President Martha Pollack accepted a Student Assembly resolution to raise the student activity fee from $310 to $424 — representing a 37 percent increase — according to the April 29 S.A. newsletter.
But with the administration stipulating an incremental increase over the next two years, the $384 price tag for the 2024-2025 school year does not bring enough funding to cover all expenses initially slated by the S.A. budget in Resolution 39.
Byline organizations are consequently seeing their funding reallocated for the upcoming 2024-2025 school year.
The Student Activity Fee is a mandatory payment for Cornell undergraduate students that funds many campus organizations and activities. It is recalculated every two years to reassess ever-shifting funding needs.
The Student Activities Funding Commission allocates the collective funding to 30 byline organizations, which support 700+ groups on campus. Byline organizations are groups that are registered as umbrella organizations that fund various groups on campus, such as the Multicultural Community Fueled Activities Board and Environmental Collaborative.
According to recently appointed Vice President of Finance Zora deRham ‘27, the Student Activity Fee for the 2022-24 season was lower than usual due to organizations’ rollover funding from the 2020-22 season. The activity fee for the 2020-22 period was set before the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in campus groups accumulating unused funding since many did not utilize their entire budgets amid campus restrictions.
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Out of rollover funding, the fee for 2024-26 needed to be increased, according to deRham.
“For the 2024 to 2026 cycle, in order to maintain precedent for organizational funding and to … maintain the existing standards, a lot of organizations came to us asking for hefty increases [in the budget],” deRham said.
However, according to deRham, there were “internal issues” within the University related to the sharp increase of the fee that required the Student Activity Fee to increase over a span of two years rather than one.
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“The costs are being cut because the increase to $424 was too steep and so we had to find a middle ground number for the next year,” deRham said.
deRham said she was “not allowed” to divulge more context on the issues surrounding these issues.
While increasing the fee over two years may ease the transition, it also creates a gap in byline funding. The S.A. budget presented in Resolution 39 declared that $424 per student is needed to support the various byline organizations — including the Slope Day Programming Board, the Cornell Sports Council and Haven: The LGBTQ+ Student Union.
The $384 price tag for the 2024-25 year will only account for a portion of the funding required by these many groups.
According to deRham, byline organizations will have to “rely on reserves and alterations” to their budgets to supplement their rationed funding for the upcoming year.
However, they can apply to receive extra funding from the S.A. Special Projects funding reserve if so needed. S.A. Special Projects funding provides monetary support for any program or service that it deems will “improve the quality of undergraduate student life or to further the goals of the Student Assembly,” according to the fund’s website.
Reallocated amounts were approved by the S.A. on Thursday through Resolution 81. This resolution calculated the distribution of funds for the 2024 and 2025 years separately, unlike Resolution 39, which had consistent values for both years. Additionally, this resolution places the values for the 2024-25 cycle side-by-side with the 2023-24 allocations, displaying the general increase in funding.
“There hasn’t been a substantial increase in over four years, so now there has to be a steep one,” deRham said.