Every year, each undergraduate pays a little over $420 to the ASSU to support the activities of Stanford’s 775 student groups.
That funding - adding up to just under $3 million every year - supports almost all of the extracurricular and co-curricular programs we love, from Full Moon on the Quad and concerts to student groups within community centers and the Solar Car project. Even better, we control those dollars; so even though $420/year is a tiny part of the total cost of attending Stanford, we, the students of Stanford University, can control every cent to maximize the value we get - and that’s important when we pay over $1,600 to the ASSU over our four (plus!) years here.
Over the last nine months, a coalition of ASSU representatives has inspected our student group funding system, and we’ve found many ways to improve the student fee system. Today, we propose “SAFE Reform,” a comprehensive set of changes to the ASSU Constitution and the internal bylaws. As a whole, SAFE Reform will decrease the student fee, cut ASSU bureaucracy, stabilize the funding system, eliminate unused fee money, create more flexible funding opportunities, and still give student groups the opportunity to access exactly as much money as they can today. We currently have the highest “student activities fee” in the country, paying as much in one quarter as our peers at Harvard do over an entire year and twice as much in one year as our peers at Berkeley do over their entire college careers. We can’t fix everything at once, but we will fix the biggest problems and set the student fee on the right path.
We’ve worked hard to make our proposed funding system the best it can be by interviewing current and former FOs, group advisors, Senators, financial staff, Stanford budget officers, and our equivalents at peer institutions across the country. We want your help now. If you have an idea about how we can make student fees better, please get in contact with us. If you’re concerned about SAFE Reform, tell us why. We want to make the ASSU the best it can be - for students, for student groups, and for the future.
Read more about our SAFE Reform proposal at assu.stanford.edu/safe-reform
Click to read the presentation we gave to the Undergraduate Senate.
Click to read the entire executive summary of the proposal.
Click to read our answers to some frequently asked questions.
Email us directly with thoughts, comments, or questions at safe@assu.stanford.edu.
Sincerely,
Olivia Moore ‘16 & Justine Moore ‘16
on behalf of the SAFE Reform team
