One of Northwestern’s biggest draws is its proximity to a world class city.
The catch? Public transportation to and from Chicago can take its toll on students’ bank accounts.
ASG recently began promoting the Chicago Card to help students get to and from the city more frequently. The Chicago Card allows for quicker boarding, and you don’t have to use cash to add fare value. Users also get access to the “Go Lane” when boarding trains and buses, in addition to online manageability and fare protection. Yet in principle, the Chicago Card doesn’t differ greatly from the conventional, disposable CTA card: Cash is added, and once you deplete your value, the card can be reloaded for additional rides.
The Chicago Card is offered as an alternative to the U-Pass, a contracted pass that allows students unlimited rides during a school term for a fixed fee. U-Passes are not currently available for the entire Northwestern student population.
Why not?
The main reason is that U-Passes require a contract. Northwestern would have to sign a contract with the CTA, thereby requiring the school to enroll a certain number of students in the program for a given time frame, usually a few years. Within that time frame, every student in the school would have a U-Pass and would pay a fee until the end of the contract.
Clearly, a U-Pass has its benefits, as many Medill and graduate students can attest. You never have to worry about how many rides you take, and if you’re an avid user, you’ll get more bang for your buck. However, the contract also means if you don’t take the required number of trips to break even, the U-Pass could be a waste of money.
But that all depends on how much the pass would cost.
“Based on research from other Chicago-area universities, it would be $50 per quarter [per student],” says Weinberg sophomore Amalia Namath, an ASG senator.
Many nearby universities — DePaul, Loyola and the University of Illinois at Chicago — are part of the U-Pass program. But at Northwestern, the pass is currently available only to students in specific schools. In the Graduate School, every student is given one.
“The students brought it to our attention…they wanted this U-Pass,” says Penny Warren, assistant dean of student life & multicultural affairs at the Graduate School. “Just to go back and forth from home to school was a justifiable reason for having it.”
In 2007, students at the Graduate School had an open forum and conducted surveys asking the student body if they wanted a U-Pass. Results were then presented to the administration. According to the 2007 Graduate Leadership Council survey of 967 respondents, 80 percent were in favor of the U-Pass, for reasons ranging from environmental to financial.
Such an “overwhelming response” was enough for the administration to start implementing an activities fee in the winter quarter of 2007, says Warren. In 2009, the activity fee was $78, $74 of which went to the U-Pass, while the remaining $4 was to provide an attorney for students with legal issues.
In 2008, another study was conducted to examine whether the U-Pass was worth the money. According to this study prepared by the Graduate Student Association, a third of the 848 students surveyed use the CTA, or their U-Pass, to commute to campus. It was also calculated that roughly 60 percent of the students were saving money, or at least breaking even.
“It’s just placing an unnecessary financial burden on students because they wouldn’t use it enough times to justify the cost in the end,” says ASG president and SESP senior Claire Lew.
So what about everyone who isn’t granted a U-Pass?
There is no U-Pass in place for the School of Education and Social Policy, even though students must complete a one-term practicum in various sites — some of which are in the Chicagoland area. The program, however, has been discussed.
“We did our own analysis and we didn’t fall within the CTA guidelines for how they set up the program,” says Susan Olson, coordinator of student programs and SESP’s assistant dean of student affairs.
There are fluctuating numbers of people each term who might potentially need the U-Pass, says Olson, and this fluctuation does not work with the CTA contract, as it demands a set number of students for an extended period of time.
“If we go into contract with the CTA, everyone would have to have a U-Pass, which is an issue that the administration used as an argument against it,” Namath says.
The reason Medill and Feinberg can give their students U-Passes is because the CTA treats each school as a single entity, according to Lew. The journalism and medical schools are like small universities: Each entity has a set number of students, and there are enough students who want to commit to a U-Pass.
“[They] both have enough students who say ‘Yes, this is worthwhile, we can do this,’” says Dean of Students Burgwell Howard. “We’ve had difficulty in the past getting any of the larger undergraduate schools where the student body as a whole to be recognized as a single entity, and getting enough people to agree that it’s a worthwhile expense.”
Additionally, the majority of undergraduate students live on campus, so to use such a “huge bulk” of the activity fee when funds could be used for other causes (like student organizations), is a waste, says Olson.
Namath is working with ASG to instead publicize the Chicago Card for Northwestern students as an alternative to the U-Pass — a push motivated by her own confusion freshman year. The key difference between the Chicago Card and the U-Pass is that the former does not have a binding contract.
“[We’re always] trying to be creative about how to still allow students to feel like they can go down to Chicago whenever they want,” says Lew, citing the creation of the free Chicago Express shuttle that takes Northwestern students downtown. “That’s really why we find it to be important and we think it’s a valuable option for students.”
In Namath’s vision, the Chicago Card marks a step toward a U-Pass for the entire Northwestern community.
“I just want people to know about the Chicago Card,” she says. “Hopefully, if people are really interested in this . . . we can also start more discussion about the U-Pass, and come to a sort of conclusion.”