Call to Action: Decrease Club Dues
By Areeba Kamal & Mike Kobiela, in collaboration with GSB SA 2021.
For years, Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) clubs have asked students to pay high dues. Yet, clubs collectively have over $100,000 in their bank accounts, and access to multiple institutional sources of funding. Low-income GSBers have been gated from opportunities, while other students have paid hundreds of dollars more than they needed to in dues.
In Fall 2020, the GSB Student Association (SA) mobilized an effort to reduce clubs dues in light of lower-cost virtual programming and widespread economic duress. Ninety percent of clubs decided not to charge dues, while the remaining ten percent slashed dues in half. Now, it’s time to lower club dues permanently.
It’s true that dues are a fraction of the financial load GSB students have to shoulder. But lowering club dues is a meaningful step towards embracing our power to make this elite, expensive institution a smidgen more inclusive.
How We Experience Dues Today
“I remember walking around the club fair calculating how much it would cost to join clubs. I’m an international student, and I kept converting hundreds of dollars of dues into my local currency. Was I really going to spend a couple months’ worth of rent like this?” said one MBA2 we interviewed.
Another added, “I remember having to decide which clubs to pay for at the end of the Academic Adjustment Period, when social anxiety and recruiting frenzy were at an all-time high. I was shocked at how much it would cost to join clubs, but I didn’t want to be excluded from events and jobs.”
Some GSBers were confused by the volume of overlapping clubs: if you cared about investing, you were torn between Private Equity, Venture Capital, and Finance & Investment clubs. If you were into consumer tech, there were Tech, Product, and Consumer & Retail clubs. Plus, there were identity clubs and social events. Suddenly, that $45 per club turned into hundreds of dollars.
Did MBA2s who paid these dues get their money’s worth? The answers were, at best, ambivalent. “I kept being charged for t-shirts and tickets at clubs I’d already paid to join. Honestly, I paid dues to get newsletters,” said an MBA2.
Those who didn’t pay club dues had different regrets: “I am disappointed that when it was time to recruit new club leaders, many clubs only advertised the positions to their own listservs. I would have appreciated a shot at running a club for the benefit of my classmates, even if I didn’t have the budget to pay for it some months back.”
While a handful of clubs do waive dues for financially-constrained GSBers today, the process is opaque and tedious. Some clubs use Google Forms, others ask for an email to club-wide leadership, and many don’t have a formal procedure at all. For GSBers struggling to pay tuition on top of academic, professional, and extracurricular workload, securing exemptions on a club-by-club basis feels exhausting and embarrassing.
Why We Charge Dues in the First Place
Of course club leaders don’t mean to cause harm — and usually end up overcharging for club dues due to a lack of capacity, information, and administrative support.
Each Spring, a fresh lot of GSBers step into the ranks of club leadership, and are overwhelmed by an onslaught of decisions. There are nitty gritty details: Do we still have leadership vacancies to fill? How will stars and calendars align for a team kick-off? When is our first BBL? Who is writing the weekly newsletter? And there are existential questions: What’s our vision and mission? What’s our budget? What kind of culture will we build? How will we do things differently than last year’s leadership?
Amidst this chaos, it’s easy to charge the same inflated dues as the year prior without critically examining how much the club needs from its members.
Four Steps Towards Club Inclusivity
Thankfully, we have the power to reduce club dues for good. Here’s how.
1. Begin with institutional funding and existing balances
Student dues are one of at least five deep pockets of funding for clubs. Instead of peddling Eventbrite invites for classmates to shell out $45 per club, club leaders should first tap:
- Annual funds from GSB SA (via the Student Activities fee)
- Rolling funds from GSB SA (available for any event open to all students)
- University funding (e.g. career event funds, Alumni Association funds for events with GSB graduates, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion funds, etc.)
- Existing bank balances (including >$100,000 currently held across clubs)
Given access to all this capital, we encourage clubs to cap dues at $15 per year — that is if they need to charge dues at all.
2. Call it a dues-free year when you have the funds to cover your budget
While some clubs refused to share their financial status with us, most responded with data that showed they can make 2021–22 entirely dues-free.
For instance, the Tech, Private Equity, and Africa Business Clubs have bank balances ranging from $18,000 to $23,000. The Energy, WIM, Consumer & Retail, Healthcare and Finance & Investment clubs have roughly $5,000 each.
We encourage incoming club leaders to set up financial counseling sessions with Student Life to understand how much of their budget can be covered by a combination of existing balances and institutional funding.
3. Waive dues via a standard process for financially-constrained GSBers
Clubs that need to charge dues should offer a simple, standardized way to get a waiver. If a student cannot afford dues (Honor Code applies), they should still be able to join clubs without additional outreach on a club-by-club basis.
E.g., if your club uses EventBrite and charges $15 annually per member, create a dropdown menu with $15 for regular members and $0 for financially-constrained members. Anonymize the records, so economically challenged GSBers do not become second-tier citizens.
4. Be transparent with classmates about your club’s financial standing
Share with your members and SA reps how much money you have in the bank, what your upcoming expenses look like, and when applicable, why you need to charge dues and how exactly student contributions will be utilized.
Clubs are not corporations. Clubs exist to serve our community. No club needs to treat students as a source of revenue, or shroud its finances in secrecy.
This is Bigger Than Club Dues
Whatever we ended up paying in club dues might feel like a pittance against the avalanche of debt we have accumulated over months of passdown rents, weekend trips, and DoorDash orders. But this is bigger than club dues.
Every time we eek out additional dollars to climb a social ladder or access professional networks, every time we inflate passdown fees, every time we ask our peers for club dues before considering other avenues, every time we murmur “whatever, it’s all debt anyway,” we add to the mountain of economic misery our GSB class has to reckon with.
We have an obligation to make the GSB more inclusive. Let’s start with club dues.
