Beginning next fall, University of Idaho students will be able to opt-out of some student fees supporting student clubs and organizations.
In late 2021 the Idaho State Board of Education approved a plan to allow student fees at Idaho’s four-year institutions to become optional based on categories and need. Universities are required to evaluate the fees and arrange them in a structure to “address the need for access, affordability and choice,” according to House Bill 387.
In an initial notice of the 2022-23 fee schedule at UI, the only thing projected to be optional is funding for student clubs and organizations. The proposal will has been forwarded to the UI Board of Regents and will be up for approval at the April 20-21 meetings.
We appreciate the university’s effort to keep the majority of the funding we already have for essential programs like ASUI, the LGBTQ+ Center, the Counseling & Testing Center and many more. We just hope tat down the road our legislators don’t continue their attack on education with decreased funding for institutions that truly encourage fair learning and diversity.
Looking at the distribution of student fees at UI, there aren’t any programs we should ever defund or consider unnecessary. Every program on campus was created for a purpose and they are still here, currently receiving funding from students, because we use them.
Each UI student pays $550.75 every semester in student fees to fund the programs we all benefit from. While that may seem like a lot, that money is split between 24 different programs which serve the diverse community on campus.
Some of the programs, like the Native American Student Center, receive less than $1 in student fees from each student each semester. Others, like intercollegiate athletics and the Commons/Pitman Center, receive around $100 from each student each semester.
While the Idaho legislators and board members who made the decision to support HB 387 may have been intending to give students more freedom to choose where their money goes, they are also creating a window to cut funding for programs that encourage diversity, education, communication and health on our campus.
ASUI, our student government which has helped establish the existence of the ISUB after negotiating student fees which go toward paying off the ICCU Arena, is funded with $74.61 from each student. More recently, ASUI has expressed support for and against many of the bills going through the Idaho Legislature and has been a loud voice statewide for the UI community.
The Student Health services on campus, which receives $41.87 from each student every semester, is what provided many of us with masks, vaccinations and COVID-19 tests among all the other health care Vandals may have needed to seek out.
Programs that help encourage and support the diverse population of students and mentors on campus, which include the LGBTQ+ office, Office of Multicultural Affairs, Native American Student Center, Women’s Center and Sustainability Center, all receive less than $6 each from every student in a semester.
While these programs specifically aren’t being defunded, according to the initial notice of the 2022-23 fee schedule, we never know what will happen in the future with our legislators acting the way they have been the past few years.
If we want to keep the amazing things all of these programs bring us all year round, not just during the semester, we need to support them. Sure, giving our support by using these programs is wonderful. We should continue to use them. But we can’t reap all the benefits of these programs unless they have funding.
As college students, watching another $550 get added to your list of tuition fees can be painful and make us feel even more helpless as we drown in student debt. But these types of programs won’t be so available to us once we move away from Moscow and move on after graduation.
The staff who run the offices, write grant applications, create ways to engage with the UI community and spend their time getting to know us need to be paid for their hard work. They also need to be here to represent the students who are Black, Native American, international, women, gay, transgender and more because those are all communities on our campus.
We may not be able to easily afford the extra $550 to fund all of these different programs, but we can’t afford to lose these programs even more. To help support ourselves and our communities, we need to show our support for these student organizations through more than just using them. We need to pay for them as well.
But out of that $550 that supports the variety of programs we have, only $4 is projected to be the amount students are able to opt out of. That’s roughly the cost of a coffee or a couple energy drinks. College students can afford that.
Support your peers by funding their clubs and organizations, whether you agree with them or not. Everyone needs a place to speak, and whether a student joins an ultimate frisbee club or the College Republicans at UI, other’s shouldn’t be the ones to decide whether or not to silence them. Support clubs, support education, support diversity and support free speech.
- Editorial Board
This column has been updated for accuracy.