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Insight contract would cut public access funding by 71 percent

By Tom Cronin- Public Affairs Reporter

       Public access television programs produced by UIS students and members of the local community may face considerable cuts if officials at Insight Communications proceed with their plans to reduce funding to university-produced public access programming by 71 percent.
According to Jerry Burkhart, director of the office of electronic media, Insight reached an oral agreement with UIS in April to continue funding public access at the current level of $170,000 per year. After Insight officials learned of the university’s plans to select Campus TeleVideo as the cable service provider for campus Housing, they began discussing the possibility of reducing public access funding. About two weeks ago, Insight sent the university a contract documenting the planned cuts, Burkhart said.
As part of the contract, Insight offered to contribute $50,000 annually to UIS-produced programming on public access Channel 4, UIS Public Relations Director Cheryl Peck said. Insight provided $55,000 annually to public access when it was launched in 1985.
Jon Danielsen, Insight’s digital vice president for central Illinois, told The State Journal-Register last week that Insight officials no longer felt obligated to fund public access programming on Channel 4 following the university’s recent decision to provide cable service to Housing residents through a vendor other than Insight.
Based on the recommendation of a committee with representatives from Campus Technology, Housing, Business Services and Purchasing, the university selected Campus TeleVideo as the new cable service provider for University Hall, Lincoln Residence Hall, and the campus apartments and townhouses. A subsidiary of Lamont Digital Systems, Inc., Campus TeleVideo provides the programming from DIRECTV at an annual cost of $31,280, according to John Ringle, director of Housing and residential life.
Peck said that Insight’s bid was “considerably higher” than that of Campus TeleVideo, and the package offered by Insight did not offer an adequate amount of educational and foreign language programming. Campus TeleVideo offers 10 foreign language stations, six of which are associated with foreign-language programs at UIS: German, Russian, Chinese, French, Japanese and Spanish.
The service provided by Campus TeleVideo is also less of a hassle than Insight’s service was, both for residents and for the Housing staff, Ringle said. Residents who received cable service from Insight last fall needed to split the bill with their roommates, which sometimes to conflicts. Ringle said that Campus TeleVideo’s service eliminated these conflicts by allowing Housing to charge residents for cable individually.
“The hassle factor will be drastically reduced,” Ringle said last month, “and the educational factor will be drastically enhanced because of the addition of the foreign language channels and the tie-ins with the academic departments.”
According to the article in the SJ-R, Danielsen said that Insight’s bid was between $60,000 and $70,000 per year. Danielsen did not respond to interview requests from The Journal before today’s issue of the newspaper went to press.
Insight’s Web site includes information describing the relationship between the company and the communities it serves. According to the site, every community served by Insight is a priority.
“Insight is as dedicated to serving the community as we are to our individual customers,” the site said.
If Insight follows through with its plans to cut public access funding, there would be fewer productions and shorter playback times, Burkhart said. As a consequence, the amount of time that student workers spend working on productions and interacting with community members would also need to be reduced, he said.
“You have this wonderful thing of the students and the community working together on something that’s meaningful, and that’s a great example of the university and the community working together on a project,” Burkhart said. “And you get to see members of the community who come from all walks of life in Springfield who get to know our students, and our students get to know them, and I think that in and of itself is a valuable thing that happens as part of the public access.”
Burkhart said that public access gives a voice to disenfranchised individuals who would not otherwise have access to the media. It also serves as a community resource that provides information about local events and facilitates the discussion of community issues, he said.
The UIS-produced programs on Channel 4 have won three national awards for outstanding public access in the last five years, Burkhart said. The programming has been well received by the community, he said, and this is evidenced by the fact that community members have voiced their support for the channel and its programs after learning about the possible funding cuts.
According to Burkhart, negotiations between the university and Insight have been taking place at different levels. Burkhart said that electronic media staff members and public access producers have always had a good relationship with Insight, and he hopes that it can continue.
“We’ve continued to build the channel up over the years, and whatever the funding ends up being, we will continue to work very hard to provide the best public access service that we can to the city of Springfield,” Burkhart said.

2-year transfer students pay higher rates under newly implemented Guaranteed Tuition Plan

