I had a recent chat with my university's chancellor (UC San Diego). Something didn't seem quite right when he said that in order to retrofit buildings to be carbon-neutral, the school's tuition would have to double. Now, my school has something like a 2 billion dollar operating budget. I impishly agreed but that's because I didn't really have anything to say as an educated or prepared response. It doesn't sound quite right.
Depends on how you define carbon neutral. UCSD-La Jolla is already almost independent in terms of generation, and they get millions from organizations like the CEC to install more solar. So you could probably just wait and it will eventually go carbon-neutral (at least in terms of electricity) with external money. They're already well on their way. They're at about 5 megawatts renewables now (peak load is about 40 megawatts) and are adding an average of about 2 megawatts a year renewables.
You're right it is fishy. For a start, retrofitting is a capital, one-off cost, whereas tuition fees are an annual income. It would fairer to give you a capital cost and then you could debate the methods of recovering that cost and the period of time over which to do it. Fees are one way, but fundraising for particular causes is something many educational institutions do all the time so I am not at all persuaded that tuition fees would have to take all the load. His response sounds like a coded fuck-off-you-pimply-student to me.
