Morgan Fritz, sophomore in political science, and Jacob Schrader, junior in economics and political science, are running for Student Government president and vice president on a three-point platform.

The platform breaks down to affordability, campus climate and sustainability. Each key area has smaller subsections that lay out Fritz and Schrader’s plans to improve Iowa State University (ISU).

Affordability

When it comes to college affordability, Fritz and Schrader are proposing the implementation of Income Share Agreements, a one-day orientation option, an Open Education Resources (OER) expansion and an official ticket resale option.

Income Share Agreements would be an option for students to contract with the university to pay back a certain percentage of their future earnings for a fixed period after graduation.

“Purdue tried to make a lot of noise, they kind of did a media blitz about when they started,” Schrader said. “So that was when I saw it last year. […] It’s kind of an idea we’re familiar with through the media, and Purdue does a pretty good job of explaining it. It makes college more affordable, it seems like more of a trend, Utah’s doing it now. So we want Iowa State to be at the front of that trend.”

Additionally, Fritz and Schrader want to create an option for students who are attending orientation to have a one day, simplified choice.

“I worked this summer as a Cyclone Aide,” Fritz said. “The one-day orientation is coming from the same point of, there are a lot of students and families who might not be able to afford the two-day experience. It’s $50 per person to spend the night in the dorms, you might have to take two days off of work, some people have to come without their parents if their parents can’t take that much time off. So, I just thought it would be [nice], to have an option like that, other schools do that as well.”

OER are sets of text, media and other digital assets that are freely accessible and openly licensed for use. 

Fritz and Schrader want to expand the initiative and have more professors commit to using OER in the classroom and the grant program that incentivizes professors to make their materials available for free or low cost to students.

“My first year in Student Government was when this was first proposed by the library, I don’t know if I was co-sponsor on that but I certainly voted for the resolution asking the library to look into a grant program, and then last year I wrote the resolution with the expansion of it, and it’s just kind of been something that Student Government supported for a while,” Schrader said. “[…] OER is something that I think ever since we’ve known each other, that’s something we’ve worked on.”

Within affordability is Fritz and Schrader’s idea for an official ticket resale platform for students to easily sell and buy student tickets.

Currently, there is no way to officially re-sell unwanted student tickets to Iowa State sporting events with a lot of tickets being sold from student to student on a Facebook page.

“People have gotten scammed before,” Fritz said. “[…] It’s just something of that, if it could be set up, that would be great.” 

Fritz said this program would be set up through Iowa State Athletics somehow.

“If administrative costs had to say ‘Sell your ticket for 20 bucks,’ and they had to take a dollar of that,” Fritz said. “Just an idea.”

Campus Climate

Campus climate is another key point of Fritz and Schrader’s campaign. They decided to break it down into four smaller ideas: Cultural Competency Training expansion, expanded menstrual product locations, implementing a “Rooney Rule” for naming buildings and hosting “Know Your Rights” sessions.

Fritz said they wanted to expand the Cultural Competency Training to students.

“Not exactly sure what that would look like, but potentially like how people take the AlcoholEDU class before coming to school,” Fritz said. “That could be something that is a multi-year thing. We’re trying to make it a long term thing instead of just a band-aid solution that’s just going to fix it for now, and then we can forget about it. We want it to be something that’s long term, creates a lasting impression, legacy.”

As well, their campaign wants to expand the locations on campus that offers free menstrual products for students.

“The four main issues found in the Campus Climate Survey were that women do not feel safe on campus, […] minorities do not feel welcome, LGBTQIA+ individuals feel attacked and conservative students feel silenced,” Fritz said. “[…] That one was just kind of a good idea. As a girl, it’s super helpful to have that sort of product provided and some people might not be able to access that on their own if they can’t afford it.”

The products would be available in gender-neutral and family bathrooms to ensure everyone has access, Schrader said.

The Rooney Rule is a current National Football League policy that requires league teams to interview ethnic-minority candidates for head coaching or senior operation jobs.

Fritz and Schrader want to bring this idea to campus and implement it when it comes to naming buildings.

“There’s a committee for that,” Fritz said. “They work on naming buildings and the Student Body president sits on that. That’s just something about changing the process of how they do it.”

They said they would like at least one female and one candidate from a marginalized group to be considered when it comes to the naming.

“There’s literally not formal rules on this thing,” Schrader said. “The committee has no formal rules currently […] when we sit down we need to make sure that happens.”

“Know Your Rights” sessions are another idea of Fritz and Schrader’s.

“The Dean of Students office has a packet about students’ rights, and that information is already in there, and it’s online it’s kind of hard to see, so any messaging we give out to students would also provide that link,” Schrader said. “It currently already exists, I just think many people don’t know about it.”

Hosting sessions during orientation is the goal but, with competing interests, just getting the information out there is good, Schrader said.

“We just want students to be able to know what their rights are,” Fritz said. “Whether that’s a session or information disbursed, an email sent out. I think any of those.”

Sustainability

Sustainability is the last point of Fritz and Schrader’s campaign. They broke it down into three ideas in total: expanding composting, supporting the plan to reduce carbon emission by 50 percent in the next 10 years and expanding bio-fuel and electric bus use.

“Our first idea that we had was to expand composting,” Fritz said. “The university currently has very good infrastructure for that, they use it for the compost for agriculture projects. But something that I have researched at other universities is they compost the paper towels from their bathrooms and I think that’s something that could potentially be done here at Iowa State.”

The implementation would involve putting another bin in the bathrooms for just paper towels, Fritz said. The paper towels at Iowa State are already unbleached so that would not be an issue.

Fritz and Schrader’s composting plan extends outside of the bathrooms as well, even reaching dining.

“Another thing that I’ve noticed is in the food courts,” Fritz said. “When you get your little dishes, they’re compostable, but they just go in the trash. So that gets taken to the Ames Trash Facility and burned. We have some of the things in place for it, but the follow-through isn’t there.”

Last year, facilities planning and management outlined plans to reduce carbon emissions at ISU by 50 percent within the next 10 years.

“The plan that [facilities planning and management] has to reduce emissions by 50 percent over the next 10 years at no increased cost to students,” Fritz said. “That is 50 percent better than what we have right now. Also, I think we should take that opportunity and do it.”

Schrader has been on the CyRide Board of Trustees and has overseen the expansion of bio-diesel buses and the addition of two battery-electric buses coming soon to CyRide’s fleet.

“So those two electric buses we got take 122,561 pounds of carbon out of the air every year,” Schrader said. “The reason we got those grants is because Student Government and the city and the county and we got together and we wrote, we got our messaging straight. I wrote one and the other trustee wrote a resolution in Student Government and passed it and we sent that to the Federal Government.”

Schrader said he attributes success to strong local support.

More information about the Fritz and Schrader campaign can be found on their campaign website.