Nearly every undergraduate student enrolled at Iowa State pays a minimum of $110 per semester in “computer fees.” It is the highest current student fee, and in the 2006 fiscal year, they brought in $6.02 million and in 2007 brought in $6.05 million.

Michael Bowman, director of ITS and member of the CAC for the past 15 years, said that the fees, also known as Computation Advisory Committee fees, vary for certain majors and enrollment status. He also said that there has been inconsistencies in the way the funds are used and recorded by the CAC. Additionally, the funding information is not readily accessible to the university community.

“Part of the agenda for this fall is making appropriate changes in terms of reporting and also looking how the fees themselves impact the use of technology in terms of instructional computing,” Bowman said.

Bowman said that the CAC took a genuine interest in these issues late last spring, but recent involvement by members of the Government of the Student Body have acted as a catalyst for the changes the CAC is going to potentially endure in the near future.

After being collected from students, the funds are pooled and delivered to the university CAC where it is then allocated to colleges based on formulas that take into consideration variables such as student credit hours and total enrollment. So, unlike many other student fees, not all colleges are considered equal.

Government of the Student Body President Brian Phillips, senior in political science, said there are a handful of colleges that receive additional funding by charging a higher CAC fee from students enrolled in their respective colleges.

The base rate for undergraduates is currently $110 per semester, but students majoring in engineering, computer science and business pay $218.50, $208.50 and $130, respectively. Phillips said the problems with these fees are not in the price, but in the fashion that each college records their spending of the money and making it readily available to the public.

“Each of the individual colleges, along with Information Technology Services, the library, and CAC itself is responsible for submitting final reports detailing what the money was spent on,” Phillips said. “We’d been looking back at reports of expenditures by colleges in comparison to the money that was allocated to them by CAC and it just wasn’t matching up.”

One of the warning signs that got the attention of GSB was during the 2006 fiscal year when the College of Business submitted “inconclusive” reports in which the funds initially allocated didn’t correlate with the spending recorded in reports back to the CAC.

After some investigation into the issue by GSB, it surfaced that the College of Business ended up using the surplus endured during the 2006 fiscal year toward anticipated needs in the 2007 fiscal year.

Bowman said there wasn’t a problem with the actions taken by the college, but the college should have made it clear what its intentions were.

“The situation with the Business College is that they anticipated a move from Carver to a new building so they felt like they needed to keep a surplus to make up for the changes in computer labs and things of that nature,” Bowman said. “The computer fee funds for one year didn’t really cover the needs, so you may carry over the funds from one year to the next to do a big project like that.”

Along with vague reporting provided by the College of Business, Bowman said the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences completely failed to submit reports.

“L.A.S. had not reported all of their expenditures during the 2006 fiscal year,” Bowman said. “There was definitely a missing report.”

Along with Phillips, Trevin Ward, GSB’s IT director and GSB representative on the CAC, has had a direct impact on the actions being taken by the CAC and the way it goes about its business. Although changes have only been drafted, Ward said the goals shared by both GSB and CAC lie in the fact that information is unavailable to students.

“The information that we would really like to see isn’t being extended out to the university level so students can’t see where the money that they’re paying is being used,” Ward said. “Students are paying these fees for themselves, it’s not tuition money or state funds or grants, it’s student money that is intended for student use and there needs to be accountability in every step of the process.”

Vice Provost for IT and Chief Information Officer James Davis agreed that since the CAC is funded by student fees, the university community should have full access to all its information.

“Everyone on CAC agrees so that everyone in our university community to see how those funds can be expended,” Davis said. “I really think this was a case where CAC was just doing business as they usually do it over the years, but this is a opportunity to stop and ask ‘can we be doing a better job with this?'”

Davis said guidelines brought forward by GSB will help the various entities that receive CAC funds report in a productive manner.

“One of the questions that was on the table was how to best structure our reports so that it makes sense when people look at it,” Davis said. “At the same time we don’t want to make data collection in the colleges too large of a challenge.”

Sree Nilakanta, associate professor of logistics operations and management information systems, currently serves as the faculty representative for the College of Business on the CAC and firmly believes that the best way for students to get informed is through their own student representatives.

“On the Computation Advisory Committee, each college has student representation, so we share all account details with student members,” Nilakanta said. “They [student representatives] also have voting power so they help determine how this money is spent. All they [students] have to do is contact their representative to obtain the financial information.”

Davis didn’t agree with Nilakanta on the issue of how information should be obtained, but agreed that student involvement is an essential facet to how the CAC determines where student money is spent. Instead of relying on student representatives, Davis said an updated Web site would be the best way to approach the issue of information access.

If the new guidelines are passed as expected at the CAC’s Nov. 29 meeting, the issue that originated with student fees will conclude with students being able to see where that money is used.

Phillips and Ward both said the 2007 fiscal year reports will hopefully be used as a dry run for the new CAC reporting guidelines.

“We want to make sure everything being done is in the clear, and we want to able to see where the money is going,” Phillips said. “There aren’t any other fees like the CAC fees, all other student fees go to major offices, and they’re not doled out to individual constituencies. As students we should be able to look at these things and there needs to be consistency in the reporting of how our money is used.”