The Dollars and Sense of Class Attendance

Meet "Mike," a Nassau student who every so often opens his wallet, takes out $10 or $20 bills (sometimes several at a time), and throws them away.

Over the course of a typical semester, he may toss a hundred dollars--maybe more. It's money Mike will never see again, no matter how hard he may (later) wish he had the bucks back.

Is Mike crazy?  Dumb?  Oblivious to the value of money?  Not at all.  He's simply behaving like countless other college students (including some at NCC) who cut class--and in the process throw dollars down the drain.

Missing classes has more serious consequences than lost benjamins, of course.  It goes without saying that the more you're in class (no matter what the course), the more you're likely to learn.  And the more you know, the more successful you'll be--in college, in your career, probably in your life. While a good attendance record in itself won't guarantee straight A's and a bright future, you can't go wrong by attending class regularly.

But apart from all of these very important outcomes, class attendance is also a matter of dollars and cents. When you pay your tuition every semester, you're paying to be taught by your professors. Just as you would pay for a doctor's or dentist's services, you're paying for a professor's expertise, in the form of instruction, in college.  And when you miss class, even now and then, you're missing out on that instruction--and wasting money.

How much does a missed class cost? Let's use round numbers to figure it out.

Suppose, for instance, you're taking fifteen credits--five three-credit courses--this semester.  And suppose each course meets twice a week for fifteen weeks (the length of a semester) for a total of thirty class sessions. Multiplied by five, that's 150 class meetings in all (thirty class sessions x five courses).

Now let's divide a typical student's tuition at Nassau--$2117--by 150. The answer: $14.11--fourteen if you want to round it off.  So EACH class session costs roughly $14, money you've paid at the door, so to speak, prior to the start of the semester.

Money you waste by not going to class.

While this computation may not be the same for every person (lots of factors influence the tuition students actually pay), there's no denying the fact that missing class, even occasionally, costs money.  While you might argue that $14 isn't anything to sweat over, think about the long term costs of missing, say, ten class meetings (all classes together) a semester.  Or twenty or thirty over the course of a year.  Being absent regularly can be expensive.

Adults--parents, teachers, advisers, counselors, and everyone else (including bloggers!) in the mix--are forever going on about the importance of regular class attendance.  And as noted earlier, with good reason: showing up to class is an essential part of becoming an educated--and successful--human being (the reason most students attend college).

But on a different level, class attendance also has a financial dimension.  When you don't get to class, you miss out on instruction you've already paid for.  And if you miss enough classes, you wind up like Mike, opening and emptying your wallet for nothing.

There may be some reasons to be like Mike, but this clearly isn't one of them.