ASUSU announces new state funding campaign
A new online system for reporting service hours and a statewide campaign for higher-education funding was unveiled at the ASUSU Executive Council meeting Tuesday.
The Aggies Giving Service site will be released online starting Monday for students to record their service hours, said ASUSU Service Vice President Maddie Busteed.
“This way students will have accurate numbers to put on resumes,” said ASUSU President Erik Mikkelsen. “(The system) is another tool to help make Utah State students more marketable.”
The system will also help USU organizations apply for funding, Busteed said. Many student groups receive funding based on their community impact, and this tracking system will allow them to specifically demonstrate that impact, she said.
Busteed said even though any student will be able to access the system, it is initially aimed at helping established organizations and their administrators track service hours. Once all technical and other administrative concerns with the site have been worked out, she said, she “sees it expanding to the whole university.”
Busteed said also she wanted to create the site since she came into office last year, and the system will be a vast improvement to the Service Center’s previous hand-written tracking system.
The system was co-created with ASUSU webmaster John Reynolds and has been in its testing phase since Friday, she said.
A new advertising campaign encouraging university and governmental support for increased state funding to universities will be displayed on campus, beginning sometime in the next few weeks, Mikkelsen said at the Tuesday meeting.
“Utah is very fiscally conservative,” said ASUSU Executive Vice President Kirsten Frank. “Higher education has taken so many cuts, there is not more fat to trim.”
Mikkelsen, along with the other members of the Utah Student Association, based the campaign on a Georgetown University study that says by 2020, 66 percent of Utah jobs will require some sort of post-high school education.
The campaign will be styled after the “99 percent” campaign used during the Occupy movement and will depict a student holding a piece of paper with his or her personal education story written on it, stating “I am the 66 percent,” Mikkelsen said.
“It’s about return on investment,” Frank said. “The only way to ensure Utah stays economically competitive is by investing in higher education.”
Mikkelsen said this is a statewide campaign, and other universities around the state will display similar ads.
“It brings all 170,000 Utah students together under one voice,” he said. “It will not be fragmented by institution, like in the past.”
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