Monday, March 14, 2005
Even more things to count
If you pick up a paper or wait until the website comes back up, you can see a graph about voting for the health care referendum. The graph is a horizontal bar graph with the top bar being the total number of students voting, the middle bar being yes votes, and the bottom bar being no votes. So, putting aside the obvious stupidity of comparing turnout to votes, the graph is also designed so that it looks like a lot of students voted. Why even bother to put the bar graph up if you're not going to put the whole scale in? I would have liked to see a graph with 20000 students worth of empty space to represent the students who didn't vote (this would be somewhere around the Tae Kwon Do dude's crotch, if you have the paper paper).
The headline includes: "Two-Thirds of Voters Agree to Shell Out $43 Each Semester." That's one way to put it. Another way is that "20% of Students Agree to Force All Students to Shell Out $$43 Each Semester Next Year, and Even More Each Year Afterward."
"I think the nation as a whole could learn a lesson from UC Berkeley," said Caitlin Price, co-chair of the Student Health Advisory Committee. "The administration at University Health Services is eager to give back to the students."
I don't quite see how charging us for services we probably won't use counts as "giving back," but hey, what do I know?
"I didn't see the need to tack on a fee to a constantly increasing college tuition," said freshman Mark Landau.
But supporters said the fee will be kept in check through an independent student advisory committee, which will evaluate the fee's success annually and make adjustments as necessary.
"Students have been monitoring the process very closely," said Student Health Advisory Committee co-chair Nad Permaul. "The vote seems to have validated their interest."
What would have kept the fee in check would have been a written provision that said the fee would be kept in check. As it stands now, though, raising the fees is left at someone's *shudder* discretion. If we add Permaul's comment about the vote "validating interest," we can definitely expect the discretion to not show a great deal of discretion.
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