University May Turn to New Campus Technology Fee

With a 40 percent fee hike still lingering in students' checkbooks, some university officials are tossing around ideas for a new campus-based fee to meet surging demands for UC Berkeley's information technology.

Although there is no official proposal yet for a student technology fee, the ongoing discussion points to an underlying concern among many campus divisions with the current fiscal crisis: how to assure adequate funding to remain on top of the latest technological innovations.

Over the last three years UC Berkeley's state funding has fallen 14 percent. This year, the campus has taken a $25.5 million hit and the Information Technology department took its share with a 10 percent permanent cut.

With this fiscal crunch, the unit has had to push aside plans for an online student portal and a student calendar system first proposed several years ago, said Jack McCredie, associate vice chancellor of information technology.

So to remain consistent with goals of the division, some campus officials say a technology fee is necessary.

Lucky Nguyen, who is on the Committee on Student Fees, said a student portal is important and worth an additional fee.

"Students are getting more confused than they would normally," Nguyen said. "We need access to online services from a centralized location."

Such a fee would be the seventh campus-based fee. Already, students pay about $98 in campus fees every semester, which are implemented through a student-initiated referendum.

But Charis Kaskiris, Graduate Assembly representative on the e-Berkeley Steering Committee, said that the recent increase in student fees has made any new campus fee politically unfeasible in the near future.

And McCredie, who signaled last year that a fee would have to be explored if the budget crisis continued, said the unit has made some headway with a $200,000 grant from Hewlett-Packard for wireless Internet access on campus and research on wireless technology.

Nearly 70 percent of public universities in the country already have a mandatory student technology fee, according to a 2002 study by Educause, The Center for Applied Research.

The main concern is how to make spending revenues from the fee accountable. Campus-based fees typically have very defined purposes.

"There must be public visibility of where funding goes," Kaskiris said."Restrictions must be imposed on what projects can be undertaken with student tech funds."

And beyond accountability, Kaskiris said, all students need to have access to the projects the fee supports.

"When we get indications that a tech fee will be debated more seriously, we will want a public forum for students to get an idea of the different possibilities and the different models that could be implemented," Kaskiris said.

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