As of this weekend, all UCSD students who haven’t tossed their tuition change into the central cashier’s hat will find themselves administratively dropped from their classes. So it goes.
Students who have paid their dues, however – and have taken the time to examine their billing statements – should think long and hard about the money they pay for UCSD’s auxiliary services.
Beneath the $1,800 educational fee, the $250-something student health insurance fee and any other charges you may have racked up once you learned you can use your student account to buy coffee at the Sunshine Store, you find a set of vague ancillary fees. There’s the University Center fee, for instance, and the Recreation Facility fee, plus $21 that goes to the A.S. Council as the campus activity fee, as well as another $31.80 to intercollegiate athletics – though starting next fall, you can tack another $78.04 onto the ICA fee.
Add onto that an additional $250 in registration fees, and you have a bill that’s certainly no chump change: well over $500 per quarter in noninstructional fees.
It’s not a stretch to suppose that most students couldn’t identify where most of that money goes. And even if they took the initiative to find out, even fewer students would have the first idea where to give their input. (Quick: Which students sit on UCAB? What is UCAB?)
Welcome to the dysfunctional and sometimes surreal world of student finance at UCSD.
Consider: In 2006, A.S. presidential candidate Daniel Watts was nearly laughed out of the race when he proposed that UCSD’s student government fund a second Sun God festival. Critics picked apart his nickel-and-dime plans to weed out unnecessary A.S. expenditures, wondering from where the money to pay for an endeavor as massive as a second festival would come.
Just half a year later, UCSD’s student body passed a whopping $3.6 million fee to expand the school’s athletics program. For reference, that’s the equivalent of around 22 Sun God festivals (which cost about $160,000 each) – roughly one Sun God every two weeks or so.
Reflect well on that, UCSD.
The student body has a right to choose how it spends its money, of course, and the near-record turnout for the athletics fee referendum shows they have unequivocally (if subconsciously) voted with their wallets.
What’s strange, though, is how often the student body imposes fees on itself without having an accurate idea of where the money will be going – and usually without taking any steps to make sure they retain direct say over where the money goes.
Students directly paid for the construction and operation of Price Center, the construction and operation of RIMAC and the vast majority of the athletics program. In each of these areas, however, students have ceded their power of oversight to administrators. Students sit on various advisory boards (such as the University Centers Advisory Board), which can make recommendations to the appropriate vice chancellor, but the vice chancellors have a free hand to distribute money as they please.
The registration fee, meanwhile, cryptically pays for a number of student services that have nothing whatsoever to do with registration. Though students certainly take advantage of these services, they retain as much control over registration fees as they do any other fee – which is to say, not a lot.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to fault school administrators for this. More often than not, we shoot ourselves in the collective foot by giving away our own authority.
Consider the recent athletics referendum. The one-page referendum request submitted to the A.S. Council explained that the fee increase would do two things for the athletics department: pay for the Division II grants-in-aid stipulation and “”increase its operating budget for a broad-based program.””
The justification for increasing the athletics budget, then, is … increasing the operating budget. Profound.
Afterward, an e-mail from Senior Associate Athletics Director Ken Grosse made the rounds, listing the primary allocations from the fee in this order: “”team operating budgets, student-athlete insurance, athletic training room operation, athletic scholarships and coaches’ salaries.””
A casual reader might have gotten the impression that the bulk of the referendum goes directly to student-athletes. But the planned line-item budget (which precious few student voters had the privilege of seeing) tells a completely different story. Nearly half of the $3.6 million raised for the department will go toward coaching salaries. It’s interesting that the items were relegated to the bottom of Grosse’s e-mail.
That’s not to say UCSD coaches don’t deserve higher salaries: They put in long hours and earn far less than their peers at other universities. The problem is that the planned expenditures weren’t accurately advertised on the ballot (check the “”pro”” statement), to the colleges (check your college’s council minutes from late January) or in print media (check the Jan. 29 Guardian op-ed by Kari Gohd, the A.S. vice president of athletic relations).
To repeat: The problem is that most fee referenda ask voters for money without telling them on what exactly it’s being spent. How are we to judge whether a fee is worthwhile when we barely know what it does?
And even those fee increases put out a rudimentary plan that takes few steps to ensure that students maintain control over their own fees. For example, students have paid for the Price Center expansion (via a $7 increase to the University Centers fee), yet our own student government is looking off campus for space for a Triton Store – for exposure, yes, but also because the new Price Center spaces will be too expensive. Students are unable to get a space in the expansion for which they themselves paid.
Reflect on that, too.
A simple solution: Students should reject any fee increase that does not have line-item allocations, as well as a stipulation that funds may not be spent without final student approval.
Of course, if you don’t mind dropping bills without a guarantee on where or how they’ll be spent, feel free to stick a few twenties in an envelope and send them to “”Opinion Editor, c/o UCSD Guardian.”” We’ll most certainly dedicate them to enriching student life, and we’ll be happy to show you how at the advisory board meetings (held during the Monday happy hour at Porter’s Pub).
See you there!
