No. The funds used for financial aid come from a specific allotment in the endowment that cannot be accessed unless the funds are actually being given to students. In order for the college to use the money at all, it has to come to us.

Sometimes our parents just need a little nudge. Here are some tips for how to talk to your parents about the strike. We recognize however that this is a family decision, and we do not advise that you go behind your parents’ backs in order to strike. There are plenty of other ways to get involved if withholding tuition is not an option.

No. The Vassar College Regulations, which lists offenses that can result in conduct probation, does not mention delayed payment of tuition as such an offense.

In short, yes, they can charge you late fees. $170 can be applied after 8/10/21 for Fall. However, we are growing a fund to cover late fees for strikers who receive financial aid. In addition, past strikes such as the one at Columbia have successfully demanded that all late fees be waived, a position that we certainly plan to maintain if the strike runs on past the payment deadline.

When you and your peers are engaged in a tuition strike, you are placing a demand on an institution or an employer until the institution agrees to that demand. Once Vassar agrees to the demands, or comes to an acceptable compromise, then students will stop withholding tuition, and pay the amount. The tuition strike would begin with the next tuition payment deadlines on August 10th for Vassar students. If we build up enough power between now and the tuition deadline, there’s a chance that Vassar might concede to our demands before we even have to go through with withholding tuition — though we should be prepared to do so if we want our strike threat to be credible.

A tuition strike is a way to make a difference in Vassar’s revenue stream and create a crisis for the administration as a way of pressuring them to concede to our demands.

Vassar, as an institution, is run according to the profit motive—the administration won’t willingly do anything that will hurt its bottom line. Our demand would require Vassar to give up millions of dollars in revenue. The only way to get Vassar to agree to this will be to make the cost of not conceding our demands higher than the cost of conceding our demands. In order to do this, we have to directly impede the stream of revenue by withholding tuition payments.

The more people who join us in our tuition strike, the lower the risks will be for each individual student. The best protection against retaliation is to organize as many people as possible. But we also recognize that withholding tuition payments will involve some element of risk. At first there won’t be any consequences except possibly a $170 late fee after the tuition payment deadline passes. If the tuition strike is still going on a few months after that, you might be faced with a registration hold when it’s time to register for classes. This won’t be a problem for most students since we’ll have the whole semester to register for Spring semester classes, though it will pose more of an issue for students who are 1) international students who depend on having full student status in order to maintain their visa status 2) If you fall into any of these categories, it’s totally fine if you need to go ahead and pay your tuition at that point, but again this would only be relevant if Vassar still hasn’t met our demands by August, and you can withhold your tuition through August without any serious consequences at all besides the late fee.

Students at University of Chicago successfully organized a tuition strike involving 200 students earlier this year. UChicago granted a tuition freeze as a result of the strike. Students at Columbia University also recently went on a tuition strike, and won a financial aid increase and fossil fuel divestment.