We all wonder where our tuition money goes and how it is spent.

The tuition cost at Columbia is approximately $17,000 this year. That’s not including various charges such as course fees, student activity fees, health center fees, orientation fees for freshmen and graduation fees for seniors.

While we talk about the issue of student affordability and the Student Government Association pushes for more transparency in those nickel-and-dime fees, we don’t talk about knowing what happens to the money we give to the college each semester. It’s known that our checks go into the operating budget of the school, but how much goes where?

In this age of financial uncertainty, transparency is important. Columbia, however, is a private institution and the definition of transparency is user-subjective. The college should at least tell us how much goes to each department, how much of students’ money goes to administrations’ salaries and how much goes into our portfolio.

Unlike public institutions, the college is only slightly mandated by state and federal law to disclose certain information, one being the crime statistics they must tell us every year. This means the administration can tell us next to nothing and are completely in line by doing so. It also means the school must rely on mostly tuition dollars since it is also a nonprofit organization.

To put it in perspective, if every student stopped going to Columbia, over a short amount of time it would paralyze the school worse than a teacher’s strike because so much of its operating budget relies on students’ or parents’ money each semester.

I’m not suggesting every student stop going to Columbia because it costs so much. But since we do pay for the college’s heating and light bills, we should have a right to know what else we’re spending our money on.

Let’s look at it another way. We will all have jobs, presumably, when we graduate. When we get our paychecks, we have certain money taken out for different costs, such as insurance, Social Security, income tax and Medicare.

But what if instead of detailing on the check where those wages go, they just listed one lump sum they’ve extracted from the check? I would be inclined to think any reasonable person would want to know where those missing wages went.

While it is a little different in that we’re not getting paid to go to school, we should know what every dollar and cent accounts for at the college. If a student were to ask the administration about the rights students have, they would probably agree up front. But, much like the course fees, it could be a slow-moving and begrudging process to actually accomplish that goal.

Public schools, such as the University of Illinois at Chicago, give at least a percentage breakdown of its operating budget. They are also required by state and federal regulations to do so. Isn’t it clear that transparency is important to the state government, too?

According to UIC’s pocket fact book, only 16 percent of the school’s $3.9 billion operating budget is taken from student tuition. But it’s also half the tuition to attend UIC because of the money they receive from other places, such as the state and federal governments and private gifts for the budget.

For the 2007-2008 fiscal year, $187.8 million of Columbia’s tuition went into the school’s $224 million operating budget, which is approximately 80 percent of that total. The budget that is for public consumption, however, doesn’t specifically state where that money goes.

As students who pay for the school to stay open, we have the right to know where all of our tuition goes inside the institution, not that it just leaves our checkbook and is a blanket fund for the college.