Students at UT-Austin could be facing weekend classes, if a new bill gets through the Lege.
House Bill 120, sponsored by Rep. Fred Brown, R-Bryan, is intended to get more use out of university lecture rooms; the more hours the rooms are made available, the more credit hours a student can take in a semester, the quicker they can graduate. However, there’s the question of when those hours will be. The bill proposes a test scheme for three universities – Texas A&M, Texas Tech, and UT-Austin. Students will get a 15% discount on their fees for courses held outside of the normal business day. That means nights, weekends, and the nebulously defined “times that the institution’s instructional facilities would otherwise be underutilized”.
The bill is supposed to avoid the state having to spend money building new facilities or replacing old, worn-out ones. Pack students in later and later (they’re young; they don’t need sleep), and get lecturers working longer hours and teaching more classes, rather than expanding the facilities to keep track of the expanding population. It also seems to be built on the idea that students don’t already get taught from early morning to late at night. At UT-Austin, many departments already schedule courses from 8am to 10pm. This only leaves weekends and those “other times.”
Just because a lecturer is not using a room does not mean they are not teaching – they may be in office hours. Many rooms, especially computer labs, may be in open hours, with a teaching assistant helping students. Scheduling more lecturing hours in these facilities means either cutting down on open labs or putting them at increasingly difficult times.
The Legislative Budget Board, the body which works out how much a bill will cost to implement, estimates the tuition discount will cost UT-Austin $13,265,393 each year. This will be reimbursed through central funding. However, this just fills the gap to the old funding level. Nowhere in the bill does it suggest hiring extra lecturers, TAs, janitors, administrators, or technical staff for all these extra hours. Nor does it suggest how cash-strapped students, desperate to make any savings they can, will be affected if they only take these “odd hours” courses.
This article appears in March 16 • 2007.
