Next year, ISU students will face an almost 10 percent tuition hike. Some people are predicting tuition increases for the next few years of over 20 percent. And what does the Inter-Residence Hall Association propose? More newspapers.

IRHA voted 21-0 (with one abstaining) to approve the USA Today readership program Thursday night.

The readership program will put three newspapers in the residence halls in addition to the Des Moines Register and the Iowa State Daily. These newspapers will be USA Today, The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune.

The cost to students will be $10 per student every semester for Monday through Friday issues, added automatically to every dorm resident’s room and board charge, whether he or she is interested in receiving these newspapers or not.

That’s $24 a year per student to get three more newspapers few will probably read and no one will read all of daily.

Thursday, the top stories in USA Today included “Abortion murder suspect caught,” “`Soft money’ vote possible today” and “McVeigh remorseless about bombing.”

The New York Times top stories included, “Man Accused of Killing New York Obstetrician Is Arrested,” “Campaign Finance Vote Expected” and “`No Sympathy’ for Dead Children, McVeigh Says.”

The Chicago Tribune featured such headlines as, “Abortion foe wanted by FBI arrested in France,” “Senate nears final vote on campaign reform” and “McVeigh’s only regret was bad PR, book says.”

Yet somehow IRHA thinks students, most of whom barely take the time to flip through one newspaper each day, will benefit from reading five.

At the Daily, I’m surrounded by journalism students, and none of them even read five newspapers a day. Most journalism professors don’t read five papers a day.

Though it sounds strange for someone who works at a newspaper to condemn a program that supposedly will increase students’ knowledge about world events, the simple fact is no one needs to read five newspapers each day.

While The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune are both excellent papers (I’m withholding judgment on USA Today), they both cover a lot of the same national and international news, and they focus heavily on the news in their respective cities.

Though $10 a semester may seem like a good deal for three additional newspapers, at Iowa State, every student has access to the Internet for free, and that means every student can already read the articles in every one of these papers every day – free.

The Web sites for these papers are www.USAToday.com, www.NYTimes.com and www.ChicagoTribune.com, if you’re dying to read them.

These fine publications are also available in the library and in reading rooms all over campus, if you prefer to read your news on actual paper.

Ironically, at Thursday night’s IRHA meeting, the same representatives who voted in favor of the readership program argued that more students would participate in the upcoming IRHA election if the voting was done online and not on paper ballots in the lobbies of the residence halls.

IRHA representatives argued that all residence hall students have access to the Internet, since every dorm has a computer lab and every room has an ethernet connection. But they somehow didn’t see that every student already has access to USA Today, the Times and the Tribune.

In addition to paying for something everyone already gets for free, the readership program has a few other drawbacks.

Resident assistants are probably already cringing, imagining the potential mess of two and a half times as many newspapers as are currently strewn across the dorms.

Environmentalists should be shuddering at the thought of thousands of wasted newspapers every day.

Meanwhile, the 140 universities nationwide that have committed to the paid program are allowing USA Today and other papers to boast of higher circulations and thus increased ad rates.

The program has been known to hurt student newspapers at schools across the country that are involved in the readership program, and while the program might hurt the Daily a little, we’ll always be the No. 1 place students turn to when they want to see the finals schedule or check out what happened at the last Government of the Student Body meeting.

USA Today will never report on the ISU men’s swimming and diving team, The New York Times won’t be printing articles on Liberal Arts department budget cuts, and The Chicago Tribune could care less about reverse campaniling.

The main problem with this program is that in these days of double-digit tuition increases and budget cuts, it’s crazy to pay for something students already get for free.

Like a used car salesman offering “rust undercoating,” IRHA is always looking for extra fees to stick to students who live in the dorms.

Last semester, the residence hall council debated raising room and board fees $7 a semester so students could be served juice at lunch and dinner in addition to breakfast.

They didn’t pass the juice increase, possibly because common sense told them that no one drinks fruit juice with dinner, but now IRHA has passed this bill even though common sense should have told them that no one reads five newspapers a day.

Tuition is too high already, and the projected increases for the next few years are downright frightening. Students don’t need fees for juice or extra newspapers tacked on to their U-bills.

The average ISU student will at most read only one of these three papers a day. And that’s using “read” loosely – most people are more likely to scan the front page articles, skim the letters section and glance at the sports page than actually read through every article in the paper.

ISU students living in the dorms receive, in addition to newspapers and unlimited online resources, WHO and NBC news, KCCI and CBS news, WOI and ABC news, KDSM news, CNN, FoxNews Channel and CSPAN.

Students who live in the residence halls have had every opportunity to get involved in local and national news, and if they don’t want to, no amount of newspapers will change this.

Jocelyn Marcus is a junior in English from Ames. She is opinion editor of the Daily.