Have you ever thoroughly examined your bill from Drake, or is it just too depressing to even look at? There’s tuition, a monstrous number. You may see room and board if you have the pleasure of situating yourself in one of the fine residence halls this year. There’s that technology fee, and then, most likely, a student activity fee of $66. Over the course of two semesters, that’s $132, and my guess is the majority of students paying it are not as knowledgeable regarding those fees as they should be.

Without some of the money from you’re student activity fee, you would not be reading this paper right now, but more about that later. All of the student activity fees get added up and then divvied out to its respective beneficiaries. This year, they were estimated at $450,000 and the group that controls them is the Student Senate.

Luckily, there are rules and precedents as to how they can use this money. To better understand this process and these figures I would encourage anyone to check out www.drakesenate.com for more information.

For this year’s budget, about 62 percent of that $450,000 is going to annually funded organizations. For example, the Student Activities Board (SAB) will take $140,000 of the $279,563 allocated to these groups.

About 11 percent of all the student activity fees, or $48,964, have been allocated to the Student Development Fund. This means almost $50,000 is available to student groups for one-time funding requests. For instance, a couple hundred bucks might go to help cover the costs of a campuswide program sponsored by a non-annually funded organization. Any organization can complete a one-time funding request and plead its case before the Student Fees Allocation Committee.

The final 27 percent of the student activity fees are used by the Board of Student Communication (BSC). This $121,500 is broken down even further when the BSC budgets for each of its products: the Drake Broadcasting System, Drake Magazine, Periphery, DUiN and The Times-Delphic. The TD operates with a budget of about $40,684, which, along with advertising revenue, pays the bills. Speaking in broad terms, over the course of a year, The TD will distribute around 45 issues of the twice-weekly paper, totaling almost 100,000 copies. In essence, each paper is using nearly 41 cents of Student Activity Fees.

The bottom line is that, per year, $132 of your dollars go to provide activities and products around campus. To get your money’s worth, join annually funded organizations, petition SFAC for one-time funding, attend SAB and other organization-sponsored events and don’t forget to grab those BSC publications, you’ve already paid for them.

Kreznor is a senior accounting and finance major and The Times-Delphic’s business manager and can be contacted at phil.kreznor@drake.edu.