Last year, the Idaho State Board of Education approved a plan to change how student fees work at public universities across the state.
The bill, House Bill 387, required universities to, evaluate activity fees and structure them to “address the need for access, affordability, and choice.” This means that students can opt out of a number of student organizations beginning in the fall semester of 2022.
These fee changes only affect a subset of the fees which students pay on top of their tuition. The change will not affect things such as the Student Recreation Center, or intercollegiate sports, with effects limited to certain areas like student government.
“It would really only affect student government, and… student-run and led clubs and organizations on campus who rely on that funding through the funding board,” Kallyn Mai, president of ASUI, said.
The University of Idaho is still working to sort out these details for the fall.
“[I] can’t speak to anything concrete, we have been meeting weekly for three weeks now, and we are going through each student fee increase request one by one,” Mai stated.
These meetings have involved a voting group for decisions of several faculty and staff members, four undergraduates, two graduate students and a representative from the Student Bar Association along with Mai.
“It’s only the students who vote, which I think is really great and really important because we get to decide what affects our future,” Mai said.
These students vote on whether or not to increase funding allocations within the student fees. For the Spring 2022 semester, each student pays $74.61 towards ASUI, $16.85 dollars for the Counseling and Testing Center and $1.50 to LGBTQA Office. This is out of a total $550.75 of student fees and tuition money contributed to organizations. This funding is variable depending on the number of students that year. , Currently, Mai has no knowledge of any potential funding decreases for groups on campus.
The meetings have different groups involved, such as the Native American Student Center, Black Student Union, Vandal Tutoring and several others requesting budget increases.
“We have all been going through the requests and ranking them, you know, is this high importance? Is this medium or low importance to us? And what do we think?” Mai explained. “All the questions that we sort of consider when we make those distinctions are how many students is this going to affect?”
These student fee increases will be finalized in the next two weeks, according to Mai. From there, fees are sent to UI President Scott Green as a recommendation, as the committee does not have the ability to directly set fees. Afterward, there will be finalized student fees for Fall 2022.
Cory Summers can be reached at [email protected]