That was the official answer given by Student Body President Courtney Tkacs when asked how many students had actually requested an increase to the campus activity fee. It is a staggering admission.
In any other representative body, a response like that would be the death knell of a proposal. It would be the moment the room went silent, the motion was tabled and the leadership went back to the drawing board to find out what students actually need.
Instead, at the University of South Carolina, "not a lot" was apparently the green light to move forward with a plan that would hike a mandatory student fee by 86%. When the student senate felt that nearly doubling the fee wasn't aggressive enough, it pushed to increase the fee by an additional 11.5%.
If you are a student living on campus, USC’s own estimates suggest you are already staring down a $64,052 annual price tag. The university is well aware that this is an unsustainable burden; they prove it by funding programs such as Garnet Bites and the Gamecock CommUnity Shop, which provide free food and clothing to students who can no longer afford the basic cost of existence.
There is a profound, almost dark irony in a university that hands out free groceries in one building while planning a massive, 86% fee hike in another. It is institutional cognitive dissonance to recognize an affordability crisis with one hand and actively exacerbate it with the other.
The central defense for this hike is that student life is underfunded. We are told that student organizations are struggling, that inflation is rising —on top of the current $87 activity fee and new athletics charges — and that the only way to save the campus experience is to ask students for more. But before we reach into our pockets, we must look at the math.
The campus activity fee currently generates roughly $5.2 million. That is a massive pool of capital. If the goal of this fee is to support student organizations, one would assume a significant portion of that $5.2 million would go directly into the hands of those organizations.
It doesn't.
According to Student Government’s own reporting, only 3.6% of that fund actually reaches the student organizations that provide the heartbeat of campus life. The remaining 96.4% is swallowed by the Department of Student Life before a single club flyer can be printed.
It funds the salaries of administrators whose primary role is to mandate awareness events and enforce four-part mandatory workshops that drain the time of student leaders. It pays for media operations and centrally run programming that many students never engage with.
When Student Government argues that organizations are running dry, they aren't lying — they are just omitting the reason. Organizations are fighting over scraps because the system is designed to feed the administrative machine first and the students last.
To suggest that the solution to a 3.6% allocation is to double the total fee — rather than simply changing the split — is a confession of management failure. You do not solve a plumbing problem by pumping more water into a leaky pipe; you fix the pipe.
Even within that tiny 3.6% slice of the pie, the distribution is a masterclass in inefficiency. Currently, according to Student Government's live ledger, the 10 organizations on campus that get allocated the most money receive 61% of those funds. The other 700+ organizations — the ones that represent the niche interests, the professional societies and the cultural groups that make a large university feel like a community — are left to divide what little remains.
The new solution being implemented by leadership is to limit what smaller organizations can receive, punishing them for not having the fiscal efficiency of the largest, most well-connected groups. The narrative is shifting from funding events to supporting them — a semantic trick designed to make giving you less sound like a strategic partnership. This is just a managed decline of student-led initiatives in favor of university-controlled programming.
We are being told to pay nearly double for the privilege of being told to do less. We are being asked to fund additional staff members whose sole job will be to rewrite the laws of a Student Government that has edited itself into a mess and to manage a leadership structure that, by its own admission, has no mandate from the people it represents.
Perhaps the most frustrating element of this proposal is the closed-door nature of the deliberation. In 2024, the report by Student Government on increasing the fund suggested a modest $13 increase and was met with pushback from the student body. The current leadership has looked at that history and decided the problem wasn't the fee — it was the transparency.
If Student Government wants to claim they are acting in our best interest, they should prove it. They should not be allowed to hide behind a two-year-old report while ignoring the students sitting in front of them today. If they believe the student body supports an 86% price hike, then they should put it to a campus-wide referendum. Let every student see the $5.2 million budget, see the 3.6% allocation and then vote on whether they think the problem is a lack of revenue or a lack of accountability.
Until then, we should treat this proposal for what it actually is — a spending wish list built by our student leadership that has lost its way. They have assumed the administrators are their primary constituents and that the students are merely a recurring revenue stream that is only worth listening to during election season.
If "not a lot" of students asked for this, then "not a lot" of students should be expected to pay it.
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