PantherNOW Editorial Board
FIU is one campus in many ways, including how we pay our tuition and fees.
Despite 92 percent of FIU’s students living off campus, the majority of whom attend classes at MMC, students still pay thousands in fees for services many of us will never use, including transportation, health, PantherExpress and more.
Not to mention, the ride to BBC is an hour, and that’s without traffic. With traffic, you’re in a bus with strangers for at least an hour, sharing mediocre internet. If you have classes twice a week at BBC, that’s four or more hours of commuting a week.
FIU even bills online students a transportation fee like the rest of us, many of whom never set foot on campus and may even live in other states and countries.
Why pay for a ride you’ll never take?
FIU will argue that it’s not necessarily about needing to use these services all the time; it’s that you can use them all the time. At some indeterminate, unknown time, of course, except there are still thousands of students who have never taken the bus to go to BBC.
Fees should reflect fairness and utility, not arbitrary replication. It might be difficult to sort it out on the books, but saving money for students should be a budget priority for campus administration.
To put it short, a campus should not rely on the wallets of students to fund its amenities that otherwise would be solved with better accounting.
FIU’s BBC-only programs are marine biology, hospitality, journalism and media, which leaves only a fraction of students who exclusively attend the campus.
“The exclusive number is tricky because the studies have never really happened to look into it,” said Tanner Croddy, SGA’s BBC Housing senator in regards to the number of students who have never stepped foot in BBC and vice versa.
In a rough estimate, “…The latest numbers are 4,000 to 6,000, exclusive to BBC, potentially. And 18,000 to 34,000 being exclusive to MMC.”
Croddy said the large range can be attested to not knowing how often hybrid students attend school physically, with the estimates coming from foot traffic, parking and heat maps showing where students most often frequent.
Asked about the number of students who swipe in to use the BBC bus, FIU’s Department of Parking and Transportation did not respond for comment at the time of publication.
In 2019, SGA included the costs of the shuttle into its budget, but only after FIU raised transportation fees. Students subsidize their access to the bus, which at the end of the day amounts to semantics.
Unfortunately, there is still not enough transparency regarding where these fees go and how much they actually are. You can’t even see where the fees go on the Financial Account tab in your student account.
For example, the only way to see a full breakdown of any sort of transportation fee is through the Master of Science in Information Systems, which is $95.30 per semester for fall and spring, and $88.88 for summer.
We believe there should be a bus and that it should be available to students, but it should come out of FIU’s pockets, not the students.
And if it is too expensive for FIU to foot the bill completely on its own, there can be an opt-in option for students who have to take the bus.
We already have options like that on campus, like Panther BookPack, which you opt-in or out of every semester. Why can’t we have that for the bus?
Students should vote on whether student fees should support the Panther Express and have the opportunity to express their opinions, for a better, fairer campus.
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