Letter to the editor

To the Editor, 

I am an education major that attends school at the UDS’s main campus in Vermillion, SD. I am writing to you about the university’s expenses during the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Before the pandemic I utilized the USD Wellness Center and attended USD activities, which was included with the activity fees in my tuition. When COVID-19 hit the university closed the Wellness Center and their canceled events.

This means I lost access to the gym I was utilizing and the sports I would attend as a benefit of being a USD student and paying the activity fees. The college never compensated students for the activity fees even though we missed out utilizing these benefits for half of the 2020 spring semester, over summer, and for part of the fall semester. 

I understand the COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on many people and organizations including the university. I understand that they lost out on funding they would have normally received if those events would have taken place when they were supposed to.

However, I do not feel it is right for the university to have our student body pay the full amount for these activity fees when we only got to use part of the benefits from them. With this being said, I believe that they should have refunded fifty percent or cut the cost of activity fees in half for these semesters.

College is expensive enough with paying for classes, housing, meal plans, books, and we don’t need extra taken out for benefits that we are not able to utilize. 

Devon Myers, physical education major