Assessment is a hot word at corporations and colleges and universities these days. It is not to be used lightly, but it shouldn’t be a frightening word. Assessment is simply the concept of gauging how well you are achieving the goals you have set out for yourself or your organization. Once you have evaluated this, the logical next step would be to input corrective measures to better achieve your goals. From there the process repeats itself, theoretically until you reach 100% efficiency in achieving your goals. The important part is that excellence is striven for, whether or not perfection can ever be attained.

While participating in the roles of first Treasurer, and then President of the Undergraduate Student Government (USG), I was witness to the countless opportunities that the Student Activity Fee (SAF) provided to students and student organizations. I was also witness to many of the problems in providing that the fee achieved what it was intended for. There was a noticeable gap between the intent (idealistic) and the functional policy (practical). Further, during the last process of budgeting for the Student Activity Fee with the Ways and Means committee, it became clearer to me that USG’s level of involvement in providing these opportunities through the SAF was approaching the point where it was ready to discuss what it could provide rather than talking about what it had provided. This proactive change in student government involvement, along with the confidence that my work could improve the quality of student life to a level Michigan Tech had never seen, prompted me to perform this assessment and develop some preliminary tools to ensure the quality of the Student Activity Fee well beyond my duration at Michigan Tech.

Background

If you don’t have any sort of background in how the Student Activity Fee is administered, this short explanation will be helpful in understanding the rest of this report. In 1991, the Board of Control policy 9.18 was accepted, giving the administration of Michigan Tech the authority to assess (charge) a Student Activity Fee (separate from tuition) to all students for initiatives that would benefit student life and student activities. Responsibility for administration and oversight of this fee was given to the Undergraduate Student Government. To ensure proper use of community funds, the Office of Student Affiars, a division of Michigan Tech’s administration, requires that all student groups with a large portion of Student Activity Fee revenue (Special Budget Groups) have a Student Affairs representative as one of the organization’s advisors.

In June 2003, after this assessment process, administration and oversight was divided among the Undergraduate Student Government (USG) and the Graduate Student Council (GSC). Some additional tools may need to be developed to aid Graduate Student Council in their new involvement in the Student Activity Fee.

Criteria

The first step in assessing anything is to develop criteria by which you will assess your progress. This means that you have to know what your goals were. Each year, during budget hearings, Ways and Means has a discussion about what its goals are, and to some extent, how to go about achieving them. Usually, this involves a conceptual breakdown of the budgeted fee revenue between different groups of student organizations and student affairs programs. However, these things are relative to change every few years, and with leadership and knowledge rollover being one of the biggest problems for student organizations these days, it can change annually. I knew that there was something deeper and more concrete, so I started digging.

After saying the word “assessment” around the right people, I had become immersed in Student Affairs literature. Since the Student Activity Fee was a Student Affairs initiative, administered by student government, I set out to determine what Student Affairs professionals were attempting to produce through activities.

If your college experience could be described as a painting, and you considered that the fruits of your academic experience were the paint, then the work of Student Affairs would be the canvas and the easel. Student Affairs professionals would like to produce all the support systems for students as they travel through their college careers, and make them appear seamless. In providing this background of services, they seek to develop the whole person in the student, and provide the university with a sense of community. Activities tie into this concept by providing co-curricular engagement. Engaging in organizations and activities gives students an outlet to pursue ambitions other than what is stored in their curricula. It also makes them a part of the university community, which by no small coincidence, is directly linked to student success in college (Alexander Astin, “Student Involvement: A Developmental Theory for Higher Education”, 1984).

Eventually, I became aware that rather than just having collaborating groups involved in the process, there were actually different levels of intent for the groups. All of the groups used one shared resource, the Student Activity Fee, to benefit one shared audience, students. However, the goals of each area were different. My explanation for each is as follows:

1. University – As it says in objective 4.1 of the strategic plan, Michigan Tech would like to be “recognized for high quality student activities”. Essentially, by being located in the strategic plan, we can assume that this objective is one part of being recognized as a high quality university.

2. Student Affairs – The overall student affairs objective is to provide as sense of community and develop the whole person in its students.

