Stony Brook graduates are earning some of the highest salaries in the country.

Stony Brook Alumni are rolling in it.

Stony Brook University is the highest ranked SUNY campus in the 2010-2011 PayScale College Salary Report, an annual ranking of universities based on the mid-career salaries of its graduates.

This year’s report places Stony Brook 23^rd out of 374 state schools nationwide, good enough for the top seven percent.

Stony Brook graduates actually earn a bit less than their Binghamton University counterparts in their first five years of employment ($49,200 compared to $49,700). But Stony Brook’s median mid-career salary of $90,800 is higher than Binghamton’s and many other notable public universities, like the University of Michigan ($90,200), University of Texas-Austin ($87,500) and UNC-Chapel Hill ($82,900).

Compared to other universities, Stony Brook graduates have managed to weather the economic storm better than most. While Stony Brook’s ranking is down from 2008’s high mark of 18^th, we actually jumped from 24^th in 2009. In comparison, Binghamton fell from 11^th in 2008 to 36^th in 2009, then to 39^th this year.

Like the ranking, Stony Brook’s mid-career median salary was also up from last year, one of only four schools in the top 25 to grow from year to year in that category.

While the general downward trend in median salaries doesn’t come as a big shock in the current economic climate, it is sharply contrasted with rising tuition costs at many universities. Essentially, today’s college students are paying more to get degrees that are in turn earning them less.

More to come from Think Magazine when the school year begins in one month.

President Stanley joins a growing list of university presidents who have spoken out in favor of the DREAM Act

Stony Brook University President Samuel Stanley joined the growing list of university presidents and administrators calling for the passage of the DREAM Act.

In letters to Senators Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C), President Stanley joins the presidents of the Universities of Buffalo and Rochester; Cornell, Fordham, Syracuse and New York Universities; and the chancellors of both SUNY and CUNY in calling for comprehensive immigration reform.

“We would…like to take this opportunity to affirm our strong support for federal legislation that would provide a pathway to legal residency—and remove barriers to higher education—for thousands of students who are not legal residents of this country, through no fault of their own,” reads the letter.

The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act enjoys broad support among lawmakers and citizens alike. A poll released earlier this summer suggests that as much as 70 percent of the country favor the provisions included in the DREAM Act.

Those provisions include the creation of a pathway to citizenship for students who were brought to the United States as children and never received proper documentation. In order to obtain legal residency, students would be required to complete some college or enlist in the military, live inside the law, and pay a fine.

Additionally, the act would give states the freedom to offer in-state tuition to undocumented students, many of whom have lived in their home states for most of their lives. An ambiguous provision in a 1996 bill sought to outlaw benefits like lower in-state tuitions for undocumented immigrants, but 11 states, including New York, passed their own legislation that offered in-state tuition to immigrants if they met certain requirements.

“We urge you to include the bipartisan 2009 DREAM Act,” says the letter, signed by President Stanley and Chancellor Zimpher. “This legislation will correct an injustice perpetuated upon thousands of American students and ultimately will benefit our country.”

Time is not on the side of supporters of the DREAM Act. The bill is currently part of a larger comprehensive immigration reform bill that is, overall, much more contentious than the DREAM Act. Unless supporters find enough allies to bring DREAM to a vote as a standalone bill, it is unlikely to pass before the November midterm elections. And if the results of those elections go as expected, it’s unlikely there will be enough support in the next Congress to pass it at all.

But pressure to pass the DREAM Act is growing, as more and more outside voices lobby for action.

“It is the right thing to do and should be done now,” reads the letter.

Yet despite the massive undertaking, there was never any disclosure made to the students that the census was being filled out on their behalf. Nor does it seem there was any desire on the part of the university to engage and involve the campus community in the process at all.

Census officials from the local Ronkonkoma field office were provided with records of every student living in dormitories on campus, according to Alan DeVries, Associate Director of Residential Programs.

“They came with an authorization for specific data contained in our housing database and I provided them with rosters that did not include student ID,” he said via email.

The census, which is conducted every ten years, is a series of questions aimed at determining just how many people are currently residing in each state, as well as the demographic makeup of the nation. Figures compiled by the U.S Census Bureau dictate the distribution of over $400 billion in federal funding, as well as representation in Congress.

