Time is money

The cost of sleeping in

by Selma B. Tidwell

With there never seeming to be enough time in a day, coming to class late to finish a project or catch up on some extra sleep doesn’t seem like a big deal. This is especially with the larger classes like art history where no one notices when you slip in the back door. However with tuition sky-rocketing, time is also money.

If you are taking one three-credit, three-hour undergraduate class at SAIC’s current price of $905 per credit hour, you pay for it when you miss a portion of class. Every minute spent in class costs $1.01, which is the fast food equivalent of buying fries or a burger off McDonald’s Dollar Menu. If you saunter in five minutes late to class after finishing up that cigarette, it’s almost as expensive as buying a pack of cigarettes. If you have one of those days where you wake up late, rush out the door, hit every red light on the way to school, and arrive ten minutes late to class, you run a tab of $10.10. You would have been able to buy a pair of inexpensive swimming trunks with that money.

If you missed class completely, it would cost $181.80—the same as buying an Xbox. And, if the apocalypse came and you missed seven of your classes, it would cost you almost $1,294.99—which is enough to buy a home defibrillator—this, in addition to everything else the apocalypse would throw on your lap that day.

This is just a reminder that your classes are costly. Besides offending teachers who find tardy, disrupting students to be pet peeves, it costs you too.

DECEMBER 2005