3. Student Government – Based upon my knowledge of the tradition held in making allocations, the intent of student government is to provide opportunities to all students, organizations that have open membership, and/or that promote the organization/university outside of Michigan Tech.

4. Student Organizations/Programs – Develop some sort of Entertainment and/or Educational experience that the shared audience, students, will enjoy.

Student Activity Fee Assessment Flowchart

The next task was to define how you become recognized for high quality student activities. My theory is that at the top level of the university, the best way to become recognized for high quality student activities is to create a division of Student Affairs called Student Activities and give it some general fund support. Since that has occurred, I didn’t seek out answers to the opportunity provided portion of that question.

As I was reading some of the many pieces of Student Affairs literature that are out there, I came across one particular article that I’d heard referenced to many times before. “Developing Learning Communities”, written by Charles Schroeder, could be more or less considered gospel as far as Student Affairs professionals are concerned. It simply describes the four essential principles for learning communities. Schroeder lists the four essential principles as involvement, investment, influence, and identity.

A short explanation can be made for each. Involvement is simply the function of being active and physically doing things within the community. Investment is essentially caring for the community and using that as motivation for your actions. Influence is a responsibility for your physical and social environment, and is the cornerstone of student governance. Identity is what attaches you to a community.

After considering these concepts, I realized that the first three, involvement, investment, and influence were major characteristics in all of the activities that were funded by the Student Activity Fee. There were activities that exhibited more than one of these activities, however, each activity exhibited one predominant characteristic. This gave me three principles of community upon which to evaluate the activities.

From there, it was simple to divide the areas of the Student Activity Fee budget. Student Organizations had to be broken into three different categories based upon their activities: Programming, Service, and Governance. The following is an explanation of the budget categories and their predominant characteristics.

Student Organizations

Programming – Though there are only a few organizations defined as programming by the Office of Student Activities, almost all organizations participate in programming activities, whether it’s attending a conference or inviting a speaker on a special topic, the program is simply the activity which the group plans. These programming organizations are therefore fundamentally rooted in the Involvement of the activity and it’s participants.

Service – Service organizations are very involved as well, quite often participating in campus events and maintain similar structure to programming organizations. However, their designation comes from their focus to benefit others through their involvement. This makes the organization’s activities focused upon the Investment in its benefactors.

Governance – Governance organizations are also inherently different than other organizations due to the nature of their activities. Student government provides the opportunities for other organizations to get involved, while also representing its constituents through initiatives and actions. In this way, governance organizations are said to Influence the campus community.

NITE (New Innovations in Tech Entertainment)

NITE was created at the beginning of the 2001-2002 academic year. Its purpose was to provide new and exciting opportunities to Tech students, while also displaying to other programming organizations the realm of possibilities that can be explored. Also, a time focus was given to the hours of 10pm – 2am to provide an alternative to binge drinking, or at the least reduce the amount of drinks consumed by reducing the amount of time drinking. Its primary focus is the Involvement of Michigan Tech students.

Student Organizations Secretary

The Student Organizations Secretary is primarily concerned with handling some of the more complex financial operations of the Undergraduate Student Government and the Lode (campus newspaper), as well as providing an informational resource to anyone who becomes involved with the Student Organizations Office. With the increase in the Student Activity Fee in 2001, support for the Student Organizations Secretary was removed from general fund budget support and inserted into the SAF budget. In return for removing this financial responsibility, it was agreed that these freed up monies would in turn be used to support new student life initiatives and support staff. This position is considered an Investment in student life.

Family Weekend

Family Weekend is another new initiative that came about due to the increase in the SAF in 2001. This program provides students and their families with a number of opportunities to participate in the Michigan Tech community for a weekend. As well as involving many students and parents, this is considered a valuable retention tool as new students transition from being actively involved in their hometown and family communities and become involved in the campus community. Therefore, it is an Investment in Michigan Tech and it’s students.

