The Wake

Check your wallets, students. Registration at the University of Minnesota is right around the corner and while the price of classes might drain your funds you might have to use that extra beer money to help pay off some hidden costs.

No, it’s not about the student service fees or the fees from elusive groups like MPIRG. It’s about the cost of materials necessary to actually participate in class. Materials like textbooks and lab manuals might end up costing an arm and a leg, but some classes require other special materials just to complete assignments.

Photography, art and graphic design are just some of the courses requiring students to continuously purchase materials throughout the semester. Inks, paints, film and different assortments of paper and mop board can quickly add up, especially if students want to create a high quality product.

Being a graphic design senior, Alexis Mason knows all too well about having to invest in class projects.

“In graphic design you are either buying materials or paying for an output and the materials necessary to display it,” she said. “Unless it’s a lecture-based course almost everything you do will be like that.”

Mason explained how she once had a project requiring her to design a poster costing $30 per sheet to print. In addition, she had to make three different variations of the poster, which cost her even more she said.

Some classes are better than others in helping students find the right materials, she said. One class she attended required the students to pay a fee used by the instructor to purchase materials the class could use throughout the semester.

She believes that having the instructor purchase the materials helped to reduce student costs as well as level the playing field. Students who do not have many resources cannot make the highest quality product, which makes it unfair, she said.

“It shouldn’t be about who can afford what, it should be about who is willing to put in the effort,” she said.

With students buying their own materials, it might seem that the ones using high quality products or spending the most money would get the best grades. However, Mason said those who try hard to find good deals on materials or those who are creative and work with what they have can achieve results as good as anybody else.

“It depends on how far you’re willing to go,” she said. “Spending more to create an elaborate product might stand out more but it’s not an overriding factor in grading.”

While the depth of a student’s wallet might not determine the outcome of their grade, a little extra goes a long way. Students have to realize where they are and what they are doing and expect to put in some resources in order to succeed, she said.

“You have to come in prepared,” Mason said. “In the beginning I wasn’t willing to invest all my cash into this, but I later realized it was expected in order to have high quality outputs and high quality results.”