Picture this: it’s the summer after you graduate high school and each passing day brings you one step closer to moving onto campus and beginning a new period in your life. Now imagine this: you move onto campus, you have your new laptop, and you’re ready to become the academic weapon you’ve always wanted to be when, boom, the wifi is refusing to work with you. As you switch between UCONN-GUEST and UCONN-SECURE, the results are the same: no connection.
For those of us living on campus at UConn, this isn’t something that we have to imagine. This is our reality.
I don’t know who specifically is to blame for this issue — if it’s a building issue or an overall poorly connected Ethernet issue, but it’s something that needs to change. Not only is this a problem I’ve had personal experience with, but many of my friends and people in my building (Alumni Residences) have echoed a similar sentiment.
This isn’t just a problem because it’s difficult to get work done; it’s a problem because I am paying over $30,000 in tuition money to attend an institution that can’t even offer me a stable connection to complete my assignments and browse the internet. The even more interesting thing about this problem is that each student pays $87 dollars to cover a “Tech Fee.” If there are over 27,000 students that attend this school, that means the school is bringing in $2,349,000 worth of money that should be used to maintain a stable internet connection for students to use.
For those who remember when President Radenka Maric was urging us to protest at the state’s capitol in order to receive more funding for our school, I really question, if our tuition could potentially be raised next year, what are we really paying for?
UConn’s wifi issues open up the door to a larger question that could be asked to those in positions of power at this university: when most freshmen are living in dorms with no air conditioning, falling ceiling tiles, and rooms that haven’t seen any renovation since they were first built, it really forces you to consider where your money is going.
But maybe not. It’s quite clear where our money goes when you look around the campus and see a brand new building for the engineers and a new hockey arena even though we already had one less than a mile away from the new one.
There’s no doubt about it, we are a sports school that receives a lot of coverage on our teams and stats across the United States, but not everyone who attends UConn is a student-athlete or even a sports fan. To be clear, I love UConn and I’m grateful to attend such an accredited university, but an accredited university is not without its faults and UConn deserves to be called out in the areas where it could improve on.