Student fees may increase to allow more student activities
Students may be paying $6 more in activity fees next semester if a fee proposed by ASUSU is accepted by the fee board. The proposed fee would add $100,000 to the budget for student activities, a budget that Programming Vice President Jake Cook said is greatly in need.
Cook said student activity fees haven’t been raised in 13 years, something which he says has made the quality of the activities offered to the students suffer.
“This money will better the lives of the students,” Cook said. “There are not enough activities. Thirteen years is a long time not to have an activity fee increase and expect the quality to stay the same.”
More activities cannot be planned simply because there isn’t any more money, Cook said. The school already goes over the entire budget with just one activity, the Howl, which costs $18,000-20,000 to put on while the budget is only $11,000, but the Howl is what brings in the revenue to allow the other activities that are put on, Cook said.
“After Homecoming, we had $200 left in the budget,” Cook said. “Without the revenue from the Howl, we wouldn’t have the money for any other activities.”
Even if the board decided not to ask for $100,000, Cook said he thinks the budget should be brought up to what the people are already spending.
“We have already decreased the number from $150,000 to $100,000,” Cook said. “We have already compromised. We want to have more activities and right now we can’t do it.”
Edward Norton, business academic senator, said he feels the increase would help improve the students’ lives by giving them more opportunities to be a part of the school.
“With this increase, more people will enjoy their experience at school and actually come back again,” Norton said.
Cook said one of the ideas the new budget would be used for is to have a free weekly activity students could attend.
“We could do something like a movie night,” Cook said. “Then all the students could know, hey, Thursday night is movie night, or something to that effect.”
The council also discussed adding a provision to its proposal to the fee board that would allow giving the previously uncompensated students on the Graduate Student Senate a stipend.
Jeri Brunson, Graduate Students Vice President, said using part of the money to give the GSS a stipend would allow them to compensate each member $1,000.
“This is not a question of what they deserve because they deserve so much more than this,” Brunson said. “The GSS brings a different perspective to the committees. They are a little bit older, a little bit wiser and a lot more cynical.”
When asked why the undergraduate students should pay for the graduates, Brunson said graduate students want to know why they have to pay for the undergraduate students.
Brunson said,” $500,000 a day is brought into the university by the graduate students in ways such as grants. They really deserve this.”
Both reasons for the fee increase will have to pass the fee board and USU President Stan Albrecht before they will become a reality.
-debrajoy.h@aggiemail.usu.edu