Your Money Spent Wisely

By Thomas Laughlin

As students get a rare, first-hand experience of rising costs, in the form of rising tuition and fees, during a recession, one might wonder where that extra money goes. In fact, your fees primarily go to the University as a whole to pay for a variety of things and people. However, not all of those vaguely-named fees are allocated appropriately and responsibly.

The Activities and Services Fee is one of those fees that has a name that, while concise, doesn’t really provide much information as to how that $9.97 per credit hour ($10.47 next year) obtained from every undergraduate and graduate student is spent. While the fee is, after all, the student bodies’ money to be used on activities and services like the Leach Center, Homecoming, etc., it is also being used as a direct source of funding for some less conspicuous purchases.

Going over the Excel spreadsheets available on the Student Government Association website, one can peruse all of the different expenditures made by various agencies, RSOs, and the like. Among the hundreds of recent expenditures, there are the routine expenses for the myriad events held by different organizations all over campus. This is why the A&S Fee was created. Upon further inspection there are some more noticeable big-ticket items that aren’t for any student organization event or expense.

In just the last few months since the beginning of this academic year, the heads of your student legislative and executive branches have spent over $2000 to send a couple students to a conference in Polk County, $2148 for food at an SGA awareness event, and an astonishing $9000 for towels that you may or may not have received during the FSU vs. USF home game this season. On top of these examples there are tens of thousands of dollars that have been allocated by the SGA Senate for food costs and facility rentals of various groups.

The items stated above are just a few examples of the outrageous, reckless, and unchecked use of the students’ money for some desires of a relatively small group of individuals. Unlike the convoluted and bureaucratic process student organizations must go through to acquire funding, the heads of the SGA didn’t have to jump through as many hoops to get your money. And when they see the opportunity to take more of your money, they do. According to Bobby Seifter, a junior here at FSU and former Student Senate President, we have “a certain lifestyle” to maintain on this campus – even if it comes at the expense of the average student. For an itemized list of SGA expenses please see the SGA Budgets tab: http://sga.fsu.edu/