Students find university budget confusing

After students posted the university's 2010 fiscal year budget online last week, the SGA is hosting a competition meant to encourage students to participate in the debate over where their tuition dollars go.

Students, who can view the budget by visiting the Student Government Association's website, are being asked to submit examples of expenses they find absurd or confusing to SGAcommunications@gmail.com. The best submissions will be posted on the website every week, and the SGA hopes to present a list of student submissions to university administrators at the end of the semester.

So far, student participation has been low, in part because of the sheer size of the document.

"Eight hundred pages?" junior history major Danielle Levenfus balked. "I have homework to do!"

Some students said they are just too bogged down with classes and extracurricular to digest the huge amount of information in the university's budget.

"Honestly, I wouldn't look at it," sophomore Romney Makle said. "I don't have the time or the level of commitment."

Others think that the information available in the budget doesn't provide enough insight into administrators' motivations or justifications.

"Personally, I wouldn't look at it because numbers alone don't tell much of a story to me," junior Tam-Sanh Nguyen said. "Numbers can't say why [administrators] decided something needed that much money or if it's being used effectively."

A few students admitted they didn't even know the university was tackling budget cuts, despite university President Dan Mote's persistent stream of e-mails.

"I don't pay much attention to the campus news," junior elementary education major Steffi Chang said. "I didn't know the budget was online, so I don't think most people are really reading it."

SGA legislator Kenton Stalder, who originally downloaded the document from Hornbake Library for public distribution, said he did so to make it easier for students and faculty members to get involved in decisions about university spending.

"Obviously we have a lot of decisions that are going to be made down the line," Stalder said.  "We're hoping students can contribute creative solutions to some of the university's problems." 

SGA spokesman and former Diamondback staffer Joel Cohen said only about 10 to 15 students had submitted budget lines as of Wednesday, adding the SGA hadn't really advertised the competition outside of its Facebook group.

One of the few students to comment on the competition, Nate DeSelms, a junior computer science major, gave a "thumbs up" to a submission posted on Saturday: "Did you know your university budgeted $250,000 for the football team's food service this fiscal year?"

DeSelms, who said he joined SGA's Facebook group for "no special reason," said he liked the post because he thinks the university spends too much money on athletics. He added that he did not know that the SGA was hosting a competition.

"The focus on putting money toward athletics bothers me and scrutiny toward the budget can only benefit the university," DeSelms said.

Cohen said he expects most students to search the document for things of particular interest to them.

"The idea is that people will look at what they're interested in," Cohen said. "If you're a government and politics major, you might search for BSOS or the government and politics department. Or if you're a big athletics fan, you would look at that."

Although the PDF can be searched, lines are so specific that queries often turn up too many or no results. There is no table of contents or index, and the budget references ambiguous acronyms without providing a key.

For example, one submission made on Monday reads, "Did you know your Universitybudgeted $77,000 for ‘instructional' in the office of 350049 ASCDU? If you know what this office is or what they do, we want to know!"

Both Stalder and Cohen stressed that they hoped to take up the issue of the budget's readability with administrators. Cohen said the SGA plans to do so when representatives present the list of winning submissions at the end of the semester.

apino at umdbk dot com