By Tom Cronin - Public Affairs Reporter

      Full-time transfer students who were admitted last fall and plan to graduate after two years at UIS will be charged approximately $328 more in tuition over the course of this academic year and next academic year than full-time undergraduates who began their studies at the university prior to last fall, a Journal analysis has found.
Last fall, the university implemented the Guaranteed Tuition Plan, which guarantees all new degree-seeking undergraduates – including transfer students – that their tuition rates will remain the same for four years.
The Guaranteed Tuition Plan was implemented in response to Illinois Public Act 93-0228, commonly known as the “Truth-in-Tuition Act,” which requires the state’s public universities to charge new undergraduates a fixed tuition rate for four continuous years.
The act became effective on July 22, 2003, when Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed House Bill 1118 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The state’s public universities were required to comply with the act beginning with this fall’s entering class.
According to a press release from the governor’s office, Blagojevich said at the bill-signing ceremony that the act would bring stability to the cost of a college education at the state’s public universities.
“It has been my belief that the tuition a student pays as an incoming freshman should be the same tuition the student and his family pay as a senior,” Blagojevich said. “By doing this, we can help make college affordable for Illinois families.”
Guaranteed tuition rates represent an average of the estimated non-guaranteed rates over the four-year guaranteed period. Assuming that the estimated increases in non-guaranteed tuition are accurate, students receiving the guarantee would pay more than the guaranteed rate for their first two years and less than the guaranteed rate for their third and fourth years.
Transfer students who arrived last fall and expect to complete their degree at the end of next academic year are required to pay the guaranteed rate, even though this rate is higher than the non-guaranteed rates for both this academic year and next academic year.
Last semester, 2,189 transfer students were enrolled at UIS, according to a spreadsheet on the Office of Enrollment Management’s home page. They represented 87.3 percent of undergraduates and 49.8 percent of the total student population.
The guaranteed rate for transfers and other undergraduates entering the university this academic year is $2,001 per semester, or $4,002 a year. This rate is based on enrollment in 15 credit hours of coursework in the fall and spring semesters.
For undergraduates who arrived on campus before the Guaranteed Tuition Plan went into effect, the rate for this academic year is $1,863 per semester, or $3,726 per year, for the same amount of coursework – $276 per year less than the guaranteed rate.
The approved non-guaranteed rate for next academic year is $1,975 per semester, or $3,950 per year, for 15 credit hours in the fall and spring semesters – $52 less than the guaranteed rate for this year’s entering students. Altogether, two-year transfer students who take 15 credit hours during the fall and spring semesters of this academic year and next academic year will pay $328 more than undergraduates who pay non-guaranteed rates and take the same amount of coursework.
At a November 2003 tuition forum, UIS Student Trustee Andrew Hollingsead pointed out that students who transfer to UIS with a substantial number of credit hours would most likely pay more overall with the tuition guarantee than without it.
“I see a problem with that because students are going to be paying more because they’re transfer students,” Hollingsead said. “And I sincerely doubt that the intent of the legislature and the governor was to have basically a guaranteed tuition hike geared just toward transfer students.”
At the meeting, Hollingsead suggested creating a program at the university that would reimburse students the difference between the total amount they would pay in tuition with the guarantee and the amount they would have paid without the guarantee.
About two weeks ago, Hollingsead said that he looked into the possibility of implementing a reimbursement program for transfer students, but he found that it would not be feasible from a logistical or a budgetary standpoint.
According to Hollingsead, reimbursements would need to be calculated on a per-student basis because the amount being reimbursed would vary from student to student depending the number of credit hours taken and the number of semesters spent at UIS.
Reimbursements would need to be computed by staff members in the campus accounting office because Banner, the software for the university’s integrated technology system, cannot accommodate the programming for a reimbursement program, Hollingsead said. With hundreds of transfer students graduating each year, the implementation of a reimbursement system would be an “accounting nightmare,” he said.
According to a document from a university press packet distributed in November 2003, the four-year tuition guarantee is being offered to transfer students to simplify matters for students, advisers and fee assessment personnel. Transfer students enter the university with varying numbers of credit hours, the document said, and sometimes only a limited number of these credit hours can count toward their degree.
Because some transfer students attend on a part-time basis and others come to UIS with only a handful of applicable credit hours, they often need to stay at the university for three or four years to complete their degree.
Of the 711 students who transferred to UIS in fall 2001, 17.4 percent graduated after two years, according to the January 2004 University of Illinois Student Data Book. Of the transfer students entering UIS in the fall semesters of 2000, 1999 and 1998, the percentages graduating after just two years were 21.1, 22.2 and 19.5, respectively.
Among those from the entering fall classes of 1998 and 1999, more students graduated at the end of their third year than at the end of their second year. However, only a slight majority graduated after four years or less. For the fall 1998 entering class, 26.5 percent graduated at the end of their third year, and 10 percent graduated at the end of their fourth year. The respective percentages for the fall 1999 entering class were 26.7 percent and 6 percent.
Tim Stevens, a junior history major who transferred to UIS last fall, said that he entered the university with the expectation that he would graduate after two years, but he may need to stay 2.5 or three years to fulfill his graduation requirements.
Because he expects to stay at UIS for three years at most, Stevens said that he would have chosen to pay the non-guaranteed rate instead of the guaranteed rate if he had been given the option. Additionally, he said that it’s unfair to charge transfer students more in tuition for completing their degrees in less than four years.
Stevens said that the university should have informed him when he first enrolled that he would likely be paying a higher tuition rate than those paying non-guaranteed rates if he completed his degree after only two years.
“Being honest [and] upfront about any possibility of an overcharge is much better than skirting the issue,” he said.
Brian Clevenger, associate registrar and associate director of records and registration, said that all transfer students who entered the university this academic year are being charged guaranteed tuition rates because the Truth-in-Tuition Act mandates the university to extend tuition guarantees to all degree-seeking undergraduates.
As stated in the act, “For four continuous academic years following initial enrollment … the tuition charged an undergraduate student who is an Illinois resident shall not exceed the amount that the student was charged at the time he or she first enrolled in the university.”
Telephone calls to the governor’s office seeking comment from a spokesperson for Blagojevich were not returned before The Journal went to press.

Insight contract would cut public access by fundinng by 71 percemt

2-year transfer students pay higher rates under newly implemented Guaranteed Tuition Plan