By Faradis Lindblom
faradis-lindblom@uiowa.edu
Traveling outside Iowa City and working with other Big Ten leaders this summer, University of Iowa Student Government officials are concentrating on finding ways to help students cut costs.
“We are really using this summer to lay the groundwork,” UISG President Rachel Zuckerman said. “We aren’t taking any time off.”
She recently attended a conference in Washington, D.C., with other incoming and outgoing college student presidents from the Big Ten. At the conference, they discussed similar issues each of them face on their campuses.
“I was able to learn how other universities are trying to combat the same issues we face,” Zuckerman said.
On June 9, representatives also traveled to Ames to attend a state Board of Regents meeting to take a stand against tuition hikes.
Of the three state universities, the UI was the only school that did not agree with the proposed $300 tuition increase for in-state students and $400 increase for out-of-state students. Instead, UISG proposed a $200 increase in tuition for both in-state and out-of-state students.
“We made the calculated decision that the university needs revenue but that we also need to protect our students,” Zuckerman said.
In an effort to influence the price of attending the UI, UISG officials plan to embark on a “legislative road trip” later this summer. During that time, members will travel around the state to different legislators to speak about tuition in attempt to influence their decisions in the next legislative session.
Vice President Lauren Freeman said there are many problems that come with high tuition costs, one being student food and housing insecurity.
“We recognize that sometimes keeping tuition affordable is hard to make happen … [but] we also look at other costs that students face in terms the costs of living on campus,” she said.
Titus Hou, the UISG speaker of the Senate, said to combat these issues they hope to start conversations with landlords in Iowa City in an effort to ease rent increases.
“The amount of money that students would spend on their education may affect how they purchase food,” Hou said. “We’d like to reduce the number of students who go hungry because of whatever they need to pay in terms of housing or tuition.”
Zuckerman said a major goal this year will be to work to be a more transparent student government, and communicating with students would be a priority.
“We want to continue producing results, but those results don’t matter if people don’t know what we did,” Zuckerman said.
In order to facilitate this, she created a new position on UISG for the next academic year, the director of External Relations. The position’s main goal will be to create awareness of the initiatives UISG is taking to better the lives of students and to communicate those results to the community.
Additional efforts planned by UISG is making priority of maintenance in the four UI Cultural Resource Centers, shifting perception of UI students on sexual assault with a “It’s on Us” Welcome Week event, and pushing voter turnout among students for the November elections.
“I think there are a lot of motivated right now people on UISG who are putting in work as we speak,” Hou said.