UB Athletics announced last week its decision to cut four sports programs, effective fall 2017. In the days following, students, athletes and parents questioned the decision and its announcement. UB Athletics has a $32 million budget and will save an estimated $2 million annually from the cuts.
The cut will not reduce the fees students pay for Division-I athletics at UB, leaving the question many people in the UB community are asking: what will the money go toward?
We asked students what they would put the money toward if they were in administrator’s shoes. These are the top items on the “student budget wish-list.”
“I’m a transfer student and at my last school we had book vouchers in addition to campus cash and dining dollars, they helped a lot,”Wilform said. “Instead of paying thousands of dollars for books – because that’s how much my books were this semester – I only had to pay like $200 or $300.”
“After its remodeling, Capen was super nice but only if you’re not going to go to the one floor of Capen, I feel like Lockwood hasn’t had any resources allocated to that,” Gelber said. “It’s the same thing with the Law Library, you have undergraduate students going there also so I feel like definitely getting more resources for better equipment for libraries besides Capen.”
“I used to live in the dorms and in the summertime, you can’t survive in that, maybe try to get some A.C. installed up in there,”Brehon said.
“I’m EOP so I have my own specific adviser but other general major students, sometimes their advisor has so many people that they can’t really get the advisement that they want. Maybe it should go towards more things like that and more funding toward things like C-Step and STEM programs.”
“They spent a whole bunch of money on Alumni [Arena] and it’s just still packed,” Saar said. “I feel like going to the gym is important to a lot of people and if there are too many people there, it makes them not want to go.”
Sarah Crowley is the senior features editor and can be reached at sarah.crowley@ubspectrum.com