Opportunities Fund

The Opportunities Fund was conceptualized and adopted into the SAF budget for the 2003-2004 academic year. It’s objectives are basically the same as the money allocated directly to student organizations, it simply gives an outlet to opportunities or new organizations created after budgeting time. Due to these similarities, the fund’s focus is in Involvement.

Reserve Fund

The Reserve Fund was created many years ago to separate monies from the Student Activity Fee that went unspent for a given year. This fund is sometimes given money directly from the Student Activity Fee income and sometimes not. It provides resources to replace or repair assets that are essential to the operations of a student organization. Because of this, it is considered an Investment in student organizations.

Tools

Now that it’s clear that we are assessing our ability to provide a sense of community, we need to develop tools for that assessment.

Opportunity

Very soon, it was apparent to me that there were two major things that were important to assessment. These two things are the opportunity provided by a contribution from the SAF and the success of that activity. Both of these can be evaluated at each level of intent.

To assess the opportunity provided, I developed three tools. The first tool focuses on the long-standing ideals and tradition of what the Student Activity Fee stood for.

Tier Assessment

The Tier Assessment, which is based upon these long-standing ideals of budget hearings, has a point system, and three focus areas. The focus opportunity areas answer three questions:

Is the activity or opportunity targeted towards all students (from a practical standpoint)?
Do all students have opportunity to produce the activity/does the host organization have open membership?
Does the opportunity or activity promote the organization/university outside the university community?

These areas can be considered participation, production, and promotion, respectively. I assigned two points to participation and production, whereas an opportunity that provides promotion receives only one point. This allows any opportunities provided by the SAF in the past to be classified in tiers 2-5. Activities that have been commonly rejected for funding from the SAF can be classified as tier 1 opportunities. The Opportunities Provided Form, which will guide you through this process, can be found in Appendix C.

Classifying all opportunities provided into tiers allows you to realize where your focus is. The tiers can be generalized into their most common roles.

1. Tier 5 – An opportunity produced by an open membership student organization targeted towards the entire student body that promotes the university/organization outside of Michigan Tech. Some examples of this are the International Parade and Spring Fling.

1. Tier 4 – An opportunity targeted towards the entire student body that is produced by an open membership student organization. Some examples include the comedy show put on by SEB and the Black History Month Celebration put on by the Black Student Association.

2. Tier 3 – Opportunity produced by an open membership student organization that promotes the university/organization outside of Michigan Tech. This tier is most commonly filled with conferences and competitions.

3. Tier 2 – Opportunity produced by an open membership student organization. This could consist of a number of internal activities for open organizations, including operating supplies and equipment.

4. Tier 1 – Opportunity that promotes the university/organization outside of Michigan Tech.

In the past, this classification has gone to denote activities that are partially supported by the university already, or that have a direct affiliation with an academic program. Examples include the Enterprise Program, Senior Design groups, and co-sponsored events between organizations and campus departments.

Ideally, all opportunities would fall into the fifth tier, but practically you can realize that a diverse amount of opportunities for student life will not all be lumped into the fifth tier. Internal contributions to student organizations are also important.

Budget Category Assessment

In addition to classifying opportunities into tiers, it might be helpful to look at them in more of a physical light. This tool is pretty much an offshoot of the Tier Principle. The categories developed for the budget template fall pretty easily into tier classifications. The following is a brief explanation of which tier the categories could fall into.

Equipment –An investment in an open organization would clearly be a 2^nd tier opportunity.
Projects and Activities – Could be a 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th, or 5^th tier activity. Dependent upon target participants (from a practical view), membership status of the organization, and what the exposure outside of campus is.
Conferences and Competitions – A 3^rd tier opportunity because of its ability to promote the university/organization outside of campus.
Miscellaneous – Usually used to group office supplies and other consumables used by an organization, this is also a 2^nd tier opportunity.

By focusing in on what budget areas receive the most funding, you will be using a close system to the tier principle. This may prove useful when thinking about budgets, since it focuses more on practical items than ideals.

