Money woes

The Student Senate meeting was purposely interrupted Tuesday. Senate hosted a tuition town hall meeting in the middle of its weekly proceedings to allow SMU students to come and discuss how their tuition should be spent. Only a handful of students were in attendance besides Senate members. “I was excited about the turnout but I wish it was a packed house of course,” said Dustin Odham, student body president.

The speakers included James Caswell, vice president of Student Affairs, Morgan Olsen, vice president of business and finance, Mike Novak, executive director of enrollment services and Quincy Crecelius, student representative.

The speakers gave an overview of what tuition usually goes toward and what expenses SMU annually pays. This includes funding for the Junkins buildings and the Dedman Life Science building that have been built in the past few years. Along with keeping current with library acquisitions, medical care and the money spent in maintaining campus grounds.

What was not discussed, however, was why there is a lack of revenue to go toward necesities such as financial aid and projects like the proposed Dedman Center renovation.

They then opened the floor to allow students to ask questions or express thoughts about where their tuition ought to be spent. One student suggested SMU should stop spending money on art work and start putting it towards something more useful, such as financial aid.

Novak had the floor for the financial aid segment of the meeting and implied at some point in the future scholarships might be indexed. Indexing means that as tuition increases, scholarships increase proportionally. It will most likely not happen during the years that any of the current students are here. As of right now SMU does not have the money to fund the indexing of scholarships. The school would require 30 to 50 million dollars to do so.

Similar to the lack of money for renovating the Dedman Center for Life Time of Sports, there is not money for indexes unless tuition is increased.

The Board of Trustees will determine the tuition increase in February. They are striving for SMU to be parallel to our benchmark universities.

“If these problems were easy, then they would be solved already,” Olsen said.

Crecelius ended the meeting on saying that the Board of Trustees is there to work with the students and that they are on our side.