The Facts: The University of North Carolina Association of Student Governments receives $202,500 annually to support a non-voting member on the Board of Governors. The member is supposed to represent the concerns of the UNC-System’s students on the BOG. NCSU, UNC-CH and ECU finance more than two-thirds of the total ASG fund.

Our Opinion: ASG’s advocacy role is weak at best. The student fees N.C. State contributes to the organization are wasted money and could be utilized far better on this campus.

The University of North Carolina Association of Student Governments serves the students of the UNC System as their representative on the Board of Governors.

Despite the fact that this representative is a non-voting member of the BOG, the ASG requires an annual sum of $202,500 to fund the support for that single position.

Greg Doucette, president of the association of student governments, said the ASG serves a role that is “predominantly advocacy.” We are the “student voice on the Board of Governors,” Doucette said.

The Daily Tar Heel challenged this advocacy role and claimed the association did not effectively use its resources — $1 from every full-time UNC System student — in a manner that warranted UNC-Chapel Hill’s continued support of the system.

Despite the factual errors within the DTH editorial — which Doucette needlessly assaulted on the ASG’s Web site — its proposal was fundamentally correct. Carolina should leave the ASG, and so should N.C. State.

Doucette said that UNC-CH, ECU and NCSU combine to support more than two-thirds of ASG’s funding; $30,000 of the funding comes from NCSU alone.

The principle use of this funding, more than 90 percent of it, is to fund the ASG’s office, its staff and travel costs.

These travel costs are mainly used by smaller schools, which pay far less into the ASG fund, so the student body presidents from all seventeen campuses can attend the ASG’s monthly policy meetings.

NCSU, UNC-CH and ECU students are subsidizing the travel costs, including overnight accommodations, of the smaller campuses’ student body presidents.

Doucette claims that the consensus of all the system’s student body presidents gives the BOG representative leverage and credibility. He can claim he speaks for every college student in the UNC System.

If these meetings resulted in serious policy changes by the BOG to the benefit of the University’s students, these fees — essentially subsidies — may have been money well spent.

But, if that were the case, the organization would have fought tooth and nail against mandatory university health care last August as Student Senate did in its proposition last year.

ASG takes $1 from every student on this campus. For us to continue to fund compensation for its student officers and subsidize its travel costs while receiving no tangible benefits is a farce.

It’s time for the University to count us out and give the students their dollar back. ASG’s futility and empty lobbying needs to come to an end.