Entitled Complaints

It's a new world of academia. Where university courses can be taken over the Internet. Sit at home, log onto your site, and attend virtual lectures. Send in papers, write exams, email lecturers and professors. And it's not a bad idea, actually. Giving people the opportunity to remain in the city they're familiar with, while taking university courses on line at a university located halfway across a continent.

Things that seem simple can sometimes also be complex. There's the news item in the city section of our local newspaper outlining a complaint from a young woman who, to save money, decided to stay at home with her parents in Ottawa, and 'attend' university at the University of Victoria. Long distance, over the Internet. Neat stuff.

But she's complaining. Money is tight, she is a full-time student in the university's child and youth care program. Tuition fees and course publications have already cost her thousands. She has a job and is trying to make ends meet, so to speak. She had attended Algonquin College in Ottawa last year. And last year she had no problem acquiring a student special-fee bus pass from the local public transportation authority.

This year, different story. Since she lives at home and attends virtual university the transportation authority failed to see how she would qualify for a student bus pass. Students who live in Ottawa and attend school full-time, from elementary school, to colleges and universities do qualify for special-rate student passes. They attend school daily, and transportation is required.

But not her. And she's fuming about it.

Public transit, we should remember, is costly. It is also subsidized by local taxpayers. It is a benefit to society and its use is encouraged for obvious reasons. And this student, in her first year at University of Victoria, feels very ill done by. That she does not physically leave her home to 'attend' classes is irrelevant, she insists. She still has to take public transportation to go to libraries to enable her to do research.

And she works, as well, so she does use public transit regularly, she says. To go to work. Trouble is, the pass is meant for academic attendance, not employment. The differential in cost between a regular transit pass over the course of a semester would amount to several hundred dollars. But the transit authority's policy is that only students attending school in the area which it serves are eligible for a student pass.

It's hard to feel much sympathy for this young woman. She lives at home, so her costs are relatively modest, other than for tuition, but she does work to help pay her expenses. One can only wonder; if parents are freed from the burden of paying a child's tuition because the child works, could they not offer to help pay for her bus transit passes?

Why does it make more sense for people to assume that a tab that owes much to taxpayer support appears like a good thing, not that, in instances such as this, it becomes a parental or familial responsibility?