Skidmore News

Issue date: 3/5/10 Section: Cover Story

"We have a lot of money and we want make sure that we are using our money to the benefit of the students," said Student Government Association President Raina Bretan '10, in reference to the budget surplus of approximately $400,000 to $500,000.

"It's tough to peg down an exact number for the surplus. It kind of depends on the assumptions that you use because some monies you could consider to be already allocated for projects that are coming down the line in the next few years. Some of the money is also completely free to use. So, it's a pretty complicated thing really," said SGA Vice President for Financial Affairs Jim Welsh '10.

The money that constitutes the surplus comes from two primary sources, the first being the student activity fee. Every student pays a student activity fee of $319.50 that is included with the tuition cost.

"We budget everything each year. But, say a club is given $5,000. Sometimes it might only spend $3,000 or $4,000. So, that extra $1,000 or $2,000 is left unused at the end of the year. All of that adds up every year, some years to a pretty significant amount. And over time that has built up to several hundred thousand dollars now," Welsh said.

The second cause of the surplus is an over-enrollment of students. The college typically budgets for 2,280 students each year. Because of the recession, the college has been enrolling anywhere from 80-100 more students for the last few years than it typically does. This allows the college to gain more tuition dollars. But, each year SGA only budgets for the 2,280 students.

"Say there's 100 extra students, we still get the student activity fee for them, but not until the end of the year, so we can't really budget for it at the beginning of the year. For instance, something like that would be an extra $30,000 or $40,000 at the end of that year. That money builds up as well," Welsh said.

SGA is meant to use student activity fees during the year in which they are paid. "SGA shouldn't really be in the business of holding a lot of unallocated money because our purpose is to provide programming for the students who are on campus now. So, having all this money unallocated essentially means that we're not using our money and fulfilling our mission appropriately," Bretan said.

Several ideas have been proposed concerning how to spend the surplus money. "We're reaching out and looking to pursue different projects," Bretan said.

Although it has not been finalized, SGA is focusing most of its efforts on using the surplus money to fund 30 internship awards a year of approximately $2,500 each, for a span of five years. "If you did the math, that's about $75,000 a year for five years," Welsh said.

Continued...

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