Traditionally, the bureau mails census forms to every home address in the country. Families then fill out one form and mail it back to their regional office. But for college students living away from home, the process is different. Instead of being counted on their parents’ census forms, students are usually counted using the census’ “group quarters operation.”

“We started the group quarters program for people who live in places not considered housing units,” said Patricia Valle, an Assistant Regional Manager at the New York regional census center. That includes places like nursing homes and prisons in addition to colleges and universities. Unlike the standard ten question census form mailed to millions of homes, the group quarters census form asks for less information and is used to gather accurate counts quickly. The form asks for name, age, date of birth, race or origin and gender.

The option of conducting a group quarters enumeration instead of door to door enumeration is left up to individual campuses, according to Valle. Since the group quarters method relies on official—and, generally, confidential—records kept by the university, they must obtain authorization from the administration. Often, universities actually prefer the group quarters method, says Valle, as the prospect of dozens of census workers patrolling dormitories for days raises concerns about security and privacy.

“We ask each administration ‘What is the best way to enumerate on a college campus?’” said Yolanda Finley, a spokeswoman for the New York regional census office. “The directive on how to enumerate would have to come from the university.”

According to university spokeswoman Lauren Sheprow, however, Stony Brook was never given any alternative to the group quarters process.

“At no time was the University offered the opportunity to use any approach other than a group census,” she said via email. “Had the option been presented to do it another way we would have implemented it, but that was not the case.”

But those claims are strongly disputed by the regional census office.

“There were many conversations,” said Valle. “We offered the option of doing this door to door.” If anything, she added, the census would have recommended direct communication with the campus community.

“We always prefer to go door to door,” she said.

“A recommendation was made by administrators to conduct a group quarters enumeration and not go door to door,” added Finley.

Valle said that conversations were held with Alan DeVries on multiple occasions, dating back to last year.

“In September ’09 we began identifying natural targets for group quarters operations,” said Valle. From there, advance units were dispatched to begin laying out the framework at each group quarters location. At Stony Brook, a coordinator was dispatched to campus in February to prepare for the census.

DeVries was the point of contact for the census this year, but it was unclear whether the decision to use the group quarters method came from him or someone else at the university.

The biggest question remains why the enumeration process was kept a secret. There appears to have been no significant effort made by the university to inform students that they were being counted. After speaking with roughly 100 students who reside in the dorms, exactly zero knew that the census was ever here.

Will Apple's newest gadget change the way we attend college?

There’s a futuristic scene in the movie The Time Machine in which an elementary school, circa 2030, is on a field trip to the New York Public Library. The students aren’t carrying pad and paper though, or even one of those audio devices for guided tours. Instead, each has what looks like a glass pane (we’re told later it’s really a “microscanner”) strapped over his or her shoulder roughly the same size of…well, of an iPad.

The impact that Apple’s latest gizmo will have on education is yet to be seen. But barely two weeks since we got our hands on a device, its clear that the iPad has the potential to fundamentally change how students attend college.

The concept behind the iPad has been tried before, with little to no success. Other computer companies introduced swiveling tablet PCs years ago, targeting the college market with features meant to make note taking and other academic endeavors easier. But none of them took hold.

Apple’s foray into the market is different. For starters, it’s Apple. The company’s younger, loyal fan base and aggressive marketing of college students is what led to their line of laptops becoming as omnipresent as Frisbees and Obama stickers on our nation’s quads.

The iPad also benefits from incredible technology. I don’t know enough about microprocessors and megawatts and gigawhatevers to speak authoritatively about the technical aspects of the iPad, but having used one for two weeks now I can report that it feels fast, its easy to use and can do just about everything I need it to do in a classroom.

Universities are quickly adjusting to the new market of tablet devices as well, and are taking a wide range of approaches. Princeton University made headlines when they publically banned the iPad within its ivy gates, citing potential issues with their wireless network. Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania will be handing out iPads to their entire incoming freshman class this fall, and George Fox University will give students an option between a Macbook and an iPad for their freshmen.

Both schools have expressed hope that devices like the iPad will reduce the number of textbooks needed by students and make other common academic necessities—PDF files, PowerPoint presentations, online components like Blackboard—available all in one place.

The textbook question is probably the most uncertain. If there is going to be a killer app on collegiate iPads, it is going to be whether the largest producers of textbooks embrace the new format.

