The Strategic Priorities Task Force (SPT) has posted on its website a remarkable document, 200 Ideas from the Frontier: Alternative Revenues in Higher Education, offering a host of revenue enhancement ideas, including school color days to promote bookstore apparel sales, early move-in fees for residence halls, early registration fees, course drop fees and retroactive course add fees, campus wineries and flea markets, for-profit educator leasing and academic department sponsorships (http://www.miami.muohio.edu/documents/spc/NewRevenuePoster.pdf).
We salute this kind of outside the box thinking, and in the spirit of collective duty and shared sacrifice we offer the following additional proposals as ways to extract even more funds from students and their families:
* A seat use fee for using a seat during class, coupled with a writing surface fee for writing on a desktop during class.
* An exam fee for each exam taken in each class, with an additional exam grading fee for each exam graded (additional surcharge for essay exams).
* A professor appearance fee for each class the professor attends (additional surcharge if professor is sober).
* An office hour fee billed in five-minute intervals with a fifteen-minute minimum (additional surcharge if professor is awake).
* A faculty concern fee if students would like their professors to care whether they learn anything or not.
* A course grade fee, with higher grades commanding higher fees.
* A recommendation letter fee, with the fee highest for positive recommendation letters and lower for letters that are so-so.
* A PowerPoint fee for each PowerPoint slide shown in class, with additional surcharge if the professor turns down the lights in the room when exhibiting slides.
* A graduation with distinction fee for all cum laude, magna cum laude and summa cum laude graduates, and the fee rising with level of distinction.
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* A Bob Evans Down Home Sausage Department of English sponsorship; a Tide Gets Clothes Cleaner Department of History sponsorship; and a Budweiser Here We Go! Student Justice Center sponsorship.
These fee proposals — offered in the spirit of the SPT document to, "capture high growth student populations and instructional services" — can be charged using student ID cards, and are only a start. Hopefully our proposals will elicit even bolder ideas from others, like outsourcing the administration.
James Brock (Economics) brockj@muohio.edu
Philip Cottell (Accountancy) cottelpg@muohio.edu
Thomas Hall (Economics) hallte@muohio.edu
William R. Hart (Economics) hartwr@muohio.edu
Richard McClure (Decision Sciences) mcclurrh@muohio.edu
Jerry Miller (Economics) jerry.miller@muohio.edu
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