Right when I was supposed to leave for break, it hit me. I rummaged through my left pocket, then my right, then my left again, until I was left with one inexorable conclusion: I had locked my wallet in my room.
I rushed to the Service Point to get my temporary prox and make it to my train on time. I was greeted by a friendly employee who informed me that while this first indiscretion was free of charge, the fourth time that I locked myself out of my room would come with a $30 charge for my carelessness.
Princeton is full of fees like this, but as I rushed back to my dorm, my new card in hand, I couldn’t help but wonder: what point is there in charging for this service?
This charge is instead part of a genre of fees that are more of a nuisance than anything else. If they are intended to be punitive, they are too small to be an effective deterrent. However, raising them would come across as excessively cruel. Instead, the fees exist only to squeeze as much money out of the students using these services as possible. These fees are not enough to engender real resentment, but just enough to elicit a groan from everyone forced to deal with them. While these fees might not seem like much, for low-income students, they can add up, creating unnecessary frustration and anxiety. By doing away with these fees, Princeton can give students something we all desperately need: a break.
It’s not like Princeton needs the money. A $30 fee pales in comparison to a $34 billion endowment, and if they did, they have plenty of other ways to get it. The Service Point already charges $75 for failing to return the temporary card within 24 hours.
Moreover, the fee does not meaningfully work as a deterrent to students. Chronically forgetful people — a group I count myself as a part of — don’t lose their possessions because the cost of finding them is low, and raising the cost is not going to cause people to lose their things less. Absent-mindedness is not the result of a cost-benefit analysis. If it was, one would think that the embarrassment and inconvenience of having to walk across campus was a sufficient deterrent to careless students.
All the fee incentivizes is for students to find other means of avoiding getting locked out, such as taping their doors, risking an even more substantial fine.
For low-income students, these fees can be more than a mere annoyance. While typically too small to trouble high-income students, these fees can be just large enough to cause an undue burden to those with less means to pay immediately.
One example is the $45 fee that Princeton imposes to drop classes after the add/drop deadline. Dropping a class is already a substantial decision that risks derailing a student’s academic career. Someone who is considering dropping a class is likely facing the real potential of failing the class and giving up on credit for weeks of work. What good does punishing them do?
High-income students have the ability to pay the fee without a second thought. The fee only meaningfully impacts students for whom it might be a burden. Consequently, these students are denied access to — or have to make a more difficult decision to access — an option that wealthier students take advantage of without thinking.
Instead of trying to sway behavior, or subsidize a meaningful administrative cost, all these nuisance fees are doing is charging students because they can. It is nothing more than petty, useless profit-seeking behavior from one of the richest universities in the world — an entity that does not need to put its students in difficult, inconvenient financial positions for the sake of increasing its wealth. These nuisance fees only serve to increase Princeton’s bottom line while doing nothing to help the University community as a whole.
So, Princeton, give us students a break. We already pay for mistakes in lost items, wasted time, and embarrassing phone calls to friends searching for our things. We pay in retaken classes, five-course semesters, and the threat of late graduation. Adding one, two, or even five more $30 charges is not going to meaningfully change rich students’ behavior. The charge affects low-income students and punishes them disproportionately and unfairly.
Stop trying to incessantly nickel and dime the student body and instead just let it go. Students already pay through the teeth for textbooks, printing at Pequod, and everything else that goes into being a student. Being at Princeton can be demanding. Many of us are away from home for the first time, trying to figure our lives out in an increasingly stress-inducing environment. Just for once, let us off the hook.
Associate Opinion editor Thomas Buckley is a Junior from Colchester, Vermont majoring in Public Policy. He will try to check his email at thomas.buckley [at] princeton.edu, but he makes no promises. His Column “This Side of Nassau” runs every three weeks on Thursday. You can read all of his columns here.
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