"There's no way that much money should be left over. It's absolutely preposterous," said Director of Campus Center, Associate Dean of Students and official liaison to the student government Sam Haynes. "It's alarming to me."
Since Haynes came to Amherst College in 2000, he has never seen such a "tremendous" amount of carryover, which rarely amounts to more than $20,000, he reported. In fact, the previous semester's figure of nearly $30,000, he said, "knocked [his] socks off."
Treasurer Richa Bhala '07 echoed the dean's concerns, noting that each semester's budget is intended to serve the students on campus at the time that the funds are earmarked. "It's their student activities fee, it should be spent on their activities right now," she claimed. "And carryover defeats that."
Haynes raised questions about AAS' handling of the budget. "In my opinion as advisor, that suggests two things," said Haynes. "Student groups are not spending the money they're being given, or the AAS is doing a terrible job budgeting."
Last year's AAS Treasurer Ian Shin '06 pointed to another option. "The other possibility would be that our student activities fee is too high, and there's just too much money floating around," he said.
Haynes confirmed that the Amherst College student activities fee is the largest among its NESCAC peers. Fixed at one percent of the total tuition, the fee was $420 for this school year. That amounts to about $320,000 handed over to the AAS every semester, nearly $130,000 of which must be budgeted to clubs beforehand.
The difficulty clubs have with planning a semester in advance explains a certain amount of the carryover, but not the spike in recent years.
Shin argued that the budget problems could be traced to specific groups. "I am one to blame the clubs rather than any structural problems," said the ex-treasurer, "just from seeing what I've seen in the last couple years and people's bravado requesting money."
Cultural affinity groups tend to accrue the greatest amount of unspent funds, owing to their need to plan major events and speakers far in advance. The Chicana/o Caucus and Asian Students Association, for instance, did not spend any of their budgets-more than $5,500 between them.
Club sports and publications, on the other hand, tend to have reliably fixed costs. Consequently, such groups rarely have issues with missing their budget.
Bhala, though, hesitates to lay the blame on certain clubs. "The thing is, different people are requesting money and different people are spending it," she explained. "It really is a leadership issue and it changes every year. That's the problem when you're on a college campus."
"The senators are equally vulnerable to the same problems," Bhala continued, pointing out that close to 80 percent of the senators' fund went unspent last semester. "That's just indicative of the larger problem."
Specific funding policies, however, may explain why so many events included in the budget fail to actually materialize. At present, the Budgetary Committee (BC) initially funds only 50 percent of all major speakers, with the hope that groups hosting the speakers will find other sources of funding on campus and return to the AAS if necessary.
Often groups consider that initial 50 percent to be a failure, however, and give up on the event, leaving the thousands allotted to them untouched. She hopes increased communication will encourage clubs' persistence or at least allow the AAS to re-allot funds that groups have no intention of spending.
More communication between the BC and clubs could also alert them to unspent funds still in their budget at the end of the semester. The nine-person committee is already stretched thin, though, with weekly discretionary requests.
"Carryover is so bad," suggested Bhala, "that it might even be worth senators' time to make a separate AAS auditing committee to more regularly go through clubs' finances."
With or without that extra oversight, though, the BC will have the unprecedented carryover on their minds as they sit down in the first weeks of April to budget for the coming fall.