At last night’s Michigan Student Assembly meeting, University Provost Teresa Sullivan announced that each student’s tuition will be spent more evenly across different academic fields starting this fall.
Currently, 75 percent of each student’s tuition goes to the department in which the student chooses to major. In the fall, that number will drop to 50 percent. The remaining half of each student’s tuition will fund his or her elective classes.
Sullivan said administrators hope the change encourages students to take more classes outside their majors and improves the quality of schools besides the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.
“One of the things I think this will do is to encourage deans in schools like arts and sciences and music, theatre and dance to offer more classes for non-majors,” she said.
After Sullivan’s presentation at the meeting, the assembly’s last of the semester, the body passed two resolutions.
The first resolution calls for a new check box to appear on the University’s admissions application for prospective students who identify as North African or Middle Eastern.
The check box resolution was pushed by Project: Check It, a group comprised of current and former students and led by recent University graduate Sirene Abou-Chakra, which aims to better represent certain groups within the University’s ethnic breakdown statistics. The region includes nations from Morocco to Iran.
Middle Eastern and North African students are currently grouped with white students in the admissions process. The resolution passed unanimously.
LSA junior Muhammad Alghanem, an MSA representative and a member of Project: Check, said the new option acknowledges that students from the Middle Eastern or North African region are not white.
The assembly also passed a resolution to give varsity athletes priority registration to register for classes.
Some assembly members said they felt this move would put too much emphasis on athletics at the University, instead of academics.
The resolution passed 23-3 with three people abstaining.
MSA President Sabrina Shingwani said she supported the resolution. She said the credit blocks, which determine when students can register based on how many credits they have, have been tightened in the past, giving fewer students earlier registration dates. That has put athletes at a disadvantage because of their rigorous practice schedules, she said.
MSA resolutions alone do not change University policies. They are passed to University administrators to show where the assembly stands on certain issues.