Last month, the Student Activities Finance Committee announced over $2.7 million in allocations to student groups.
The funds come from the Associated Student Government Activity Fee students pay as part of their tuition bill — $90 per quarter for the 2024-2025 school year. Money from the fee goes into a funding pool, which SAFC uses to support NU’s student groups that are registered with Student Organizations and Activities and possess Student Organization Finance Office accounts.
All of the following data comes from Associated Student Government records obtained by The Daily through SAFC.
The 2025 allocations marked a stark increase in allocations, jumping from just under $2.1 million in 2024 to over $2.7 million in 2025. The allocations, which have increased annually since 2020, had previously stayed below $2 million.
As allocations have increased, so too have funding requests from student groups. In 2023, SAFC began a system where groups could indicate a lower bound and an upper bound request.
In 2022, the last year with no bounds, student groups requested just under $2 million in allocations. Just three years later, the aggregate lower bound request was over $3.8 million, with the upper bound request skyrocketing to about $5.6 million. This marks a nearly $2 million upper bound increase from 2024, where groups requested about $3.7 million maximum.
As allocation requests have increased drastically, SAFC has been unable to grant the same percentage of requests to student groups.
Before the bounds system was introduced, SAFC was typically able to fulfill about 85-90% of groups’ requests. That figure peaked in 2022, when 90.67% of requests were allocated.
Now, the allocation percentage has dropped off. In 2023, 73.87% of lower bound requests were allocated. In 2024, that figure dipped to 66.63%. And in 2025, it fell to 71.72%.
This analysis considers the aggregate SAFC allocations divided by the lower bound requests to calculate each year’s allocation percentage.
In addition, Northwestern began supplementing the SAFC allocations in 2023 with allocations from the University’s administration for Mayfest Productions, A&O Productions and NU Dance Marathon. In 2025, these groups received more than $712,000 from NU — Mayfest led the charge with $513,379, and A&O and NUDM received $125,800 and $73,089.12, respectively.
For Mayfest, the introduction of administrative allocations nearly doubled its total funding. In 2022, it received $354,440 in SAFC allocations, but in 2023, that figure, comprising both SAFC and administrative allocations, increased to $729,615. By 2025, Mayfest received $812,759 between the two sources.
In 2023, NUDM’s allotments remained about the same as in prior years. Even though it received an administrative allocation of about $30,000, that effectively offset a decrease in SAFC funding.
However, in 2024 and 2025, NUDM’s administrative allocations have increased to more than $71,000 and $73,000, respectively. This has driven up its total allotment to about $90,000, which is closer to the group’s typical lower bound request. In 2025, NUDM requested between $107,302.64 and $846,101.78, according to Associated Student Government records.
Similar to NUDM, A&O’s administrative allocations have largely offset a reduction in SAFC funding; however, in 2025, A&O’s total allotment increased from about $460,000 from 2020-2024 to more than $510,000.
Before the administrative allocations began, A&O consistently received over $100,000 more than Mayfest in SAFC allocations. Now, with the additional administrative allocations, Mayfest has received about $300,000 more in combined SAFC and administrative funding than A&O the past three years.
Reducing the amount these three groups receive from SAFC has made funds available to other groups. However, a steady increase in the number of groups applying for funding and an exponential increase in requests have actually driven the total allocation percentage down — especially for political clubs.
From 2019 to 2023, funding request fulfillment percentage remained largely consistent between both NU College Republicans and NU College Democrats, with both groups receiving upwards of 95% of their requests. The one large exception was College Democrats in 2019, which only received 55% of their request, but the actual sum received — just under $56,000 — was still consistent with the historical trend.
However, starting in 2024, both clubs’ fulfillment percentages decreased sharply. College Democrats received just under 80% of its lower bound request in 2024, and about 58% of its request in 2025. College Republicans received about 74% of its lower bound request in 2024, and did not apply for SAFC funding in 2025.
One conservative political group did receive funding in 2025, though. NU’s chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, which received a bit of funding from the New Student Organization Support Fund in 2024, received more than $5,000 in SAFC allocations in 2025 — 62.75% of its lower bound request.
Though College Democrats historically received significantly more funding than conservative student groups and the non-partisan NU Political Union, College Democrats also typically requests more than double what the other three political groups request combined.
If current trends are any indication, lower and upper bound requests could continue to skyrocket and fulfillment percentages could continue to drop. The University could also take further action to support student organizations — either by adding clubs to the list it supplements, increasing those administrative allocations or increasing the Student Activity Fee.
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