Out-of-state students disadvantaged by tightening requirements.
By Ronnie Sorensen
In past school years at the University of Iowa, students from all over the country, and the world, came flooding to campus with their heads held high, ready to seek out their futures. However, in recent years, new out-of-state students have emerged from their cars less than thrilled to join a university that has built more barriers to demonstrate its favoritism for in-state students. Rising tuition prices, tighter selections, and difficulty in gaining residency are only a few examples that reveal the University of Iowa’s.
The largest of those problems is the rising tuition and fees that bombard each and every college student, whether they are from in or out of state. It’s known across the country that out-of-state tuition costs more than in-state in nearly all community colleges and universities, yet there are simple ways to help ease your financial situations, especially if you are an out-of-state student … except if you do not have residency in Iowa. Becoming a resident of Iowa while you are in college means that you can pay in-state tuition, but the process to gaining residency is tedious and is often difficult to obtain when certain students really need it.
Luis Olivares, a Kirkwood sophomore from Rupert, Idaho, lives off campus and has recently gained residency in Iowa, but it was no easy task. Olivares had to undergo a yearlong process to obtain it. To gain residency, students must take part in a 20-hour work week while only being a part-time student, and the students can only take six credit hours a semester. In-state students and out-of-state students with residency often take 20 hour/week jobs while in college, but they can shoot for however many credit hours they like. Most of the out-of-state students, including Olivares, felt cheated.
“Even if you make it the full year,” he said, “you might not get it; they can still withhold your residency after the year is up, depending on if you met the requirements or not. It’s hard work, and I and my friends had to go ask for help sometimes.”
RELATED: UI changes residency rules
Olivares would often go to the Admissions Office to try to figure everything out, but he would always be met with the same response.
“They all said the same thing: Go to our website, go to our website, oh, you want to know about this? Go to our website. They really didn’t help us personally.”
The UI Admissions Office website does give insight to the residency issue, clearly describing what’s needed to obtain it, but that doesn’t disguise the fact that the yearlong process cheats out-of-state students who desperately need any help they can to afford tuition for the school that they worked so hard to get accepted to.
Olivares said the UI’s program was the cheapest among his surrounding secondary schools, but the obstacles keep growing and fees keep increasing with each year. In 2018, the 20-hour minimum work week will be boosted to 30, further ostracizing the out-of-state nonresident students from the rest of the students. The resident system and other admission requirements should be simplified for out-of-state students so more can enjoy the university without more stress and obstacles than in-state and residential students already face.
