“Systemic issue” of Vic student fees not being spent
Clubs and associations used less than half of the money the Victoria University Students’ Administrative Council (VUSAC) budgeted out to them for the Fall 2022 semester, according to the latest available VUSAC information the Finance Chair provided to The Strand. This includes all purchases except for a pending $300.00 amount.
Clubs spent 47 percent of their total $15,520.32 budget, and commissions spent 51 percent of their $23,081.55, making their total utilisation rate 49 percent. This $19,505.75 surplus in the total budget for clubs and commissions was meant to fund parties, arts and crafts, speaker events, and more last semester, yet remained unused.
“Ideally [student organisations] should be spending their full funding every single year,” VUSAC’s president Sooyeon Lee told The Strand in a virtual interview on January 22nd. “But this is a pretty typical trend that we do see of Fall and Winter semester spending year by year.”
This is an oft-discussed topic at VUSAC meetings; at the first meeting of this semester, Finance Chair Thomas Keough told the council, “Our utilisation is looking really subpar. And this is not a new problem. This is not to call out this particular iteration of VUSAC, or this Vic community as being horrible at spending. This is typical.”
Other small spenders
For funds related to running VUSAC itself, executives spent 36 percent of their $7,298.02 budget, and staff spent 36 percent of $14,191.57. Items in these categories include office supplies, a training retreat, a first aid course for council members, and contingency funds.
VUSAC does not yet have utilisation rates for Vic levies, including The Strand, which are another category of student groups with more financial independence. Their funding comes directly from student fees and is deposited into their private bank accounts at the beginning of each academic year.
Before events start up for the semester, student groups, like clubs, and associations request their budget from VUSAC, which they hope will be ratified through an all-council meeting. The process also includes an initial budget steering committee meeting—to ensure that the requested budget amounts requested abide by specific rules—and later, smaller windows for students to request to reallocate or to be given more funds.
Student leaders: too spent to spend?
Michael Elsaesser, Vice-President of Student Organisations, says one potential cause for the surplus might be all too familiar to the UofT community: being swamped with work.
He told The Strand that student leaders in charge of budgets “are still human beings that have their own personal lives, social lives, and school lives […] so while students at the beginning of the term might be really ambitious and want to run all these events and want to have all these initiatives, throughout the term things might come up where it’s like, ‘oh, I just couldn’t run that.’”
Lee points to a lack of experience in student leaders due to pandemic measures requiring the cancellation of in-person programming over the past couple of years: “A lot of the people who are in these positions now have never been in leadership positions before and have very little experience event planning or planning for things that would need a budget,” she told The Strand.
One student leader, Diana Vink, VUSAC’s Equity Commissioner, explained her group’s surplus to The Strand by saying, “I think we budgeted for more events than we ended up actually doing.” Women’s Circle, the Vic club with the highest fall budget, could not use all of its funding “mostly because we didn’t have the chance to organise,” representative Mariam Aser told The Strand.
The difficulty of predicting student participation can also hamper spending plans. Rebecca Muscant, the Co-Chair of the Sustainability Commission, told The Strand, “We did pretty much all of the events we’d set out to do,” although they found it hard to predict student interest in different activities, like whether students preferred thrift shopping or speaker presentations.
Another, though perhaps less common scenario in which an organisation might not use their own funding, is when a different entity offers to foot the bill instead of VUSAC.
Amelia Collet, VUSAC’s Arts and Culture Commissioner, told The Strand in an email, “If I were to guess, I would think budget utilisation has been higher in previous years.” One of their performances, The Bob Sketch Comedy Revue, was originally budgeted as a VUSAC expense, but ended up being covered by the Performing Arts Endowment, she writes.
Frugality with student fees
This year each Victoria College student automatically contributed either $25.94 (full-time fee) or $15.46 (part-time fee) to VUSAC and club funding. This makes up the bulk of the $60,091.46 Fall semester budget and $129,467.93 Winter semester ratified budget, both of which do not include levies nor cash inflows. Clubs and commissions further aimed to generate $3400.00 in revenue in the Fall semester through ticket sales for various events and through Equity council’s subsidised menstrual cup sales.
Vic students are required to pay the third highest annual fee for their student council (not including levies) out of UofT’s seven colleges, after Innis at $54.06 (full and part-time fee) and Trinity at $68.00 (full and part-time fee).
As for levies, Vic students give these 12 student-run groups either $41.59 (full-time fee) or $21.19 (part-time fee). In the Fall term ratified budget Vic’s 12 levies planned to spend $74,021.34 of their funds and, in the Winter term ratified budget, $88,286.09.
Saving the surplus
“If [clubs] don’t spend all their money that they requested, it just stays within the VUSAC bank account. As levies have a separate bank account, it just stays in theirs,” says Lee.
For instance, the Victoria College Athletics Association levy told The Strand that they plan on rolling over any unspent funds, saying, “Our budget plan for this semester aims to use all of the money budgeted for the Winter plus any surplus leftover from Fall.”
As for whether a relatively low utilisation rate should affect how much VUSAC gives clubs in future budgeting periods, Keough says, “It’s a case by case basis.” He says requesting money after showing an inability to spend the previous semester’s amount could show poor planning, or even guilt over not hosting enough events the semester before.
“Ultimately, I tend to ask VUSAC members to stay away from the ideology that if they have poor utilisation, they don’t deserve funding,” he concludes.
From gatherings to gift cards
The lack of in-person programming during the COVID-19 pandemic further hampered budget utilisation, according to the VUSAC executives The Strand spoke with. Many organisation leaders turned to “giveaways,” ranging from presents that were loosely related to the club’s mission to UberEats gift cards.
$18,759.81, or roughly 17 percent of the $111,858.47 that VUSAC budgeted to commissions, levies, and clubs in the 2022 Fall term ratified budget, was allocated to giveaways, according to a count from The Strand. That same tally sees giveaways this semester taking up 9 percent of VUSAC’s $129,514.69 Winter budget which was ratified on January 27.
What this figure counts as “giveaways” was anything that participants could keep outside of club meetings, ranging from the 44 sweaters costing $1,680.00 that the Cat’s Eye planned to buy for its staff, to the Mental Wellness Commission’s planned $1,200.00 plant giveaway for this term.
Elsaesser sees the merit in giveaways related to organisations’ missions, but says, “It’s not at the same level as like the big events where you […] meet people, and you get to really form that community with others.”
Keough says, “You get some free money, and students have paid for that free money. So it’s kind of messy. I do think that giveaways have their place, but I think that they should not be the cornerstone of the student groups’ events […] now that we’re back in person, and now that the mandate of student council and student groups in general should be to foster community among students at Vic.”
The money tree of student fees
So should VUSAC continue taking this much mandatory money from Vic students for its budget when its clubs are unable to spend it?
“Given our existing utilisation numbers, I think there is a pretty strong argument for reducing student fees. But I’m just not sure if it would solve the utilisation problem,” argues Thomas.
“I think it’s more of a symptom of just having student group leaders also be UofT students. Whatever they plan initially will not necessarily come to fruition.”
Lee said about budget surpluses: “If it ends up being a one time thing, then I think that’s one thing. But if it ends up being a repeated pattern of people not spending the money that they are allocated, I think that [begs the] question, ‘should we lower fees?’”
