The necessity of the student activity fee is one of the greatest myths imposed on the students at Marquette. Students pay $54 for relatively nothing at all. Students are forced to pay this fee, and it is essentially a tax that is levied on each of the approximately 8,000 undergraduate students at Marquette.
The reason that this fee should really anger everyone at Marquette is not the lack of choice in the matter of paying this fee each semester, but rather the gross misuse of this money. For the 2008 school year, Marquette University Student Government estimated that the Activity Fee will, or has brought in $374,700. Now, one must sidestep the fact that number cannot be evenly divided by the activity fee (probably an issue MUSG chose not to look at when making up numbers in its budget). From that amount of money, exactly how much is distributed back to students via student organization allocations? Only $131,000, or less than 35%.
The rest of the money MUSG either spends on themselves or on useless programs that cannot be self-supporting. For example, MUSG treats itself to a “Recognition Reception” at the end of the year, presumably to give themselves a pat on the back for all the “hard work” that they have done throughout the year. They will spend just under one thousand dollars on the event. They spend huge amounts of this money on programs that just do not have a large following.
Every weekend MUSG plays a movie, and they are extremely proud that it only costs $2 to attend these movies if you are a Marquette student. That’s wrong; a student pays a lot more than $2 whether they choose to go to the movie or not. In the budget, $29,000 is allocated to films, and much of that comes from the student activity fee, that is why it only appears to be $2. So does Marquette need these films on campus? No, of course not, students could go to Mayfair or any other theatre, and in the long run, it would be cheaper for everyone. Not a lot of people attend these movies, so why doesn’t MUSG look out for the larger population at Marquette and just cut their failing movie program? The reason they do not cut it is because they have all this money from students that they need to spend in some capacity.
Concerts are another good item in the budget, which account for $69,000. Again, unnecessary. There are plenty of venues around Marquette where a student can go to a concert at a much better rate than their activity fee plus the amount that MUSG charges for the ticket. Plus, these concerts are not even well attended. The Reel Big Fish concert looked to only be at about a third of capacity. In essence, if these two activities were eliminated the student body saves $100,000.
Another question is, are the student organizations allocations even necessary? Considering that a lot of that money gets distributed to organizations that are sending a few people off campus to go to a conference or something of that nature, and MUSG is helping these few people with thousands of dollars of airfare, it seems like a large waste of the student activity fee. Very few benefit from these allocations. In essence, that $131,000 is unnecessary as well.
Clearly the student activity fee does not do a lot for the actual students at Marquette. The fee does, though, allow those people involved with MUSG to feel like they are important. The people that collect this extreme amount of money need to feel like they are doing something. Hence why they collect money from everyone and misallocate it to a few.
The Student Activity Fee is something that Marquette students would be much better off without. If every Marquette student considered how little they get from that $54 they would realize how ridiculous it is to pay it.
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