“We’re $600 in Debt to Papa John's”
The University of Oklahoma’s student government budget has left many organizations strapped for cash and confused. How can we fix it?
Two weeks ago, the University of Oklahoma student body President Caden Glasscock signed off on two auxiliary budgets, allocating nearly $50,000 to various Registered Student Organizations (RSOs) across campus.
As with every budget, this one is likely to leave many dissatisfied. Over the course of previous years, many organizations have been growing increasingly frustrated with the Student Government Association’s burdensome budget procedures. They’ve become annoyed by their chronic lack of communication, broken promises to RSOs, and, now, their increasingly tight fist in delivering funds. Accordingly, our student organizations have suffered: many are experiencing severe budget shortfalls, and campus life is withering.
I’ve sat down with a wide range of RSO officers and student government officials to try to figure out how the budget works, how it's broken, and how to fix it. I’ve found that few RSO officers know even the basic information of the budget and that the SGA hasn’t told them the basics, and I’ve discovered a worsening crisis that we must seriously address.
How Does the Budget Work?
The SGA budget begins with the activity fee, which is collected from all in-person students at the University of Oklahoma. Full-time undergraduate students pay $114 per semester in activity fees while part-time undergraduates, graduate students, and law students each pay $6-8 per credit hour. These fees are then all collected into the student activity fund, a portion of which is then given to the SGA.
The SGA then uses its portion of the student activity fund to allocate money to RSOs. This allocation is performed by a committee called the Ways and Means Committee, often shortened to WAM.1 The WAM allocates funds to organizations in two types of processes. The most significant type of SGA funding is the primary process. During last year’s primary process, the SGA allocated nearly 337k dollars to nearly 250 organizations over the course of deliberations that spanned weeks, involving public hearings, meetings, and evaluating RSOs’ requests for funding. There is one primary process each year, and it occurs at the end of each school year. The primary budget for the 2024 - 2025 school year was approved in May 2024.
The other type is the auxiliary process. So far, the SGA has passed two auxiliary budgets this semester. Funding for the auxiliary processes doesn’t come from the activity fee, but rather from whatever is leftover of primary funds from the previous year. If an RSO does not spend all the money it received in the primary process by the last academic day of the semester, the SGA reclaims its funds and spends them as auxiliary funding for other RSOs to use. Auxiliary funding is sporadic. Sometimes, it happens multiple times in a semester. Other times, just once a year. It all depends on how much money RSOs don’t spend.
The most important part of this entire system is request evaluation. In other words, if an RSO puts in a request for a certain amount of money, it is the WAM committee’s job to decide whether to grant that request. According to WAM committee chair Jacob Schonfield, the committee uses multiple factors in evaluating whether a request is valid, the most important of which are fiscal history and impact. If a club has a record of spending their entire budget, they are more likely to receive a larger budget in the future. If that club fails to spend their money or spends it on unauthorized items, they are unlikely to receive similar levels of funding.
Impact, however, is much harder to measure. "There's no way for us to genuinely check how many people are being affected", Schonfield explained. Nonetheless, the WAM likes it when organizations are visible on campus. If the members of the WAM an organization’s posters on bulletin boards, tables on the south oval, or pins scattered across students’ backpacks, they will be more likely to receive funding.
Some of this measurement comes down to membership, but participation is more important. While certain organizations that have a large membership that often attends events will receive more funding, organizations with a limited membership that can nonetheless draw large crowds to their events may also receive substantial funding. While relatively few students are members of the Colombian Student Association or the Afrobeatz Dance Club, their events are large enough and visible enough that both organizations were granted large budgets in the primary and auxiliary funding processes, respectively. WAM committee members might even measure impact by checking an organization’s Instagram accounts or even showing up to scheduled meetings to verify attendance.
Once the WAM committee has created the budget, it falls to the rest of the SGA to approve the budget. After an extended questioning session where members of the WAM were put in the hot seat, the Undergraduate Student Congress approved the most recent auxiliary budget by a vote of 27-1, the Graduate Student Senate approved it by a unanimous vote, and the SGA President signed it into law.
Who Receives SGA funding?
As it stands, the largest beneficiaries of SGA funding are those clubs that cater to international students or a distinct identity group. According to a statistical analysis I performed, any given RSO at the University of Oklahoma can expect a base of around $1,100 in primary funding. Umbrella organizations, which are clubs responsible for organizing other clubs, can expect to receive over $10,000 more from the SGA. Administrative organizations, that deal with organizing resident life at the various residential halls at the University, can expect to receive around $4,000 more. International clubs, which cater to various groups of international students, can reasonably expect to receive around $2,100 more. WAM committee chair Schonfield explained that this bias in funding is not due to favoritism, but rather because these types of organizations tend to have strong fiscal histories.
