Student Government Association Releases Results of USD Student Tuition Freeze Survey
South Dakota is known for its inexpensive tuition, which is funded in part by the South Dakota Legislature. Recently, USD students have been surveyed on this issue. With a total of 686 students participating in this survey, it allowed insight on what the students’ opinions are regarding the tuition.
The survey began on October 28 and went until November 8. The survey came from the student federation and was dispersed throughout all the surrounding colleges or universities that are a part of the Board of Regents. USD, and all other Board of Regents institutions, has had a tuition freeze for the past 5 years.
SGA President Ethan Gladue believes the survey is important in understanding student opinion.
“I should say mainly the survey is just to find what students think and then to give it to the board to enact policy and everything like that to understand where the students are coming from,” Gladue said. “When you are on the board you don’t really have much connection to a lot of the schools and what students are thinking,”
“Our SGA was pushing it out to USD students to fill it out. It was more to see if students were aware of what a tuition freeze was and see if the affordability aspect was important to students.”
Jill Schulte, the Vice President of SGA, assisted in creating and sending out the survey.
“We wanted to send it out to gain more information about the effects of tuition in South Dakota and how it influenced the desire for individuals to come here due to the affordability schools in South Dakota have to offer,” Schulte said.
In order to get approved to send out the survey, SGA had to go through a survey committee. SGA worked with other faculty members to help create the survey. Gladue, along with the rest of SGA, were able to look at the survey results and see what students had said about the tuition at USD.
The survey was filled out by half of the freshman and sophomore classes and then the other half consisted of a mix of the junior and senior classes. Eighty-eight percent of students take in person classes while the other remaining participants in the survey take online classes.
“Then we started getting more into the questions about tuition. How would you rate the cost and fees of attending USD and at least 84% said they had an average understanding.” Gladue said.
Sixty-eight percent of students did not know that the tuition has not increased in the past 5 years. Along with that, more than 71% of students said the cost of tuition did affect them staying at USD, whether it was the main reason or not.
“This survey’s main purpose is more to drive policy. We wanted to gain knowledge on how the cost of tuition influenced overall enrollment at USD and all regental schools.” Schulte said.
Since the other results are still coming in from other schools in South Dakota, SGA will have to wait to see what the student federation has to say. The legislature will have the opportunity to extend the tuition another time at the upcoming legislative session in January.
