Student Life Undermines Students’ Fiscal Autonomy in Club and Org. Allocation Process

Kay Bailey

She/Her

Editor-in-Chief

9/19/24

Student Life does not want you to know how your student fee money is being handled. Not only does our administration not want you to see the inner workings of their allocation process, they take that allocation process completely out of student control. We do not have a say in what goes on with our money, and we are being barred from knowing how it works through baseless legal complications and restrictions.

Last fall, Student Life released what they referred to as a “Club and Organization Leadership Matrix”: a new rubric for grading clubs on their overall campus engagement. The matrix was intended to be an impartial metric for considering club and org funding requests; the better your club scores on the matrix’s attendance and performance requirements, the better funding your club will receive. Student Life’s goal was to create a fair and consistent system for distributing our money. “The Office of Student Life values transparency and straightforwardness in our grading and funding practices,” they said.

As we begin the semester, it is clear the process is neither transparent nor straightforward. Despite multiple formal requests, Student Life has denied our right to check their process. All they shared were color-coded “tier scores” represented by a vague bar graph, leaving students more confused than ever on how their money is being spent.

When The Clock requested the completed matrices from both Student Life and USNH legal to ensure transparency and equitable practices, Brianna Sorensen, Associate Director of Student Engagement, and Melina Baker, Associate Director of Student Experience, rejected the request and cited “the best practices implied by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) for release of graded information.” They noted that FERPA protects educational and individual student records. Clubs and organizations, however, are not individuals. Furthermore, the documents are not academic in nature, so policy related to graded work is irrelevant.

Student Life’s actions do not coincide with their alleged commitment to transparency. Student Life continues to say no to student requests. They abuse legal jargon in the hopes that we will take their word as fact. The matrices were made to create transparency in the allocation process. Are the matrices currently serving this purpose? No, they clearly are not.

PSU is also the only USNH school whose student fees are handled in this manner. At both Keene and UNH, the allocation process is student-led; any oversight from school administration appears in a purely advisory role. Our fee distribution is handled directly by Student Life. Though the Student Senate creates the illusion of students’ having a say in the allocation process, key members including Speaker Will Loughlin, USSB Trustee Ethan Dupuis, and 2026 Class President Hannah Lowell, all confirmed to have no working knowledge of the intricacies of the matrix system.

Our money is not only out of our hands, it’s out of our student representatives’ hands too. As it stands, there is no mechanism to check Student Lifes process. Maybe the matrixes were made to do that, but as long as they stay confidential, they fail to serve that purpose.

Student Life does not trust us to be responsible for our own clubs and organizations conduct. Under the guise of ensuring fairness, they are stripping students of their right to know what goes on behind the scenes of our funding practices. We are being coddled. Student Life is erring on the side of caution, even if it interferes with their goal of, and our right to, transparency. If we wanted fairness, we could find it in a detailed report of how the matrix truly works. 

Student leaders at PSU, I urge you; look into your own allocations, your matrices, ask yourself if you have any insight into how the allocation process exists for you and this campus. Is it fair? Is it equitable to you and your peers? Most importantly, is the way Student Life conducts itself fulfilling their promises of consistent transparency? I can promise you it’s not. 

We deserve better, we deserve to know how our money is being managed, and we deserve transparency more than ever.

In light of a need for transparency, The Clock has included our fully graded Student Life Matrix.