YSU trustees to consider new fee for student activities

By Harold Gwin

YOUNGSTOWN — Youngstown State University’s Student Government Association says a $1 per credit-hour fee assessed on students would enable it to expand financial support of individual student academic pursuits and student organizations.

As operations now stand, SGA says it is insufficiently funded to meet the needs of students, according to a final draft version of its Appropriations Budget Restructuralization Project it approved last week.

That document contains a request that the university’s Board of Trustees assess a Student Organizational and Academics Fee on all students.

The proposal calls for a fee of $1 per credit hour, up to a maximum of $12 for undergraduates and $9 for graduate students, each fall and spring semester.

That could generate about $306,000 a year (based on current enrollment levels of about 14,000 students) that SGA could use to fund student organizations and more, according to the proposal.

Zach Brown, SGA president, said the $1 number is just a starting point and that the trustees could set the fee at any amount. Realistically, SGA doesn’t expect to get all of the money it is seeking, he said.

SGA now gets $31,000 from the university to fund student organization requests for the school year.

That’s far below the amount of requests it receives, Brown said.

Scott Schulick, president of the Board of Trustees, said he’s seen an advance copy of the proposal but that it hasn’t been presented to the board yet. The YSU president’s office has only recently received it, and there’s been no determination yet of its feasibility from the university’s standpoint, he said.

Just how interested the board might be remains to be seen, Schulick said, adding that he’d like to believe there could be some support for it.

“I generally have some positive feelings about it,” he said.

Nearly 60 of YSU’s 132 university-registered student organizations request funding from SGA annually, Brown said, noting that the requests total about $150,000. The average request is nearly $2,600, but SGA has enough money to fund fewer than 50, and then can provide only about $750 per request, he said.

Read the full story, including reactions from students, Monday in The Vindicator and on Vindy.com.