Fraternities and sororities that receive funding, counter to popular misconceptions, are liable to receive up to $1,100 dollars less than any given organization, though this tendency isn’t as consistent as the previous assertions. Furthermore, of the fifteen fraternities and sororities that received funding in last year’s primary budget, a majority were oriented towards serving men and women from Black and Latino backgrounds. In 2024, the top ten recipients of SGA funding received more than half of all primary funding.
How Does the Budget Fail?
There is a wide range of criticism of the budget process from those who are subject to it. In the course of my conversations with club finance chairs, I’ve observed a pattern of ignorance of WAM committee procedures and confusion over what the SGA’s standards really are. While there were some bright spots, RSOs are largely a morass of disillusionment and annoyance.
One club officer I spoke to was the president of a small organization for international students from a certain part of the world. After failing to receive primary funding last year because she filed the wrong type of paperwork, she filed for funding in the most recent auxiliary budget. After she made a detailed, line-item request totaling around $1,000, she received less than a fifth of what she requested, and of the money she received, most of it went towards paying off debt she had already accumulated in capital investments. She does not know why her request was rejected, and she said she no longer trusts the SGA to provide for her organization. In the future, she plans on relying on fundraising, namely by selling merchandise at the events of better-funded organizations.
Another club officer that I spoke to is the finance chair for a large biosciences club. Last year, they requested $4,000 from the SGA, but received less than 20% of their request. “The only item that was approved, partially, was food,” he lamented. After working with them for two years, he said that he does not trust the SGA. “It's a taxing process to receive a refund through reimbursements, and direct requests can be denied for a variety of minuscule reasons,” he said. “While not explicitly stated, the SGA would much rather you purchase food and rent venues through OU services, where it suddenly becomes a much easier process.”
To maintain financial solvency, he described how his organization’s previous financial chair had drawn on her parent’s wealth to fund key functions, including a yearly conference for high schoolers interested in the biosciences. He suspects that her familial connections are at least one of the reasons she was appointed to the position. For his part, he lacks such lucrative connections, and he’s unsure of the fate of this year’s conference. He is currently registering his organization as a 501(c) to become eligible for tax-deductible donations.
Another club officer from a hobbyist club lamented the SGA’s lack of communication throughout the budgetary process. She complained that the SGA was deeply unhelpful when she attempted to apply for funding. Whenever she reached out to them, she said that the SGA administrators “just linked their guidebook instead of answering my questions– which didn't help because I didn't understand its language.” She said that, in lieu of a more helpful SGA, she had to learn how to file an effective budget form from other club officers.
She said that her biggest problem was when the SGA would contradict itself. During one interaction with an outside business, she said the SGA would not make clear how her RSO was permitted to spend its funds to pay this company. “It makes it difficult to gain trust with businesses because it looks like we aren't serious about paying them money when the SGA is the one that complicates the process.”
Officers from one club told a similar story about their interactions with the SGA. While a party associated with the SGA had promised them that they would be reimbursed for their food spending, the organization then struggled to actually get the SGA to reimburse them. “We’re $600 in debt to Papa John’s,” reported one exasperated officer. He argued that, in denying his organization’s budget requests, the SGA had made recruitment near impossible and denied the club sufficient funds to maintain even a basic level of function. A fellow officer nodded in agreement, disappointed in the poor recruiting numbers that their organization has been able to front in light of their inability to buy food to drive attendance. “Last year, we would have had a pizza at every meeting.” Bags of fruit gummies sat scattered across the table.
How Can We Fix the SGA Budget?
While not every club officer’s experience with the SGA is so negative and multiple club officers expressed respect for the SGA, it was hard to recognize these stories as individual failures. In interviewing so many club officers, including some whose stories I didn’t include above, I often felt deja vu hearing the same grievances repeated ad nauseam. While it would have been easy to become desensitized to each story, for each of these club officers, it was deeply personal.
In the 2024 primary funding process, the SGA granted funding to 250 organizations. For the SGA, that’s a number on a spreadsheet, but those hundreds of clubs represent thousands of individuals– their identities, hopes, and passions. When a club receives less than a third of what it asks for, it undermines trust in the SGA, but more importantly, it undermines our community. When club officers spend more time fundraising and haggling with vendors over debt, they spend less time tabling on the Soval, inviting speakers, and hosting meetings. They spend less time making campus interesting, diverse, and unique, and they spend more time on paperwork and emails. For this system to work, we need better communication from both sides.
The SGA needs to communicate with RSOs
In my investigation, I learned a lot about the SGA and its budget that most RSOs do not know. For example, many RSOs received funding cuts this year, and most officers assumed that they had received cuts because the SGA simply had less money or that they were the only ones to receive cuts. In my interview with WAM committee chair Jacob Schonfield, I learned that the SGA has been running a substantial deficit for two years now, and it’s only this year that the WAM has decided to rein in excess spending. This year’s cuts are not an exception, but a reversion to the mean. As Schonfield said, the belt is as long as it always was: the SGA has simply decided to stop punching holes in it. RSO officers should not be expecting their funding to increase next year. The current funding deficits from the SGA may well represent a new norm.
