FiCom: Measure Twice, Cut Once

Midway through March, the Undergraduate Council’s (UC) grants fund is broke. Of the $285,000 it originally designated for student group funding, the UC has about $28,000 left, meaning that it has already allocated $256,000—or about 90 percent—of the money designated for student groups for the entire school year.

This is not the sign of mismanagement or incompetence, however. In fact, the UC is doing precisely its job by distributing its budget to student organizations without delay. Although much noise will be made when the UC inevitably runs out of money and must make an end-of-the-year, across-the-board cut for all student groups in the last grants package, this practice is the most fiscally responsible, fair, and un-arbitrary way that the UC can handle its money shortage. The UC Finance Committee (FiCom) should be applauded for employing such a method already, and the cut should be institutionalized in UC FiCom practices for future councils to continue the practice.

The UC gives out grants based on objective criteria in a non-arbitrary process, trying hard not to make value judgments about the content of the event itself. The UC instead considers how reasonable the event’s costs are, how integral to the expenses are to the event’s success, and the magnitude of undergraduate benefit the event will produce.

This year, about $285,000, or 71 percent of the grants fund, was earmarked for grants covering expenses specific to student groups—a 45 percent increase from last year. Needless to say, student organizations entered this school year with the impression that the UC was in a position to support them financially, and with good reason.

Due mostly to publicity efforts, easier common grants applications, and active undergraduate organizations, however, the UC grants fund is now broke. An end-of-the-year grants package cut is inevitable if the UC is going to produce the expected four more grants packages, which have averaged about $15,000 over the course of this school year.

Some critics of this procedure argue that handing out such a large portion of funds early in the year is fiscally irresponsible, and in many ways has been interpreted as being indicative of mismanagement of the UC’s funds by UC leadership. These critics argue that the UC should simply budget at the beginning of the year so as to spread out the grants fund evenly across each week that it makes a grants package. Simple math, these critics say—dividing the UC’s total student group budget by the number of grants packages that the council plans to make—would ensure that the UC would not have to face the end-of-the-year budget crisis which it so predictably takes on each year.

But the logic which justifies many small budget cuts over the entire school year as being inherently better than one cut at the end is fallacious; there is nothing “wrong” with an end-of-the-year cut that is not also “wrong” with smaller cuts made gradually throughout the school year. Both force the UC to make rather arbitrary cuts to student group events which it would otherwise like to fund.

However, some differences can be deduced between the two cuts that make the UC’s current practice seem more favorable. The end-of-the-year cut is preferable because the amount of funding that students will request on a week-to-week basis is incredibly unpredictable. Figures from week three of the spring of 2004-05, 2005-06, and this school year, for example, all show drastically different grant requests and awards: $20,671.21, $6,048.23, and $9,870.46, respectively. The absolute unpredictability of student group funding requests makes week-to-week budgeting both impractical and unfair.

Furthermore, even if the UC did choose to budget on a tighter schedule despite the great variance in grant requests, the fact would still remain that some events would be arbitrarily refused funded simply because of their date of occurrence. Weekly budgeting would simply mean that events will not happen during the school year, rather than at the end of the year. How can one make the judgment that one is better or worse than the other?

An additional factor to be taken into consideration is the new institution of upfront funding, which was implemented in the fall of this school year. This new mechanism allows student groups to apply ahead of time for grants which they plan to pursue, which allows events that are closer to the end of the year to be funded any time during the semester, regardless of the actual date of their event. Many student groups have taken advantage of this feature, and events in April and May have been funded in the $256,000 of grant-giving.

It is important to remember that the real culprit of this fiscal dilemma is neither fiscal irresponsibility nor inability of the UC leadership to budget their finances appropriately, but rather a vibrant student social life, an efficient FiCom doing its job in a timely manner, and a finite UC budget which will inevitably fall short of the demand for student group funding. So long as there is greater student demand than UC funds can accommodate, something’s got to give. The end-of-the-year grants package cut ensures that the UC handles this shortage consistently, fairly, and predictably, without making partial value judgments and corrupting the very integrity of the grants process.



Lori M. Adelman ’08 is a social studies concentrator in Dunster House. She was chair of the UC’s Finance Committee in 2006.