Education and Entertainment Classification

The third tool is concerned more with entertainment and education development. Every produced activity has an entertainment or educational component, or both. All activities produced can be classified as having an active entertainment, passive entertainment, general education, or diverse education, or a combination of them. Once you have assessed the relative contributions to the education and entertainment aspects, and considered the success of these activities, you can decide if you want to shift the focus of your contributions to better serve student life. Also, some input from the Student Affairs staff should be considered, since they will have a good idea of what the student body needs.

The following are some functional definitions for the development categories.

Passive Entertainment – Going to a concert, comedian, lecturer, etc. where the intent is to benefit from being in the presence of the performer or performance

Active Entertainment – Physically participating in the activity yourself, e.g. playing in a Euchre tournament or playing in a Soccer Club game

General Education – Learning is integrated into the activity, for example, by going to a lecture held by your department or learning to give first aid

Diversity Education – Also involves integrated learning, but is geared more towards increasing awareness of social or cultural issues not common to this particular audience

Success

The second mode for assessment is determining the success of the activities or opportunities produced. In its simplest form, success can be measured by the attendance at an activity (product of the activity’s promotion) and the satisfaction of the participants. A deeper assessment could be taken of the impact that all these opportunities provide to the student body as a whole, for instance, gauging the personal development gained from a certain amount of diversity education experiences, or the impact on academic performance that increased involvement contributions had. However, in my opinion, that type of assessment would be both altogether too time consuming, and also content for a thesis in some sort of advanced study of Student Affairs.

Since, the activities and opportunities provided for the 2003-2004 year have not yet occurred, I had no way of gauging their success. It will be at the initiative of the Undergraduate Student Government and the Office of Student Activities to see that success evaluations take place this coming year. However, I did develop a simple activity evaluation for their use. It is found in Appendix H.

Distribution

Quite obviously, I performed the distribution step for the opportunity provided portion of the assessment for this year. So, for future use, I offer this as a distribution plan.

Opportunities Provided – When developing a conceptual plan for budget hearings, the Office of Student Activities and Student Affairs should be invited to a round table discussion to ensure that the Undergraduate Student Government has received enough input and guidance to successfully perform its task. The actual distribution is handled by the Ways and Means committee of the Undergraduate Student Government, immediately following budget hearings, and revised by the Treasurer based upon changes made by the general body of USG.

Activity Success Evaluation – A collaborative effort between the Undergraduate Student Government and the Office of Student Activities, using the Contact Program as a resource for distributing and receiving the success evaluations.

Contact Program – The Contact Program is an initiative that was developed to ensure good communication between the organizations that receive Student Activity Fee allocations, and the organization that administers the fee (Undergraduate Student Government). The basic idea is that there is one liaison from USG that serves as the first contact between the student organization or program, and all pertinent information is filtered to and from the organizations through this person. It creates a better working relationship between the organizations and USG, and also ensures that each USG member has a good knowledge of the SAF funding process, and each organization’s activities. Information is then filtered to the Office of Student Activities, who will actively try to promote the activities supported by the SAF.

Compilation and Evaluation

Compilation and evaluation of the results may be the most time consuming part of the assessment. It is really just the hands on part of the distribution step. One must take care to not construe the data so that it seems to say something that isn’t true. No assessment is going to be 100% accurate, and some items just cannot be accurately categorized. The important thing to remember is that while you are making an assessment, it doesn’t need to be the perfect assessment. If you spend too much time on meticulous details, you will lose sight of the practicality of what you are doing. Make decisions and then carry them through your entire process.

2003-2004 Data

All data from the 2003-2004 year can be found in the Appendices, following this outline:

Appendix A – Student Activity Fee Breakdown (By Organization)

Appendix B – Elements of Learning Community Assessment

Appendix C – Opportunity Provided Form

Appendix D – Tier Assessment 2003-2004

Appendix E – Budget Template

Appendix F - Subsidiaries Assessment (Using Budget Categories)

Appendix G – Entertainment and Education Development 2003-2004

Appendix H – Activity Evaluation Form

Appendix I – Activity Evaluation (Records)

Recommendations

From the Opportunities Provided portion of the Student Activity Fee Assessment for the 2003-2004 academic year, many things can be established as having been accomplished.

