University of Utah student Luq Maghal paid his tuition bill with 2,000 one-dollar bills as a silent protest against rising tuition rates at the school, The Associated Press reported.
The 21-year-old student, who spends his weekends working to pay for college, waited in a long line at the Student Services Building on Tuesday with a metal case of "greenbacks" to pay his tuition. He told The Salt Lake Tribune he collected the cash from several banks.
Even though the electrical engineering student gets a discount on his fees because his father is a faculty member at the university, he empathizes with other students and admits the cost of tuition plus fees, books and living is crushing.
"By no means am I the saddest story on campus. There's a lot of people here just as bad and probably worse," Maghal told The Salt Lake Tribune. "The people making the prices are not actually aware of how hard it is on the students."
He said he wants to send a message to the administration with the one-dollar bills he is using to pay his tuition and hopes that other students will join him next year.
In the past decade, undergraduate in-state tuition at the University of Utah has more than doubled, from $2,742 in the 2002-03 school year to $6,511 this year, The Salt Lake Tribune reported. University trustees set a 5 percent tuition hike this year, they said the increase was necessary because they needed "to fund a cost-of-living raise for employees as state funding declines," the AP reported.
The university's spokeswoman Maria O' Mara told The Salt Lake Tribune that the school has been recognized as a "good value for the money," but university officials still work to keep tuition low.
