After a revised proposal, SFAC still doesn't recommend business school fee

Representatives from the Kenan-Flagler undergraduate business school presented a revised fee proposal in front of the Student Fee Audit Committee Tuesday morning. 

They defended the decision to maintain the cost of the previously proposed fee and said the fee could help the school admit more students and focus on admission and diversity issues.

What happened?

Members of SFAC reviewed the revised proposal and voted against it 6-1. They will give their recommendation to the Student Fees Advisory Subcommittee.

Who spoke?

The new proposal emphasizes increasing the capacity of the school’s student population and addressing diversity and admission aspects of the program.

“We increased capacity, we added resources to career services, we added a dedicated resource to admission to address the diversity issue and we removed the programs around leadership and global competencies,” said David Stevens, associate dean for operations and finance at the business school.

Co-director of the Undergraduate Business Program David Vogel said the new proposal would increase the school capacity by 25 percent instead of the previously proposed 20 percent.

Co-director of the Undergraduate Business Program Anna Millar said students have shown support for the proposal.

“Some of the student leaders looked at us and said, ‘I can’t believe you haven’t been charging us up to now, I know I get so much more being a business major than my colleagues on main campus get as well, so I consider myself pretty lucky that I haven’t had to pay this fee, and I know my peers at Virginia are paying as well,’” she said.

When asked why the revised fee proposal still asked for $3,000, even without the leadership and global competencies programming, Stevens said the requested fee matches the costs of the proposed costs.

Vogel said the fee amount stayed the same because they replaced the leadership and global competency initiatives with a focus on diversity and admission.

“We increased the diversity recruitment — we have a new head just to do that — we have an operating budget just to support those efforts associated with the socio-diversity recruitment, we brought in an incremental career resource because we’re expanding the population,” he said.

In a memo to the business school representatives, Harry Edwards, student body treasurer, said the committee voted against the proposal for many reasons including the fee paying for a large increase in administration.

“We think it would set a terrible precedent to have more than half of the administrative budget of an academic program be funded by student fee revenues,” he said in the statement. “This seems like a recipe for administrative bloat and spiraling program costs.”

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