So far, the process has been slow. Barnes & Noble, the biggest seller of textbooks in the world, runs many of the nation’s largest university bookstores on college campuses, including here at Stony Brook. They have offered digital textbooks since before the rise of digital eReaders like Amazon’s Kindle or the Sony eReader.

“We have sold digital textbooks since the early 2000s,” said Jade Roth, the Vice President of Books at Barnes & Noble College Booksellers. “But there has not been a great deal of sales.”

The Famous Windmill at Stony Brook Southampton

Additional reporting by Katie Watt 

Facing yet another round of state budget cuts, Stony Brook University took the drastic step of announcing that by summer’s end, the Stony Brook Southampton campus would no longer operate as a semi-independent college, leaving the school’s 500 students to find a new university by the fall. 

“Everything will continue until August 31,” said University President Samuel Stanley. “But after that time, this won’t be a residential campus any further.” 

The news was met with anger, sadness and frustration from the campus community, a close-knit group of students and faculty. Students were given no notice of the university’s decision until an article was published on the hyper local online news site 27east.com the night before the official announcement. President Stanley began his remarks by apologizing for the way the campus found out about the news, saying that it was the intention of the administration to make the announcement themselves on Thursday. 

That did little to quiet students though. Many in the audience demanded to know why the decision-making process was kept a secret. The administration has been aware of the budget cuts for many months, and the discussions about possible cuts at Southampton had been ongoing for weeks. 

“It just happened so quickly, I really don’t know how I was supposed to react,” said Elliott Kurtz, a freshman at Southampton. 

“I found out about this at 9 o clock last night. I thought it was a joke,” said Amanda Sylvester, a sophomore. “We were never asked. We were never given the opportunity to try and change this.” 

The effective closure of the 81-acre campus will save an estimated $6.7 million per year, or approximately 20% of the total amount of the most recent cuts to Stony Brook, according to Stanley. Administration officials also made it clear that Southampton cuts were a last resort, having already trimmed the budget elsewhere. The main campus has endured numerous cuts since the current state budget crisis began in 2008, and the Manhattan campus was cut in half as well, from two floors to one. 

None of this was any comfort to students, who charged that the salaries of the administrators on the stage could make a serious dent in the $6.7 million needed annually to keep Southampton open. President Stanley alone makes $650,000 a year, and the combined salaries of those on stage totaled over $1.4 million based on 2008 figures. 

There was also animosity over the number of visits paid to Southampton by President Stanley. He estimated that he had made the hour-long trip between three and five times since he began at Stony Brook in July, but students didn’t sound convinced with those estimates. 

“Its hard to say how much he actually fought for us because we didn’t see any of that process,” said Kurtz. 

The timing of the administration’s decision is particularly tricky for students who are not graduating this year. All Southampton students will be welcomed at the main campus, but transferring to another university will be difficult, especially since many deadlines have already passed. At NYU, Penn State and Cornell for example, deadlines for transfer students passed as long ago as February 1. Other universities, like Hofstra, accept transfer applications on a rolling basis but encourage early applications. Albany and Binghamton, both fellow SUNY campuses, are still accepting transfer applications.

Stop the presses. That is what the Statesman faces in the wake of massive USG budget cuts.

The Statesman, Stony Brook University’s oldest newspaper dating back to the Oyster Bay campus in the late 1950s, is facing the biggest cut in USG funding in it’s 53 year history.

The Undergraduate Student Government budget for the 2010-2011 academic year, which was approved by the Senate Tuesday evening, reduces the Statesman’s USG line budget to $2,500 from an allocation last year of over $27,000.

That will be a steep and painful cut the paper will have to endure if they do not recoup some of the lost funding. Last year, despite substantial revenue generated from the sale of ads, the paper was operating at a $39,000 loss according to the paper’s business manager Frank D’Alessandro.

“We were operating at a loss the previous year too, but not as bad,” he said.

The cut has Statesman Editor-in-Chief April Warren and the rest of the student staff questioning how to further cut costs and minimize the damage.

“The Statesman has been looking into going weekly,” said Warren. “We’ve asked Frank [D’Alessandro] to crunch the numbers.”  The paper currently puts out two issues per week.

