After the approval of the Idaho State Board of Education to make some student fees optional, the University of Idaho has been working to meet the criteria of the approval, and it seems student government will be the most heavily impacted.
“We had several people from UI on that working group, just to kind of work through the intent language and try to decide what exactly do we think this means,” Assistant Vice President for University Budget and Planning Trina Mahoney said. “Then to come up with a fee structure that could work for all of the institutions and would meet what the intent language from the legislation that was asking us to do.”
Under House Bill 387, one of the conditions was a common structure that all four-year universities had to follow. These include enrollment, engagement and success, institutional operations, services and support, health and wellness and student government.
A list of fees for the 2022 school year has yet to be released. Within it will have a breakdown of each of the four categories and the amount that students are able to opt out from.
“There’ll be definitions so that students understand it’s not just the title and they’re like, ‘well, what the heck does that mean?’” Mahoney said. “It’ll define what we mean by student health and wellness, so they kind of understand what their fees are going to.”
Student government will be the only option that will have the opt-out feature for a student. These will be student-led organizations, like ASUI.
“If they feel that there is a student organization within that category that they don’t want to support and that their unwillingness to support is significant enough that they want to opt-out of all student government funding, then they can do that,” ASUI President Kallyn Mai said. “We have protected things like the Women’s Center, the LGBTQA Office, Veterans and Military and Family Services.”
After the approval of the Idaho State Board of Education, UI had to work through the language of HB 387 and the effects on student fees revolving on individual beliefs and values.
“So, by where we landed, student clubs and organizations are those individual beliefs and values and they’re choosing to participate in it or not,” Dean of Students Blaine Eckles said. “The others are following under institution operations or student enrollment engagement activities that we’ve determined institutionally across our state, these are fees that students are choosing to support that are part of the structure.”
Each university will need to send a report of fees eligible for op-out by December to the legislature’s Joint Finance Appropriations Committee to meet the requirements of HB 387. Mahoney stated that if it were implemented today, there wouldn’t be a significant change to the total cost of tuition.
However, the possibility of clubs losing a notable amount of money due to opt-out is considered.
“If it turns out that 10% of the students opt-out, so now the clubs are operating at 90% of what they used to have, and we still want them to be at 100%. the university can definitely use other non-student resources to help supplement that.” Mahoney said. “It would be non-student, non-state resources.”
“I’m hopeful though that it won’t be too significant. I plan on working with any club organization that is significantly impacted to see what we can do to help support them in their goals and efforts as it is progressing.” Eckles said. “Part of that entails also understanding you can also still do fundraising as a club and as an organization. That is definitely a viable option in many student clubs and organizations do in order to meet their goals.”
Daniel V. Ramirez can be reached at [email protected] or Twitter @DVR_Tweets