“Back in my day, we walked to school uphill both ways and paid our own way through college.”

At the public hearing on the “efficiency review” of Iowa’s three universities, one of the regents actually suggested compressing the school year to make summers longer so students can earn money to pay for college. 

Let’s do some math to illustrate just how out of touch our regents are with reality:

The ISU official estimated cost of attendance is $18,920 per year for residents. In order to have this amount as take-home pay, a student’s before-tax income would have to be $22,600, which is 60 hours per week at minimum wage. Every week. For the entire year. 

In order to just “work over the summer” to pay their way through school, a student would need to work 40 hours a week for 13 summer weeks at a job that pays $43 per hour. Even if we require a student to work 20 hours a week for the entire school year and 40 hours a week over summer, their hourly wage would need to be $17.50 per hour. 

So, unless people feel like more than doubling the minimum wage, we need to start hearing better ideas than regents waxing nostalgic about the 1970s. 

Like increasing state appropriations: the State of Iowa currently contributes an embarrassing 20.8 percent of ISU’s budget. So little, in fact, that we should really rename ISU to Iowa’s Student University, as our tuition and fees provide the largest chunk of the budget, 132 percent as much as we get from Iowa.

Explain to me again why the regents have so much power?