Reducing the frequency of publication would be just the latest in a series cost cutting maneuvers for the Statesman. In the last year, the paper reduced the circulation of each issue by 1000 copies, they eliminated their paid advertising staff position, D’Alessandro took a pay cut, and expenses like travel costs that had previously been covered by the paper now must be paid out of pocket by the student editors and writers.

But the USG argues that even with little or no funding from student activities fees, the paper should be able to put out a quality paper at least once a week.

“If the Press can operate with $40,000 every other week, the Statesman should be able to get by with $80,000,” the approximate amount generated by advertising each year, said one USG source who is familiar with the budget process but wished to remain anonymous because the budget is not yet finalized.

Other campus publications like The Press and The Patriot were granted budgets at the same level or slightly higher than this year’s. And the online news site The Independent is seeking USG funding for the first time. Think Magazine does not currently receive USG funding.

“The fact that they are unable to function properly means they haven’t done a good job managing their money,” the USG official continued.

The cut may have been particularly severe because The Statesman failed to schedule a budget hearing, which would have allowed the staff to explain their financial situation to a member of the USG budget committee in person.

“That was a huge oversight on our part,” admitted Warren.

But one USG representative, again wishing to remain nameless until everything was finalized, cited that as an example of a feeling of entitlement.

Dr. C. N. Yang will likely have his name placed on the newest residence hall, according to multiple sources.

The new residence hall in Roosevelt Quad will be the largest single dorm on campus. So it will take a deserving individual to lend his or her name to the new building.

The honor will likely fall to Chen Ning Yang, a distinguished professor emeritus and a winner of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics. He served as the Albert Einstein Professor of Physics at Stony Brook University for 33 years, from 1966 to 1999.

Betty Gasparino, the assistant to the director of the C.N Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics, is familiar with the contributions made by Yang to the university.

“I’m not surprised,” she said when informed of the decision to name the building Yang College. “It should be [named for him].”

Dr. George Sterman, the director of the CNYITP, confirmed that he had heard Yang was under consideration for becoming the namesake for the newest residence hall.

Campus Residences also dropped a clue on their website. A pdf file posted online that lists special living options erroneously placed a “Yang College” on the lists for 24-hour quiet dorms and substance-free living.

While all signs seem to point to Yang, the final decision on naming the new building is still weeks away. There are still several steps that the university will have to take before Yang’s name can be officially placed on the building, and Sterman suggested that approval would also have to be obtained from SUNY officials in Albany.

SUNY spokesman David Henahan was not immediately available for comment.

The PDF file that lists a "Yang College"

University spokeswoman Lauren Sheprow would not confirm that Yang’s name has the backing of university officials, but she was surprised and unaware that Yang’s name was already being used on university documentation.

“It would be unfortunate for unofficial publicity to impact the outcome in any way,” said Sheprow in an email to Think.

The timing of the official announcement may be linked to this year’s Stars of Stony Brook gala, an annual fundraising event held in New York City. C. N. Yang is this year’s honoree.

John S. Toll, Stony Brook University’s first president, brought Yang to Stony Brook from Princeton University in the mid 1960’s to help create and direct an Institute for Theoretical Physics.

“In my judgment, the single most important development that established the State University of New York at Stony Brook was the decision of Professor C. N. Yang to accept the Einstein Professorship of Physics at SUNY Stony Brook,” said Toll in a letter in 1991.

“After more than 25 years at Stony Brook, Professor Yang has continued to be, by far, the most valuable member of the university community,” he added.

Before coming to Stony Brook University, Yang was a postdoctoral fellow, then full time professor at Princeton University, working under the supervision of J. Robert Oppenheimer. During his 17 years at Princeton, he took a year off to work at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1953 to 1954.

When Oppenheimer announced his retirement as director of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, he recommended Yang as his replacement. Yang turned down the offer and left for Stony Brook a year later.

Yang has been recognized repeatedly for his achievements in the world of physics. He won a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1957, and while at Stony Brook won a National Medal of Science in 1986, and a Benjamin Franklin Medal in 1993.

The new building will accommodate 600 beds and is scheduled to open in time for the Fall 2010 semester.

Additional reporting by Alicia Kanauer

Students lined the hall outside of President Stanley's office to protest PHEEIA and tuition hikes

Days after staging protests on campus as part of the national March 4 Day of Action, a small group of students at Stony Brook University sat down in the hallway outside of President Stanley’s office for hours and begged passersby for spare change to cover the rising costs of tuition.

