Senator backs seg fees

Braden Chester, Speaker of the Senate Whitewater Student Government

Let me begin with I am largely in support of the Governor’s budget for the biennium, but there is one significant issue the students, especially students who are involved with organizations at any UW-System school should be concerned about: The provision to allow students to opt out of allocable segregated fees.

I’m all for saving student’s money but Allocable Student fees is not somewhere money can be saved without having a large negative impact on the student experience. For starters, it will likely cause serious budgeting difficulties for Student Organizations which provide hands-on professional development opportunities, preparing students for life after college.

Furthermore, how could the university regulate which students had paid the fees and therefore should be able to join organizations which are funded by these fees? I don’t think they realistically could without investing in a significant layer of bureaucracy, an investment which could be better spent elsewhere.

Additionally, this leads to the inequity that some students will get a free ride on the backs of other paying students, who could be subjected to significant increase in fees in order to compensate for the decrease in number of students paying in.

The fact is this measure will give students to option to save at most a little over 100 dollars annually, while significantly diminishing the benefit organizations will be able to provide students. This is a tradeoff I’m not willing to accept and I hope other students won’t accept it either.