The St. Thomas website lists this year’s undergraduate tuition cost as $38,720, and a student government committee is seeking answers about that money.
A group of Undergraduate Student Government members like Transfer Senator Jake Wisdorf are trying to find out if students want to see how their money is being allocated.
The initiative is part of the senate’s plan to increase financial transparency of student dollars. Right now, USG is acquiring student feedback, and they have already gathered about 600 responses from an online poll shared through social media. Wisdorf said the amount of responses they have received is telling of students’ interest in the topic.
“We’re just trying to figure out what’s important to students as far as paying for school goes. What are they most curious about?” Wisdorf said. “We figured the best way to go was to just do a survey to see what people really want to know about the money.”
At the beginning of the year, USG members ask students what issues they would like to see the student government address. The most popular requests from that survey were about financial transparency, so USG decided to look into it.
“A lot of people just had questions about money, paying for school, and stuff like that. ‘Why does it cost as much as it does?’ and stuff like that, like ‘Where does our money go?’” Wisdorf said.
Though students can currently see tuition prices and different student fees, there is no access to budget allocations or reasoning for pricing.
After all the data is collected, the group will be meeting with Chief Financial Officer Mark Vangsgard to see what they can do about student concerns. Senior Heidi Hill, who is also a class senator, believes that financial transparency could lead to more trust between students and administration.
“It feels like a mystery. I feel like it’s one of those things, even me as a senior, you’re always just curious what things go to. So having that transparency by talking to the CFO, seeing what’s important to students, and being like ‘This is what we want to know,’ is good to see,” Hill said.
Other students also feel left in the dark as to where their money is going. First-year Danielle Earp said she would be interested to see how much of the budget goes toward student resources like tutoring facilities.
“Being that we are paying a lot for education, I mean I obviously think that our education is very good here, but I think it’d be interesting to what we are paying for and where it’s going,” Earp said. “I know I use a lot of the tutoring facilities, like the math resource center, so to fund those people that work there—it seems like they get good funding now, but I don’t know.”
Kassie Vivant can be reached at viva0001@stthomas.edu