(U-WIRE) NEW YORK – Though many New York University students absorbed last week’s tuition hike announcement as a regrettable fact of life, one student is vowing not to accept this year’s hike without a fight.

CAS sophomore Asaf Shtull-Trauring, founder of the 197-member thefacebook.com group “Don’t Even Think About Raising My Tuition Again, Mr. Sexton” – description: “Because we’re not all Olsens” – put out a call to form a group this summer to brainstorm ways to resist the 5.3 percent hike, which will bring tuition to about $31,700.

“We arrive at NYU expecting to pay a certain price, and then the administration simply adds to our financial burden, knowing that our only choice is either to transfer schools or to accept what is ‘inevitable,'” Shtull-Trauring wrote in an e-mail from Paris, where he is studying abroad.

“This time we are planning to organize against the tuition hike,” he wrote.

This year’s tuition increase is smaller than last year’s 5.6 percent hike and the 6.9 percent jump two years ago, but put together the last three years of hikes have jacked up NYU’s price tag by more than $5,000, leading many to claim that the university has become unaffordable for returning students, despite increases in financial aid.

Shtull-Trauring did not explain how his resistance might be manifested, but he did say his group will not go through the standard student-government channels.

“The student council is only empowered to make recommendations to the University Senate, so it is virtually powerless,” he said. “We the students are asked to waste our energies for months in order to get any resolution passed, and even if it does pass, it is practically meaningless.”

Several members of the Student Senators Council do sit on the Senate Financial Affairs Committee, which gives feedback to the university administration as it crafts its annual budget, but none of the committee members actually vote on the finished product – that honor belongs to the board of trustees, a group of influential donors and alumni.

University spokesman John Beckman said that while the administration is “keenly aware” of the effect of tuition prices on families, students must keep in mind that all universities face enormous cost pressures, including inflation, rising salaries and the need for state-of-the-art technology.

“We endorse and support their right to state their wish that there be no tuition hikes,” Beckman said. “We would only ask that they be mindful that this is a phenomenon which affects higher education generally; it is not something unique to NYU.”

As for how open to suggestion the university is at this point, Beckman said he could not comment until he knew what Shtull-Trauring’s group had in mind, but he did say the volume of student complaints would not necessarily change university policy.

“A community has to have a way of organizing itself and determining which issues are going to be the ones we’re going to focus our energies on and make changes on,” Beckman said.

“There is an important role for grassroots input – it’s something that every community has to be attentive to. But that isn’t customarily how policy gets changed.”

Nevertheless, in the time between now and his summer meeting, Shtull-Trauring might be able to take comfort in his numbers. Just a week after Mr. Sexton announced the latest hike, the Facebook group that told him to not even think about doing so gained another 20 members.