By Alyssa O’BrienSPECIAL TO THE CHRONICLE
Last week, I spoke with President Rabinowitz during his office hours. On Tuesday, I handed him a proposal to allocate tuition dollars for internship transit to subsidize the cost for students working at required internships and traveling to New York City.
A number of Hofstra students have voiced their frustrations on dropping $23 per day on Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) transit fees. This is even more problematic due to the public relations and journalism requirement to take three credits worth of internships to graduate.
It is highly recommended that a student intern multiple times. The public relations department, for example, suggests three internships for credit in order to look competitive on a resume.
This requirement creates a variety of expenses for students. Transit costs to and from New York City at a peak fare are nearly $270 per month. For a three-credit internship, in which a student commutes to and from the city three times a week, expenses would total nearly $1,000 per semester. If the University subsidized transit, the cost would be less than one full credit for students taking a full course load of 12 to 17 credits.
President Rabinowitz cited a couple different reasons why our policy solution would be impractical. For one, he stated that “money is tight” at the University because a lot of students attend Hofstra on scholarship. This is true, most students choose Hofstra because of their generous financial aid and merit-based scholarships. However, does that mean scholarship dollars are like monopoly money? Are they not, in fact, paying for our tuition?
Perhaps the most frustrating reason Rabinowitz cited was that structural change was impractical and would not happen. This was 24 hours after the new Peter S. Kalikow School of Government, Public Policy and International Affairs was launched.
The Kalikow School encourages its students to “think critically and creatively about policy issues and alternatives and, through service learning experiences … prepare [them] for a career in public service,” according to its University webpage. Meanwhile, the president of the school, who attended the convocation and showed his support for public policy, infantilized a student idea and suggested, instead, an event-planning route. He suggested a fundraising event to raise money for transit that targets Lawrence Herbert School of Communications alumni. While the event model may have worked at the Hofstra Law School, as Rabinowitz suggested, it’s important to note the salary differences between lawyers and communications professionals.
Moreover, this event would require more time and calls for fundraising amongst college students who are already spending time interning and expects them to pay into a pool of money which would then be redistributed to themselves.
College students who suffer from food insecurity will not contribute to pay for their peers’ transit for internships, nor should they be expected to.
Incentivizing public service cannot end with simply opening a new school with academic programs. Students should be encouraged to contribute to the rules of the institutions they invest in and to propose new ones when the rules in place are inequitable.
No, I will not plan an event to raise money for transit. If a student is paying the tuition to do an internship required for graduation, the university should allocate the funding they’re paying, or receiving in their scholarship, to ensure that the student isn’t spending additional money for transit on the LIRR.
Hofstra markets itself based on its closeness to New York City and the robust internship opportunities that it provides students. What the school doesn’t tell prospective students is that these benefits are only available if a student can pay an additional $1,000 per semester to travel on the LIRR.
So President Rabinowitz and W. Houston Dougharty, this is my response to the email you sent me asking for my policy so you can forward it to the dean of the School of Communications. I will not be organizing a program.
Instead, I want my policy to be looked at by the folks at the Kalikow Center. It is regressive and contradictory to open a school for public policy and then discourage a student one day later from trying to make institutional structural change.
Melissa Koenig also contributed to this opinion piece.
The views and opinions expressed in the Op-Ed section are those of the authors of the articles. They are not an endorsement of the views of The Chronicle or its staff. The Chronicle does not discriminate based on the opinions of the authors.