Kevin Young and Nick Eaton (who is a contributing writer for Think) organized the event today, and were accompanied by roughly a dozen other students with jars and signs.

“I can’t afford to pay for tuition,” said James Ging, a freshman Engineering Sciences student. Ging’s concerns are with differentiated tuition, which would set varying tuition costs based on departments within the university.

“PHEEIA is going to make it harder for students to pay for tuition, especially for the engineering students,” he said.

PHEEIA, or the Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act, is the SUNY-backed proposal to reinvent the tuition model for the 64 member campuses that comprise the State University of New York. One potential affect of PHEEIA would be the implementation of differentiated tuition.

The students timed their protest to coincide with a press conference with President Stanley for campus media. President Stanley did not step outside his office to address the protestors, but several campus media stopped on their way out to speak with students.

During the press conference, President Stanley was asked about these student protests, including the one that was ongoing on the other side of the wall.

“I take it very seriously, obviously.” He said. “Whenever the students are speaking, I’m listening and I hear what they have to say.

“Hot air. Empty rhetoric,” says Nick Eaton. “If President Stanley was really interested in student protests, he wouldn’t send the chief of police outside and charge us with disorderly conduct.”

Campus police were dispatched to the Administration building when the students arrived. According to Ging, at the offset of the protest, there were five officers in the hallway with just 8 students.

Robert Lenahan, the chief of police for the University Police Department, was stationed outside the door. He would periodically step inside the office and speak with representatives from the president’s office.

According to Eaton, the plan was to have two shifts of protestors, one for before the press conference and one afterwards. After the arrival of the university police however, they “refused to leave on principle.”

“This event was supposed to be small and shed light on PHEEIA,” said Eaton. “It was escalated by the presence of the university police department.

The University Police Department was not immediately available for comment.

March 4 Day of Action at Stony Brook from THiNK Magazine on Vimeo.

Ahead of a nationwide day of action on March 4, hundreds of students at Stony Brook University took to the Student Activities Center Plaza on Wednesday to protest budget cuts and tuition increases recently proposed by the State University of New York.

Colorful signs and rhythmic chants lured passersby into the rally, which featured speakers from the United University Professionals and the student body.

After almost an hour on the SAC Plaza, the protest organizers took the rally mobile. A group of roughly 75 students marched to the Administration building loop to board a rented school bus that took them to the Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology complex where university President Samuel L. Stanley was wrapping up a meeting.

Students continued the protest at CEWIT for another hour, with heavy police presence looking on. President Stanley emerged from the building and was bombarded with chants demanding his support for keeping tuition costs low and fighting budget cuts. After quickly taking a letter presented to him by one protester, Stanley was ushered to a car and back to campus.

SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher was also at the meeting at CEWIT, but left shortly before protesters arrived.

The rally had been organized to shed light on proposals by the state and SUNY administrators to overhaul the tuition process at the 64 campuses that comprise SUNY. Those proposals could nearly double the current tuition rates in 10 years, in smaller annual increments.

Expensive purchases, like ambulances, are paid in large part by undergraduate students.

Your professor is in the middle of a lecture when he suddenly begins having severe chest pains and fears he is having a heart attack. Someone dials 911. An ambulance is dispatched, and within minutes, he’s on his way to the hospital. Everyone in the lecture hall probably took it for granted that a 911 call would receive this response. But whose ambulance responded, and who paid for that ambulance ride? The ambulance was likely operated by the Stony Brook Volunteer Ambulance Corps (SBVAC), and as for who paid for it, that answer may surprise you: if you’re an undergraduate student, it was financed in large part by the Student Activity Fees you and your classmates pay every semester.

The idea for this article came into my mind as some friends and I, all relatively familiar with the Undergraduate Student Government budget, were casually discussing the issue of club funding before a USG Senate meeting. We were talking about which clubs received the largest budget allocations when someone mentioned SBVAC. Founded in 1970 and staffed by fully qualified student volunteers, SBVAC is not only our primary emergency medical service but also one of the largest and oldest student organizations on campus, and one that consistently receives some of the largest budget allocations from the USG. My friend opined that SBVAC provides a vital service to the entire campus community, not just undergraduate students – after all, someone had to respond when your professor was having that possible heart attack – and that it was therefore unfair for USG to bear the burden of being the organization’s primary source of funding. USG serves not only undergraduates, but graduate students, faculty, staff, visitors and anyone else who happened to need emergency medical attention while on campus.

