USU student journalists finalists for international investigative reporting award

Image from GoFundMe.com

It was a series of important stories that led to changes in policy in regards to transparency and accountability at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University. They were published in the Utah Statesman, and on KVNU’s For the People program on Friday, the two student journalists who wrote the articles were our guests.

Due to their reporting, Alison Berg and Carter Moore are finalists for a prestigious international award from the Investigative Reporters and Editors organization. Berg said the story began with a casual conversation outside a local coffee shop with a friend who was a student in the business school.

“They mentioned some kind of problems going on in the business school, and (because of) the nature of being a journalist (I) wanted to know a little bit more. They just started to kind of spill this whole list of things that were going on and something on that list was this lack of oversight from the differential tuition that business students pay.”

Berg continued, “my friend mentioned that there’s supposed to be an advisory board watching over how that tuition is spent and that advisory board didn’t actually exist and I was just like ‘this is crazy’ and so I kind of just started asking more questions.”

Moore said as they started digging deeper into it, they were surprised at the lack of oversight of the funds and that on paper only did the board exist.

“This is over $8,000,000 of extra money that business students pay in addition to the regular university tuition. So the fact that there wasn’t a board kind of just surprised us and we were like ‘wait so you’re saying that (the) money is only in the hands of a group of higher-ups and has no influence from the people who are actually paying it?’,” said Moore.

As a result, there now appear to be promises and follow-through on oversight and accountability on how the differential tuition money will be spent. You can find out more about the story on a GoFundMe page that has been established to raise travel expenses for the student journalists to be able to go to the awards ceremony in Orlando this June. You can access that through the For the People Facebook page.

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