After seeing its budget slashed from $340,000 to $185,000, the University of South Carolina’s Student Government has found an ingenious way to achieve fiscal efficiency: Make the funding process so cumbersome that students simply stop using it. In response, student organizations are now lining up for funding from the new Student Organization Funding Assistance Board — a university-run alternative that is safer, less bureaucratic and more streamlined.
In fact, SOFAB was launched this year specifically to “open up more opportunities” for organizations to obtain funding by taking a portion of the student activity funds from Student Government. The result is fewer headaches for students and fewer expenditures for Student Government — proof that doing less really does cost less, which might explain why Student Government was so eager to embrace partial funding.
In order to request funds through Student Government, a brave student must first survive an initial comptroller audit and a risk assessment before their request even reaches the student body treasurer’s desk. From there, it faces Finance Committee scrutiny and finally a vote in student senate — all just to find out three weeks later that the budget request was denied.
Meanwhile, SOFAB offers a refreshingly sane experience. The process is simple: Submit a budget request online (after a brief training session), wait a few days and receive an answer, usually within the same week. As a student organization leader, I’ve gone through both systems and the difference between SOFAB’s timeline and Student Government’s multi-week ordeal is night and day.
It doesn’t take a genius to see which system actually works, though apparently it does take one to understand Student Government’s rules. In the past, it has threatened to defund organizations over technicalities barely understood and even attempted to defund one group purely out of political bias, a decision so misguided that the university itself had to intervene. To make matters worse, Student Government has also attempted to penalize organizations for mistakes rooted in its own confusion over the infamous 15-day university rule, a rule that seemed to be defined about 15 different ways, depending on whom you asked.
The key difference between the two funding systems is structural. SOFAB requests are reviewed and decided by a committee of five students and two ex officio appointees from the Office of the Associate Vice President for Student Life. Student Government allocations, on the other hand, are filtered through a sprawling network of committees, reviews and legislative procedure. In practice, SOFAB operates with a simple administrative approach: A request is either approved or denied by the board — no political theater needed. It’s little wonder SOFAB has become the go-to funding source for student leaders who value both their time and their sanity.
SOFAB’s competence is refreshingly ordinary. With a $7,500 full-funding cap, a simple application and broad eligibility, it does the unthinkable: makes funding easy. Students are choosing it because deadlines are sacred in event planning — when money sits in purgatory for weeks, nothing gets planned. SOFAB’s quick turnaround and clear rules make the process feel almost suspiciously efficient.
Buried in the Student Government Codes — which at times read like a choose-your-own adventure — is a $10,000 hard cap per organization. The new partial-funding model adds a twist: Requests above $1,500 for programs or $2,500 for conferences are now judged by a color-coded points rubric. In practice, those thresholds have become de facto spending limits, since anything higher usually comes straight from students’ own pockets.
Under the new partial-funding rubric introduced by the treasurer, organizations are graded on a five-tier system that determines how much funding they deserve — or, more accurately, how much they don’t. Tier One events receive 40% of their requested funding, Tier Two receive 50%, Tier Three receive 70%, Tier Four rise to 80% and Tier Five earns a full 100%. In practice, even a solid proposal can be slashed to 70% or 80%, while only perfection is enough to unlock full funding. Students pay into this fund through the student activity fee — which Student Government recently helped raise — yet now can request less money from the very pool to which they pay more into.
The new partial-funding system might stretch Student Government’s budget, but it also erodes any incentive for student groups to use it. Why navigate a months-long process for half-funding when SOFAB will cut a check for the full amount next door?
SOFAB’s success so far speaks for itself. By the end of September — barely two months into the semester — SOFAB had trained 164 organizations in its system, received 118 funding requests and approved roughly $67,452 for fall events, according to an email to org leaders from SOFAB administrator Matt Hinds. By comparison, Student Government has only allocated $27,649 by mid-October.
SOFAB has pumped out more than twice as much funding to student organizations in a fraction of the time. This is despite SOFAB having an annual budget roughly $60,000 less than Student Government’s (about $185,000). An overwhelming number of student groups have already voted with their feet, choosing SOFAB over the traditional student senate route.
At the end of the day, Student Government’s new funding philosophy can be summed up simply: If students stop asking for money, then nobody can complain about how Student Government spends it. And while SOFAB continues to fund student organizations and events that actually happen, Student Government gets to brag about something even more remarkable, having achieved fiscal efficiency by creating a system few bother to use.