I’d seen the USG budget many times before, and was aware of the large size of SBVAC’s budget allocation in comparison to those of other student clubs. In 2008-2009, it was the only club that allocated more than $200,000, or around 13% of the total allocation for club budgets, which was spread over 98 clubs. But I’d never given it a second thought; after all, as my friend had pointed out, running the primary emergency medical service on a campus with a population in the tens of thousands is an important job, and one that inevitably costs a lot more money than the operations of a typical club. Perhaps I hadn’t seen the ‘forest for the trees’: sure, SBVAC deserves to be well funded, but why was it treated not as a public service but as a student club, and why were undergraduate students disproportionately responsible for it’s funding?

A bit of cursory research on the web site of the National Collegiate EMS Foundation, of which SBVAC is a member, revealed that this arrangement is not terribly uncommon, but there is a wide variety of funding arrangements for college and university EMS groups. For example, similar organizations at Binghamton University and the University at Albany are funded in the same way as SBVAC, by their respective student governments. The ambulance service at SUNY New Paltz supplements funding from the college by billing the patients it transports, unlike SBVAC, whose services are provided free of charge. Outside the SUNY system, Columbia University’s ambulance service again relies both on funding from the university and on reimbursements from patients’ health insurance; Rochester Institute of Technology’s service is funded entirely by its Student Health Center; and at Cornell University, emergency service is funded much like SBVAC, through the student government. So despite the array of funding options on display, money from student governments seems to be a very popular way of paying for what seems more like an important public safety function than an activity for students (even if the organization is made up of student volunteers, as SBVAC is).

When I spoke to SBVAC President Christine Larose about her organization’s funding, she lamented the instability inherent in the USG budget allocation process, but did not necessarily welcome a change in its funding structure. She noted the large fluctuations in the size of budget allocations from year to year, and that it has been “lately, more down than up,” but was not particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of being funded by the university.

A direct financial relationship with the university “would have its pros and its cons,” Larose explained. “It might be financially beneficial, but we would lose some of the autonomy we have now.”

Direct funding from the university, of which SBVAC currently receives none, would mean more direct control by the university’s administration and less flexibility for the organization, a situation of which Larose is understandably leery. For now it seems that SBVAC is content to sacrifice a bit of financial security for greater freedom in conducting its operations. Besides, with rampant budget cuts always looming on the horizon, university funding might barely be less volatile than that provided by the USG.

So that leaves me where I started, with the issue of fairness to those of us who, as undergraduates, are mainly responsible for funding SBVAC. For the 2009-2010 academic year, SBVAC requested a budget allocation of $182,000 from the USG. Combined with a projected $2,000 in funding from the Graduate Student Organization and $25,000 from New York State – the latter being the only funding SBVAC receives that is not directly from student fees – it projected a total income of $209,000. In this situation, undergraduates would have provided 98.9% of SBVAC’s student-provided funding, with graduate students paying just 1.1%. This, despite the fact that undergraduates make up only 76% of full-time students and 66.4% of total students at Stony Brook according to the Fall 2009 enrollment figures provided by the university. And despite the service also being used by its employees, visitors and others, the university contributes nothing at all.

Regardless, SBVAC does not appear set to receive the $182,000 it requested from the USG; while budgets are still subject to revision, its current allocation for 2009-2010 is $145,209.30. Based on Fall 2009 enrollment figures, that’s approximately $9.85 per full-time undergraduate. (Part-time students don’t pay the Student Activity Fee.) This is significantly less than the $201,000 it received in 2008-2009 (when it requested $199,410), but far more than the $98,189 it received in 2007-2008 (when it requested $131,419.20). Even with the lower contribution, if the GSO contributes the projected $2,000 (which works out to about $0.42 per full-time graduate student, or about 4.3% of what each full-time undergraduate pays), USG will be responsible for 98.6% of the student contribution to the SBVAC budget for 2009-2010 and, assuming a $25,000 contribution from New York State, 84.3% of the total.

Even at this relatively high cost, SBVAC is still clearly an asset to the Stony Brook University community. But that is the entire community, not just undergraduates; and whether the burden of funding it is distributed fairly across that community is another matter, and certainly a debatable one.