By Mary Whitfill, editor-in-chief
An education at Northeastern comes with a price tag that tops $42,000/year. Before required fees, room and board and other expenses that come with living in the 10th most expensive city in the country, according to Business Insider, a Northeastern student can expect to be out almost $200,000 by the time they walk across the stage and shake President Joseph E. Aoun’s hand.
Trying to give students a voice in where their hundreds of thousands of dollars end up, the Student Government Association (SGA) will make their annual budget priorities survey live next week. Aimed at giving students a direct line to the administration, the survey exists to rank student priorities and evaluate interest in potential initiatives.
“This is the most important survey of the year, as it is a direct line for students to tell the administration how to spend their money,” SGA President Noah Carville said. “More specifically than that, are we spending enough money on certain things, or do we need to be spending more money on other things?”
Results of the survey are sent to the higher-ups at the university, allowing NU administrators to gauge and react to student opinions of spending, according to SGA Chief of Staff Zachary Shaw.
“The survey is a great way to identify what’s important to our students,” Tom Nedell, senior vice president and treasurer at Northeastern, said. “The survey and the meaningful engagement between student leaders and the administration to review the results help the university launch new initiatives each year, set priorities and make improvements in areas that matter to students the most. We applaud the passionate commitment of our student body representatives to excellence, and we are proud of our partnership.”
This year, one of the initiatives being evaluated by the survey is the MBTA U-Pass, a system that would provide monthly, unlimited T passes to all Northeastern students at a discount. However, all students in Boston and in classes would be required to pay for the pass at an additional fee, regardless of their T use.
“We don’t know how deep the discount would be, but we know at minimum it would be 50 percent for an unlimited monthly pass,” Carville, a senior economics major, said. “Personally, I love U-Pass. I think the more people we can have commuting to campus in a way that is environmentally sustainable is fantastic.”
Third-year chemical engineering major Faris Alshuaibi was a fan of the U-Pass idea before he heard the price. At half off, the pass would cost $37.50/month.
“I think it’s a good idea, but $35 a month added to tuition is too much,” he said. “I would pay $20 a month for that.”
This kind of feedback is exactly what SGA hopes to achieve by administering the survey. The association is also testing students’ feelings on another idea requiring a mandatory fee: newspaper subscriptions. For an unlimited online subscription to a major publication, as well as daily print papers delivered to a central spot on campus, SGA wants to know if students would pay $5/year. However, like U-Pass, this would be a fee mandated to all students, not just those who regularly consume the news.
“We say we are a global university and if we say we are global, and if we want our students to be global, they should know what is going on in the world around them,” Carville said. “I also know that a number of majors and departments require students to have subscriptions to newspapers. This is just saying, ‘this is a public good, and this is something a student would benefit from.’”
NU journalism professor Bill Kirtz, whose department requires subscriptions for certain classes, doesn’t think this is a fee that should fall to the students. Rather, he thinks the university should pick up the tab for students’ access to news.
However, some of the students in his department would be willing to pay for the service.
“I would absolutely pay for that,” sophomore journalism major Nicole Esan said. “It’s important for students to know what is happening in Boston aside from what they read on Twitter and Facebook. I rarely see students reading newspapers anymore, so I think this change would give them more incentive to read it.”
In addition to these new initiatives, students are asked to rank what the university already spends money on from most to least important. This will give administrators an idea of how students feel about spending on academic, co-op, financial aid and other advising, classroom upgrades and technology, recreational facilities, sustainability and recycling on campus and more.
While the initiatives on the survey vary from year to year, students are asked annually to rank what they consider to be most important.
“These categories vary from year to year, and there is a reason for that,” Carville said. “If students give us feedback one way or another, we want to give the administration an opportunity to take action on that feedback before asking another wave of questions on the same topic.”
In the past, student responses to this survey have resulted in a number of plans being put into action on campus, including Snell Library Digital Media Commons renovations, Husky Dollar usage in taxi cabs, expanded swipe printing and more.
Students could start to the see the benefits of next week’s survey as soon as next year.
“The U-Pass pilot program will start in July of next year,” Carville said. “Which is why we need to decide now if we want to be part of that program.”
Photo by Mary Whitfill
