$14,309 Tuition Payment in $1 Bills

Student Pays $14,309 Tuition Payment in $1 Bills
By Kathryn Knight Randolph
January 19, 2011
This semester, Nic Ramos’s tuition payment weighed close to 30 pounds. You might be thinking, “That is a pretty large check.” But Ramos didn’t pay with a check this time around.
Instead, he paid his entire tuition bill for the semester in $1 bills.
Ramos collected $1 bills from banks in the Boulder area, enough to cover his tuition bill for $14,309.51. In an interview with the Daily Camera, Ramos said he got plenty of quizzical looks and questions from local bank tellers. And in an interview with a university spokesman, The New York Times reported that it took roughly an hour for three university tellers to count the money that Ramos brought to the bursar office in a duffel bag.
The idea started out as a joke. Ramos, who is an out-of-state student at the University of Colorado-Boulder, wanted to make a funny point that tuition for students is too high. But as the stack of $1 bills grew, so did the gravity of the situation.
In his interview with the Daily Camera, Ramos quips that he learned more from this semester’s tuition payment than any other. Now, he’s more grateful towards his parents who help pay the out-of-state tuition bill. And second, he discovered that it literally costs a pretty penny to skip class – actually $65 to be exact.