When I registered for Biological Anthropology last semester to complete my final G-PAC requirement, I was surprised to see a $50 laboratory fee tacked onto the course description. My friends studying STEM soon told me that not only do lab science classes come paired with their own hefty fees, but students also must cover the cost of any equipment that they break.
The STEM majors would frequently come back to my residence hall after their labs and laugh off the 50-cent cost to replace a test tube here or the $3.25 for a watch glass there. But then one of my friends dropped a $16 round bottom flask and bent a $125 vigreux column. Another friend knocked an erlenmeyer flask, often priced at about $3, off the table with her jacket on the last day of the lab as she was returning her equipment. “What did you break this time?” another friends’ father would ask every time she called. After all, these costs add up over time.
Much of the University’s lab equipment is fragile and made of glass, and with many students using these instruments for the first time, destruction is inevitable. Laboratories should give students hands-on experience that can supplement lecture material with trial-and-error experiments where they can learn from their mistakes. Imposing a financial penalty for every piece of broken equipment pulls the focus away from these objectives. The additional costs can be a mental toll on students under the constant risk of a mistake. Mistakes cannot be used as teaching moments if students are too afraid to make them.
Students’ lab fees that range from $50 to $85 are already expensive enough as it is, but contrasted by an endowment of more than a billion dollars, GW should have no problem paying for the occasional new vigreux column, given that all other unbroken equipment is reused from year to year. Aside from the prices posted, GW fails to provide transparency in how lab fees are spent. While the fees likely cover non-reusable lab materials like chemicals for experiments or pH paper, officials could easily allocate a surplus to replace broken equipment. Professors should release reports of their lab fee allocations so students can see how their money is spent and potentially request that the surplus covers the cost of their broken equipment.
At a minimum, GW should give students in STEM labs an accident credit to avoid overcharging them. The University has already started pushing to make campus life more affordable in recent years, granting students a $30 printing credit and 17 free loads of laundry in 2019. A similar credit for students who break equipment in their labs would continue this effort to reduce the frequent costs of campus life. They would be able to use this money to take care of some of the charges for broken equipment while still being held responsible for their instruments.
Students should be able to take science labs without wondering whether they will be able to afford their mistakes. Officials have a responsibility to ensure students can focus on what science labs are designed for – learning.
Jenna Baer, a sophomore majoring in creative writing, is an opinions writer.
