You already paid for the free food on campus – it’s included in your tuition cost every semester. For every credit hour, students pay a $10 Activity and Service (A&S) fee that goes toward student clubs and agencies like the Program Board, Night Owls and the Peer Educators, just to name a few.
The largest fee students pay is the $13.75-per-credit-hour Athletics fee, which is spent as its name implies: on sports. There are other minor fees that go toward financial aid, building projects and health services. Most of these are the same for all students, including out-of-state- and graduate students, because they’re based on credit hours.
For instance, a student taking 12 credits for the semester is putting $120 into the A&S budget and $165 toward athletics for the semester. So, whether you like it or not, you’re paying to be an Owls fan.
This year, A&S fees will add up to an estimated $5,855,799, plus whatever rolls over from last year’s unspent money. SG Adviser Rivka Felsher says that the rollover money usually includes more than $1 million set aside, mostly used for emergencies. The problem is that once SG leaders receive the money, they have to cut it into many, many pieces.
However, the amount SG is projecting to have this year isn’t significantly smaller than last year, which was $5,934,990 in A&S fee money. With only a slight cut of close to $80,000, Felsher says the cuts are an abundance of caution. Even though SG is expecting the same amount of students enrolled, they expect those students to take slightly fewer classes since other areas of the university, like scholarships, class sizes and class availability, are cut. Felsher says that they also don’t expect as much money as usual to roll over from last year.
Handling the Green
Since A&S fees are student money, it makes some sense for students to manage it. After all, they should know what students want their money spent on, right? House Speaker James Tobin appoints SG representatives to decide how to divide up those dollars. Through the University Budget and Appropriations Committee (UBAC) and by separate committees for the individual campuses, the leaders are in charge of handing out money to every club, agency and organization. This year, the Campus Budget Committee (CBC) in Boca was made up of six students, including Chairwoman Marni Sherman.
Among the many things the Boca CBC takes into consideration when deciding how much money an organization gets, Sherman says there are three that are the most important: if the services (clubs) are going to benefit the greatest number of students, if the services are popular and well-used, and if those services are essential to operations.
