According to Saint Louis University’s website, the current cost for the Student Activity Fee is $90 per year for full and part-time undergraduate students and $60 per year for graduate, professional and law students. However, a raise in this fee is severely needed.
Currently, there are more than 8,100 undergraduate students and 5,100 graduate students, including medical and law students. This amounts to $1,035,000 for use by student organizations each school year. This may seem like a lot of money, but that only comes to an average of $78 per student for an entire year.
If you look at how the money is spent, you’ll quickly realize that we need a higher Student Activity Fee if we are going to continue funding programs each year.
The fall concert quickly takes a large portion out of the $78. This year the face value is $32 a ticket for Lupe Fiasco, leaving only $46 to each student. Add in one group retreat, many of which last at least one night, an expensive guest speaker by the Great Issues Committee and some of the free stuff you get from student groups in the Quad each day, and the remaining $46 quickly evaporates.
SLU is far behind other schools in terms of how much we pay for our Student Activity Fee.
Duke University has a $200-per-year Student Activity Fee and a $100-a-year Recreation Fee. Georgetown University, the oldest Jesuit institution in the country, has a $125-a-year Activity Fee. Drake University has a $132-a-year Student Activity Fee. By comparison of these universities, SLU is far behind in terms of how much we pay into the fee each year.
With an ever-increasing cost of attending school, many are in disagreement about paying yet more money in fees to an institution that already increases tuition rates each year by two percent or more.
One of the things students need to realize is that the activity fee does not keep up with inflation, which is why it is not increased every year. Each year, the $90 students pay into the activity fee has less buying power than it did the previous year, simply because, in the real world, things cost more and guest performers cost more to book. Until we create an increase in the Activity Fee, SLU will have to bring less to campus each year because we have no money.
One of the current buffers for use of the Student Activity Fee is the Student Wellness Fee, originally created to pay back the establishment of the Simon Recreation Center. This cost has since been paid off, but the fee remains. It is currently $90 for full-time undergraduate students and $45 for part-time undergraduate students each semester.
This fee is now used by the Student Government Association as a new addition to the Student Activity Fee, when it shouldn’t be.
The Wellness Fee should be used for things related to its original purpose, or be taken off our bill completely. One of the uses this fee could go toward is turning current grass fields, such as the Vandeventer Field, into a turf field, which can withstand stronger wear and tear, while still holding its function as a field.
If you sat in SGA sessions last year on a regular basis, you would have come to realize that funding guidelines, although in place, were never followed on a consistent basis.
The Finance Committee was the only branch of SGA that seemed to follow the guidelines, and even that was not enough for the general body, which would usually allocate more money than recommended. While giving student groups money is a great thing, it needs to be done in regulation.
Annual funding was again another nightmare that SGA was ill-equipped to handle, due to the fact that the SGA general body did not follow the guidelines of the Finance Committee.
Student groups made appeals to request a larger share of money from the Student Activity Fee, and when that ran out, from where did SGA get money? They simply took it from the Student Wellness Fee to make up for the fact that the majority of senators couldn’t make the tough decisions that needed to be made, such as make cuts to the budget.
Many simply wanted to give as much to student groups as possible, which cannot happen if we want to have student groups able to request spot funding for unexpected events that occur throughout the year.
New senators this year on SGA can hopefully do a better job of keeping in line with the recommendations of the Finance Committee, until an increase in the Student Activity Fee comes through.
New senators also need to keep their hands off the Wellness Fee, so that it can be used for its original intent- to increase recreation around campus.
Dustin Paluch is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences.
