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A guide to student fees @mikarodenbaugh
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on April 11, 2018. Student fees add about $2,300 to the cost of attendance each year for students. And, this year, fees are expected to rise again. Every spring, the process and structure of student fees become a topic of importance as the University finalizes its budget for the next fiscal year. Nineteen fee areas present a budget that incorporates the student fees, the revenues, the expenses and the funds, to the Student Fee Review Board. “It’s a one page document, and they have an hour to present about their fee area, they talk about revenues, expenses, depending on the area,” said Mike Lensky, former Associated Students of Colorado State University vice president and former chair of the SFRB. After SFRB presents the budget, University President Tony Frank then takes these suggestions to the Colorado Board of Governors. These recommendations will include a list of student fees for services and student organizations, as well as fees and increases that ensure the University’s compliance with local laws, like the recent increase in Colorado minimum wage. During his presentation to the ASCSU student-body Senate April 10, Frank stressed the importance of student choice in the budget process. “I’ve never taken a fee to the board that you didn’t recommend,” Frank said.
Following the spring election, Kevin Sullivan, then the ASCSU vice presidentelect, began recruiting a new SFRB to review fees that fall under ASCSU’s budget for the coming school year. “The Vice President-elect will put together an application with some questions and then send it out to all 19 fee directors of the 19 areas,” former vice president Cole Wise said. “They will also help us to recruit, and so they’ll get the message out to the areas that they serve. It will be put up on our website, and then we’ll do a marketing push for members to be involved with this.” When selecting a board that will make decisions about student fees handled through the ASCSU general fee, student government administrators said they are purposeful about their selection. “Diversity of thought, in majors, in colleges, in activities they are involved in, in fee areas they have association with, it’s really kind of looking at how we can get the best representation of the student voice in this group,” Wise said. There are a few key factors outlined in the ASCSU bylaws that help the SFRB decide what fee proposals have merit, including: if a fee is student-supported (meaning 10 registered student organizations support it), if there is sufficient student need for a fee and if the fee is sponsored by a university department. Accountability In order to keep fee areas accountable for serving students, the SFRB also has the option to add fiscal notes stipulating certain
requirements, though Lensky admits this system is not a perfect safeguard against misuse of a fee. Once a student fee has been approved for the first time, it is harder to follow up on if that same student fee should be renewed the following year based on if it was cost-efficient for the student body. “There’s not an official process for us to say no (after adding fiscal notes),” Lensky said. “There’s not ... a concrete no, like, ‘Oh, you didn’t do it, you can’t get anything.’ But usually, if a fee area doesn’t follow up on what they are doing we will usually not accommodate – like if athletics has to dip into a reserve and disregarded us, we would probably vote no on a fee increase.” The SFRB can choose to review whether or not a fee is really serving students and choose to discontinue a student fee if it is not serving student needs. This was the case in the early 2000s with the Rocky Mountain Raptor Program, which was approved as a student fee by the SFRB, but then later removed. It was determined that too few students benefited from the service as it only trained limited students to handle raptors. How other Colorado universities handle student fees Beyond accountability after approval, different universities have different systems and philosophies when it comes to how a fee becomes a charge on a student’s account. At the University of Colorado in Boulder, for see FEES on page 5 >>
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GRAPHIC BY SHELBY HOLSINGER COLLEGIAN