Student government officials are trying to reinstate a student activity fee at Mississippi State. Today, MSU students will vote on more than a new executive board for the Student Association; a student fee initiative is also on the ballot.
If accepted, the fee will cost each student $6.67 per credit hour. The charge will be paid with tuition at the beginning of each semester. For students taking a minimum load of 12 hours, that $6.67 per hour adds up to $80.04. For students taking 15 hours, the charge will be $100.05.
Student fees act as a kind of tax on students. In the era of budget cuts and crises, many student groups are left with miniscule budgets that are hard to work with.
If the students approve a fee, the plan must be accepted by the Institutions of Higher Learning Board before it can be put in place.
“Student fees will help The Reveille with day-to-day operations,” Patti Reiss, associate editor of The Reveille, said. “We are working on such a limited budget for office supplies and computer equipment that we cannot keep up with the times.
“If we want to continue producing a quality yearbook, we need help from the student body.”
Several years ago, the university had a student fee system in place, but over the years, the fee got folded into the tuition budget, and student groups were left hanging.
Daniel Bryant, chief budget-financial officerof the university, said the student fee designations were taken away after the IHL Board asked the universities to consolidate everything into one budget.
“IHL made a decision to combine all of those fees together,” Bryant said. “When they did, everyone’s budget was set at a certain level, and there were no more footnoted fees.”
In the 1992-1993 academic year, students with a full load paid $213.50 in activity fees. Today, the activity fee is nonexistent, and student groups are feeling the loss of the money.
After IHL got rid of the fee, Bryant said that the money was shifted around over the years until it no longer went to the organizations for which it was originally earmarked.
“If IHL approves this fee, it would become an amount collected that could be put into a designated account that would then be used for the purposes that the students were told it would be used for,” Bryant said.
A student activity fee at MSU would open up the doors for many student organizations to expand their programming, as well as help fund student services, such as transportation, parking and the proposed Union renovation.
“The only real precedent we have for this turned out to be a big success,” SA President Parker Wiseman said, referring to the fee set up when the Sanderson Center was built.
The new plan will generate money to help fund general campus programming, student government, concert promotion, the amphitheater, The Reveille, The Reflector, the Union and transportation.
“We’ve been dealing with it (the student fee plan) for about five months now,” Wiseman said. “We sat there tinkering with it and tinkering with it until we got the numbers to where we wanted them to be.
“Is it exactly right? I have no idea, but we hope it’s pretty close.”
Most other schools in the Southeastern Conference already have student fee system in place, and that is directly reflected in the kinds of activities and events student groups are able to plan, as well as services the universities are able to offer students.
MSU is at the bottom of the list in nearly every category when it comes to the allocation of money for student funds.
Wiseman said that reinstating a student fee is something that he thinks students would want if they could see the results right away. “I know that if people could see the final product, every student would vote for it,” Wiseman said. “The problem is that we just have to act on faith and trust that it will work.”