Board of Trustees implement health fee
By Meisha Baker
Business Manager
The University of Indianapolis Board of Trustees voted during a late February board meeting to create a student health center fee. The board had earlier determined that something needed to be done to address the increase in student visits at the health center.
The cost of the fee will be $15 per semester and will be charged only to full-time undergraduate students. Many universities around the United States charge students an extra fee (in addition to college tuition) to keep student health centers efficient in treating patients at a lower cost than doctors’ offices.
With the additional health charge, the university will be able to hire more medical staff to help alleviate the influx of student visits that the health center has seen this year. The fee also will help university officials evaluate the services offered in the health center, so that it is more convenient and student-friendly.
According to Dean of Students Kory Vitangeli, this year the student health center has seen a record number of students. The small staff, consisting of only two nurse practitioners and a doctor who visits once a week, is not sufficient to see the number of students who consistently visit the health center.
By the end of February of this year, the health center already had seen more than 12,000 student patients.
“They [the staff members] just literally do not have the time to keep up with it [demands]. So one of the ways that we’re looking to help the health center increase the number of staff is by implementing a student health fee,” Vitangeli said.
University officials used some criteria to help make the decision of adding an additional fee to student costs.
“We talked to students who were in the health center that had to wait too long to be in there. Not only did they want the health center with nurse practitioners available at no charge, they also wanted to have good customer service,” said Vice President of Student Affairs Mark Weigand. “Being conscious of all that, we tried to come up with a plan that would meet the customer service needs of the students and what they were really demanding.”
The new student fee will be an extra cost, similar to the student activity fee.
“We separated the fee out of tuition,” Weigand said, “because we wanted to acknowledge the fact that we had such an increase in the number of students using the health center, that we needed a little bit of additional funds to offset that increase without having it go directly into a tuition charge.”
With tuition increasing, students may be concerned that the new health fee will increase as well.
“Our goal is not to make the health fee extremely high. But we will have to evaluate it after next year to see did that help us meet the needs and demands,” Vitangeli said. “At this point, we are hopeful that we can keep it relatively low.”
The new student health fee will be added to student bills at the start of the 2008-2009 academic year.