Since no data exists for the previous year, it is impossible to compare the two. However, as a participant in both years of budget hearings, I can assure you that though the 2003-2004 relative contribution to Diversity Education is approximately 15%, it is above and beyond what was given in the year previous. I attribute this to the intent of the Ways and Means committee to push ethnic/cultural events at budget hearings.

Also, the building up of student organizations was clearly defined as a priority for the 2003-2004 allocations. The tier focus came out to be 3.30. I evaluate this as a major contribution to the development of student organizations, both in the purchasing of their equipment and supplies, but also in the support of organizations participating in conferences and competitions, to further their cause and the university’s. This is quite obvious in allocations to Subsidiaries. Forty-five percent of Subsidiaries allocations were dedicated to these purposes (28% to conferences and competitions, 17% to equipment).

Based upon this assessment and my experience in the Undergraduate Student Government and other facets of student life, my recommendations for the budgeting of the 2004-2005 Student Activity Fee are as follows:

Shift Tier Focus towards 4^th Tier – This past year has seen significant contributions to developing student organizations. My feeling is that now is the time to send those organizations out into the campus community to contribute their diverse experiences to the student body. It is a student life goal to fill the calendar with events held by different student organizations, and USG is the first step along that path. I recommend taking an active role in promoting and endorsing those activities that your constituents have most notably enjoyed or are looking for. You can shift the focus of the SAF pretty simply. In the budget template used this past year, there were 4 categories: Equipment, Projects and Activities, Conferences and Competitions, and Miscellaneous. Equipment and Miscellaneous are two that I think can be lumped into one distinction, operating expenses. They are internally focused. I would recommend taking a percentage of the amount of money USG plans to allocate to Subsidiaries and dedicate it to operating expenses, and also a dedication to Conferences and Competitions. Make it less than the percentages that came out of this year, and you will cause the tier focus to rise.

Promote Diversity – Promoting diversity and giving money to it are two entirely different things. Right now, the events held on campus might be sufficient to give the university a sufficient amount of exposure to ethnic, cultural, gender, and other diversity. However, the promotion of these events is less than adequate. Promotion starts with subsidizing these events so that tickets are free, or reasonably cheap. It continues with working as a liaison between the group and the Office of Student Activities so that the group can be advised how to plan and produce the best quality activity. Promotion is also in the way you spread the word, talk to your friends. Many of these tasks are primarily left up to the group, but the extra energy you put into these events is what makes them great. Promotion should be accelerated for all activities, not just diversity, but it is most integral in their success.

Communicate Your Plan – There are a few groups that need to be aware of your plan for producing opportunities for student life. First, the Office of Student Affairs and the Office of Student Activities should be brought into your discussions on what you want to emphasize for the next year. Realizing that you, the students, have the ultimate power to decide where your money goes, take their advice seriously. You’re both trying to do the same thing, improve student life through activities and programs, it’s just possible that you’ll have different ideas of how to go about it. Secondly, the student organizations need to know what you’re looking for. They are more or less the laborers or your mission to provide activities. If you survey students, and find out that they want comedy shows, then you need to relay that to student groups. If there’s an incentive to see that in organization budgets, you’re going to get some takers. And lastly, but certainly not least, you must see to it that you’re getting input from students, and that there is a surefire method to inform them of all the opportunities that are available to them.

Research

From this assessment, new questions arise. Research opportunities into the areas of student success as relates to effects of the Student Activity Fee are endless. Below are listed some possible avenues for further studies.

Link contributions to the four elements of community to varied student success

Explore the level of collaboration of between each area of involvement in the Student Activity Fee opportunity process

Gauging the level of knowledge of Student Affairs operations at different levels of the university structure

Defining and performing an overall assessment of “being recognized for high quality student activities”, wherein the report would expound upon how being successful in this intent would correlate to the recognition of Michigan Tech as a high quality university

Explore how to evaluate the activities of Service and Governance organizations

Relate student satisfaction with student activities to student success

Determine the level of involvement of Michigan Tech’s students (how many students involved in an organization, contributions to organizations and activities), determine if it is satisfactory, and if it is not, develop measures to improve student involvement