Despite how ridiculously expensive tuition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison gets, one thing I will not gripe about paying is the student segregated fee that all UW-Madison students pay equally regardless of residency, year or school. UW-Madison’s segregated fees are taxes that are tacked onto our semester tuition that add a little over $1,000 to our overall tuition and fees annually.
That might sound steep, but the money that is raised from student segregated fees pays for some of the most important student services at UW-Madison, and funds some of our favorite places to study and play. These fees should be embraced by students and not derided as unnecessary increases in tuition. For the fiscal year of 2013-’14, student segregated fees totaled $41,629,370. And all that money collected from students goes to the mutual benefit of all students! The Union, Rec Sports, General Student Services Fund groups, University Health Services and the Metro bus passes are among the items funded at least partially by these fees. This is a really impressive roster of services. And the breadth of services on campus funded by these fees is a huge justification for their existence.
Most importantly though, the existence of student segregated fees at UW-Madison allows students the ability to independently make decisions about what student services we want to have and expand on campus—that is independent from the wishes of the university’s administration as well as the state government. This is an important point to consider and perhaps the greatest justification for the existence of these fees, despite the fact they do indeed raise our overall tuition costs. Recently an opinion columnist at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel derided the presence of Sex Out Loud, UW-Madison’s peer-to-peer sexual health resource and an important brick in the university’s sexual health initiatives. What he was most upset about was that Sex Out Loud offers educational programming that includes everything from general sexual health and safer sex practices to kink, pleasure and healthy relationships. He felt this was an inappropriate use of state and university funding. But guess what? It’s neither of those! Because Sex Out Loud, like Promoting Awareness Victim Empowerment, Badger Catholic or Greater University Tutoring Services is a GSSF group. It gets its funding from student segregated fees, has its funding and eligibility approved by the student government and is in every sense a by-students-for-students process. Complain if you wish about the cost of tuition, but don’t complain about this particular college cost. Student segregated fees are small individual costs that allow students a huge level of independence to determine what happens on our campus and under our names.
In fact, I would argue the use of segregated fees reinforces the need to increase them even a little bit. There is a limit to what these fees can pay for; demand is going up, but supply isn’t increasing. Caps have been put on how much GSSF groups can receive, and even those have already been indirectly questioned. There was a moment at a recent GSSF group budget hearing when a Student Services Finance Committee member was asking for more money because of an increase in its service, but forgot about the cap that is placed on such group’s organization’s budgets.
An increase of $50 per student per year would raise more than $2.1 million for services paid for by student segregated fees. That is a modest sum per student that could go a long way to helping fund the much-needed renovations of athletic facilities, the omnipresent renovations of places such as the Union and Library Mall or a higher cap for GSSF group budgets (to put this into perspective, this amount could easily double the number of GSSF groups without budget increases). And before we get upset about paying more, let’s remind ourselves what these services pay for: unlimited condoms and sexual health supplies, free or reduced-cost medical services, access to free or reduced cost recreational spaces, places to buy beer, bus passes that are so important for getting to Target and much more. Everything comes at a cost, but some costs are more worthwhile than others. The student segregated fees at UW-Madison are genuinely worthwhile costs.
What do you think about these fees? Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
