Staff Editorial: The high price for fitness

Quietly tucked into next year's tuition bill -- alongside increases in tuition, room and board and other fees totaling about $2,000 -- is a brand new $200 charge, euphemistically named the "recreation fee."

In effect, it is the University's way of forcing every undergraduate to pay for the upkeep to the new Pottruck Health and Fitness Center currently rising alongside Gimbel Gymnasium -- regardless of whether or not a particular student uses it.

To be fair, the new fitness center should be a welcome addition to campus and represents a vast improvement over the existing facilities for those students that utilize it.

But ever since the opening of the Katz Fitness Center -- Pottruck's predecessor -- three and a half years ago, students wishing to use the center paid for the privilege -- $50 per semester or $75 annually -- and many did. In its first month, Gimbel enrolled over 5,000 people.

While some students complained about having to pay to join their own school's gym, it gave those students without the time or inclination to use the Katz Center -- and varsity athletes already given access to more than adequate facilities at Hutchinson Gymnasium -- the option to save $75.

Now that option has been taken away, and those students who do not use the gym will still be paying for its upkeep.

University President Judith Rodin claims that money collected in fees will go exclusively to the maintenance of the new facility, but nearly 10,000 undergraduates times $200 comes to almost $2 million. That is an awfully vast sum to staff and maintain a center that cost $23 million to build, particularly when administrators felt no need to impose such a hefty fee on every student to keep Katz operational.

As the overall cost of a Penn education continues to skyrocket, it is ridiculous that the University expects undergraduates to bear the burden this additional expense.

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