The Rotunda

Issue date: 3/25/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Nicole Dales Nicole Dales, Assistant News Editor.

A couple of Fridays ago I pulled a somewhat all-nighter. It wasn't a real all-nighter because I accidently went to sleep at 6 a.m. That's irrelevant. Anyway, I was up all night finishing a paper and trying to study for English and Spanish. I had my 8 a.m. chemistry lecture, followed by an English midterm and Spanish oral exam. My roommate Stevie woke me up at 7:45 for class. I started freaking out because I hadn't meant to go to sleep and I didn't get to study everything I meant to. Stevie told me to just skip the chemistry lecture. Attendance is not taken and she said she would take notes. Although the idea of an extra hour to study was desirable, my guilty conscience would not allow me to skip class. While we walked to class we discussed skipping classes, and the topic of how much each individual class costs came up.

I found a PowerPoint that broke down the costs of skipping a class at Eastern Illinois University. They added up the cost of tuition per credit hour, the cost of books and class fees. The PowerPoint estimated that it costs $13.85 to skip a three-credit Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday class and $20.56 to skip a three-credit Tuesday/ Thursday class. These numbers are from the 2005-2006 school year, so I can only imagine that the numbers have gone up. The math, I'm not so sure about it. I have heard $15, $90 and $140 per credit hour. I really don't know what is right and what is wrong. I am not a math major and right now it is a Sunday afternoon and I really don't want to try and figure it out.

On thestudentsblog.com a blog went up looking at the cost of skipping class at seven big name universities. It estimated that a skipped class at Princeton costs $300. Harvard came in at $242, Yale costs $241, University of Pennsylvania costs $243 and Massachusetts Institute of Technology costs $238. California Tech was a bit lower with $195, and Stanford came in the cheapest at $82.

The author took yearly tuition for each school, divided it into two semesters, and then further divided over the average course load and the number of class sessions per course per semester. Again I do not know if the cost is correct, and the schools used in this example were incredibly expensive. The article has a forum at the bottom where readers could post their opinions.

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