Higher Student Bill, Not More Say in the Decision
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The upcoming special election will present Stanford students with “Meaure A,” a piece of legislation designed to increase the amount of money each undergraduate must pay as a contribution to the General Fee. Measure A’s explicit purpose is “to increase the programming and community service general fee by 10%,” but students will be doing more than merely voting more monies to the coffers of the ASSU Senate. Directly, they will be voting themselves a higher student bill, as the General Fee is extracted from the Student Activities Fee paid each quarter.
The programming and community service General Fee (hereafter “General Fee”) currently stands, in aggregate, at $268,925.50. That works out to about $40.11 per student per year, with each undergraduate forking over about $13.37 each quarter. However, in any given quarter several hundred undergraduates are off campus. The burden of the General Fee, instead of falling equally among Stanford’s 6,705 undergraduates, falls instead, on average, to 6,384 students. In reality, students pay about $42.12, or $14.04 per quarter.
Measure A plans to increase the General Fee to $295,818.05. Should Measure A pass, each student can expect to pay $15.45 per quarter and $46.38 per year.
While some might scoff at the change, students should consider whether their money will be put to good use. Any student group registered with the Office of Student Activities is eligible to receive funding, provided it provides some programming or community service. Every quarter, the ASSU dispenses money to help fund such organizations. In some respects the General Fee is distributed to student organizations much the same way Special Fees are. The same categories of expenses as are used in Special Fees are employed. General Fee funding also uses the same request-recommend-approve process as Special Fees, whereby student groups request a specific amount of discretionary funds to finance their budgets, the Senate Appropriations Committee recommends to the full Senate how much of the request to grant, and the Senate approves the final amount, usually the same as that recommended by the Appropriations Committee.
However, the key difference between the General Fee and Special Fees is student involvement in the decision making process. Students vote directly whether or not organizations should receive money through Special Fees. But when it comes to the General Fee, students have no such control. The Senate may dispose of the money as it sees fit, with control of the purse strings residing almost entirely with the five senators on the Appropriations Committee. And the money involved is nothing to laugh at. Programming groups may receive up to $6,000 in General Fee discretionary funding, whereas community service groups may receive up to $8,000.
The General Fee is meant to fund expenses of largely-undergraduate student organizations pertaining to programming, community service, and basic operations. It does not cover student publications or organizations receiving Special Fees. Students can vote to withhold their money from groups petitioning for Special Fees, but can do nothing other than seek full refunds when it comes to the General Fee. If a student desired not to hand over his money to a particular student group receiving General Fee funding, but wished also to keep funding other groups receiving money from the same source, the student would be left with the unhappy outcome of choosing between cutting off funds to one group he does not wish to fund—and consequently terminating his support for the groups he does—or funding the groups he supports at the price of simultaneously financing groups to which he’d rather not give money.
In short, what is problematic about the General Fee is that it deprives students of their ability to dispense with their money as they see fit.
And students may well have reason for concern. This year, 24.9% of approved General Fee expenditures has gone to “event food” and “regular meeting food.” While General Fee funding is meant to go to groups that provide services benefiting the entire undergraduate student body, it is questionable whether all undergraduates should be funding food purchases, especially at meetings of groups of which they are not members. At present, $182,766.13 of the $268,925.50 General Fee fund has been spent, so students can reasonably expect more money to fund food purchases.
However, it is also clear that most of the General Fee does not fund seemingly extraneous expenditures. A little over a quarter of the fee, 27.04%, funds community service organizations, while the remaining 72.96% goes to programming groups, and Stanford certainly benefits from many of the events and activities organized by these groups. However, suspect uses of General Fee funds are easily found in the financial statements put out by the ASSU Senate, and students would do well to question whether an increase in the General Fee, and consequently their student bill, is warranted or worthy of their votes.
