the name that I post under and then @gmail.com. Easy enough. Any other relevant information would be appreciated (as in how do different departments at your schools handle student fees? Is is different form department to department or is it the same? How does your stipend increase, if it increases?).

On a completely unrelated note, I thought I would share this cool video with you guys. It has nothing to do with student fees whatsoever, and is only indirectly about physics.

The Meissner Effect In the Lab

Many of you may have seen pictures of the Meissner Effect at work. Pictures like the one below (from Wikipedia):

This is a picture of a magnet levitating over a superconductor which is sitting in a pool of liquid nitrogen. But few people, even physics majors, have even seen the Meissner Effect in person. One of the labs done by physics majors at UNC involves high temperature superconductors ("high temperature" is relative since this takes place at −196 °C or −321 °F), and as part of it they look at and see (for the first time for most students) the Meissner Effect in action. For the students the first time they actually see it they are all awed and amazed that they can see the magnet levitating, and then they can have the magnet spin in midair. It is a very impressive thing to see for the first time.

Today in lab (actually just a few minuets ago, since I am still sitting in lab while writing this) I took a video of the Meissner Effect at work. Sorry about the shaky camera, but it shows a levitating magnet spinning in midair.

A Historical Campus

One of the things that I learned about UNC shortly after coming here is that this is a very old school. While BYU was founded in 1875 (well the Brigham Young Academy was founded in 1875, but BYU as we know it did not come about until about 1909) UNC was founded in 1795, so there is a little bit more history here than at BYU. On a practical level this means that in some cases when I am on campus I am walking around in a vary large, living museum. On almost every building on campus you can find a brass plaque detailing the age and history of each building. There are also memorials and statues of everything from Civil War soldiers to a sheep named Rameses.

While a lot of the history is well known, there are other parts of UNC's history that are not as well known, such as the fact that the university was founded by Freemasons. This little tidbit of information may not be surprising considering the number of influential Freemasons in the early days of the United States, but most people fail to see the influence that that has had on the University. For example, the Freemason influence can even be found in the actual layout of buildings on campus, as seen below:

This is a picture of central campus from Google Maps (For those of you who are not Freemasons, or are not familiar with Freemason Temples, which I assume is just about everyone on this blog, I will explain how this relates to Freemasons). The building on the top right is Old East and is the oldest building on campus (and coincidentally, the oldest building on a state university campus in the US). On the left is Old West, and at the bottom is Old South, the three oldest buildings on campus. In the middle is the Old Well, well known (haha!) as the main symbol (logo) of UNC.

Also note that there is no building on the north side. Now for those who are not familiar with Freemason Temples, a brief instruction is needed. Masonic temples all have the same general floor plan:

On the south is the seat of the Junior Warden, on the west is the seat of the Senior Warden and on the east is the seat of the Worshipful Master (or Grand Master), with the alter with lights in the center. There are no seats to the north (in some lodges that is the place of entrance, in others, as indicated by the above image, it is the place of darkness). If you look at the layout of UNC buildings above you will note that they correspond to the layout of a Masonic Temple with Old East taking the place of the Worshipful Master's seat, Old South the Junior Warden's, Old West the Senior Warden's and the Old Well the place of the altar. Again there is nothing to the north.

I am sure that there are other interesting things about the history of UNC, but this particular tidbit of trivia I found to be very interesting. Perhaps there are some less-well-known points of history at your schools.

As an added bit of fun for this post, try to find the three Masonic symbols in the streets of this major US city.

[Hint: One of them is slightly obscured, but you can still see it. Also note that the IMPORTANT buildings are components of the symbols.]

[Second Hint: The city is Washington DC.]

An Email I Never Got From BYU

One thing about changing schools during our education is that we get to see how different departments, schools and states handle basic stuff. Having only ever attended BYU before starting graduate school it was a slight adjustment starting school at UNC. Looking back I realize that the BYU physics department, and BYU as a whole is very "official" for lack of a better word (some would call it "up tight" or "autocratic"). At BYU any email sent out to faculty, staff and students had to first be submitted to committee, reviewed, "queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters." OK maybe not that bad but it was a process.

At UNC we have a department list-serv (actually we have several, I think I am on 5 or 6) where anyone in the department can send an email everyone else in the department, without prior approval. I won't share any of the more interesting (or in need of censoring) emails that I have gotten, but I did recently get an email that I would never get at BYU, for many different reasons.

Subject: flooding

"people in the basement should be on the lookout for water
during this heavy rain. the chance will get worse over time
it is going to rain hard until Friday. let me know if you see water
in the floor."

First, it doesn't rain in Utah, and if it does it is nowhere close to the rain we get in North Carolina. Second, at BYU the custodians are the ones that typically keep track of things like this, not the grad students. It would seem that at UNC this would fall under "building maintenance" which is separate from "housekeeping", thus the custodians could not do anything about it even if they noticed because of union, accounting, and organizational rules (gotta love socialism!). Third, no capitalization, and at least one grammatically incorrect sentence.

This little email was a simple reminder of some of the basic differences between BYU and UNC (and I would venture most other places).