Another thing I learned is that auxiliary funding is going to be substantially cut in the course of the next few years. As a reminder, the auxiliary budget comes from clubs not spending primary funds. However, for the past few years, the SGA has been receiving emergency funding to subsidize excess auxiliary spending. Furthermore, previous WAM committees have created inefficient primary budgets that have yielded extra auxiliary spending. In many ways, auxiliary funding has been steadily becoming less auxiliary and more primary for many organizations. Officers should know that this tap is about to turn off.
In general, RSO officers are out of the loop. My conversations with RSO officers were plagued with speculation on what the rules are, and few finance chairs or presidents demonstrated any in-depth knowledge of the SGA’s rules and protocols. Thankfully, the SGA knows this, and they want to fix it.
For the WAM committee, closing auxiliary funding, or at least limiting it as much as possible, will give the committee an opportunity to tackle the real problems. “In previous years, the committee and WAM chairs haven’t had the opportunity to work on communication because they’ve been too busy working on auxiliary funding every week,” Schonfield said. “Communication with RSOs has never been a conversation to be had.”
In our interview, Schonfield floated multiple ideas about various ways in which the WAM will be able to improve communication with RSO leadership once they close auxiliary. Alongside the WAM committee, he wants to set up budget request workshops to develop the skills of new RSO financial officers, create demos of good and bad budget requests, and send messages to RSOs when their budgets are finalized to allow time for those clubs to make appeals before the SGA President signs the budget. “Communication is something I want to make a priority.” Schonfield said, “but our hands have been tied."
These reforms are a start to a more participatory budget, and it’s important that RSOs and representatives are vocal about advocating for transparency and communication in the budgetary process.
RSOs Need to Communicate with the SGA
In the meantime, RSO officers are still anxious to protect their budgets, whatever little they have remaining. According to Schonfield, the best thing that an organization can do to protect its budget is to communicate with the SGA. "There's a tendency for people to throw their hands up in the air and say 'they screwed us'," he said, pointing out that organizations have a responsibility to advocate for themselves.
He told the story of a hobbyist organization that had successfully protected its budget. While their club had a uniquely poor fiscal history, so poor that the WAM committee was inclined to cut its budget entirely, that club’s executive team was proactive and arranged to have a meeting with Schonfield to explain the measures they had taken to ensure future fiscal responsibility. That group ultimately received auxiliary funding in the last process.
While the WAM committee can try to measure impact the best they can, they can only do so much when confronted with so many different organizations and demands. Finance chairs need to think of themselves as SGA lobbyists. They need to be greedy with their budget and advocate for their interests. If they want the SGA to be their partner, they need to talk to them like one, otherwise, they’re leaving themselves open to cuts by a committee that knows no better.
For his part, Schonfield said that the best way for an organization to achieve higher levels of SGA funding is to send him an email at sgabudget@ou.edu or to see him at his office hours.2
Conclusion
While many RSOs have been left behind in the SGA’s budgetary processes, there are numerous things that RSO officers and SGA officials can do to create more transparent, participatory processes in the future. For his part, Schonfield believes that the funding issues afflicting RSOs present a complicated issue and that it needs to be approached from multiple angles. “We're not going anywhere", Schonfield said, “but it's wise to shore up the ways in which you receive money because the committee only operates off the money that we're given.”
Unless the SGA receives an influx in funds from an increase in student activity fees, the SGA will not be able to approve every budget request. This can be a good thing: not every budget request should be approved, and a tight budget encourages fiscal responsibility just as a gastric bypass encourages healthier eating habits. However, with the number of clubs at the University of Oklahoma increasing at a rate that exceeds the growth of each successive freshman class, the SGA budget is only poised to become tighter.
In this sweltering climate, RSO officers need to be advocates for their interests, and they need to prepare for the possibility of cuts. In lieu of greater SGA funding, seeking private and non-profit sponsors may prove an increasingly necessary task in coming years, and the SGA should be there to support them in this endeavor. As for the SGA, they need to implement programs to ensure that RSO officers, many of whom will have limited or no experience with finance or government, are prepared to engage with student government in a productive manner. By doing this, the SGA and RSO officers can help to turn the budget into a greater asset and a lesser burden.
Post script: I would like to thank everyone who volunteered to be interviewed for this essay, including WAM Chair Jacob Schonfield, Representative Michael Reynolds, and all those who anonymously volunteered. I would also like to give special thanks to Emily Spotts and Daniel Zavala for their assistance in the editing process.
Technically, this committee is called the SGA Budgetary Committee due to the presence of a Senator of the Graduate Student Senate, however, in common parlance, WAM is more prevalent.
M: 9 AM - 11:30 AM
W: 1:30 PM - 4 PM
F: 1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
WAM Chair Jacob Schonfield’s office is in Room 181 of the Oklahoma Memorial Union by Crossroads, and he can be reached anytime via email at sgabudget@ou.edu