While the price of bringing speakers like Maya Angelou, Michael Moore and Dustin Diamond to campus ranges in the thousands of dollars, the cost to give them a place to speak has grown substantially just this past year. The Student Programming Service fee for renting out a large stage, such as Goldstein Auditorium, has risen 20 percent since last fall to about $3,300 to $3,600, according to Maggie Misztal, Student Association comptroller. Organizations can still rent out any classroom for free, but they will get charged for any additional equipment needed. ‘The costs are sometimes more than the programming,’ Misztal said. ‘It’s ridiculous.’Misztal said that while this cost does increase every year, she attributes this year’s larger-than-normal price increase to the purchase of a movable dance stage by the university. While she said this can not only negatively affect student organizations, it also puts stress on the budgets of academic departments, which also have to pay to rent campus space. ‘As these costs are rising, it is less than we can fund,’ Misztal said. ‘The university needs to start subsidizing it.’ The rise in fees has sparked debate over whether this is necessary, and has caused the Office of Greek Life and Experiential Learning to look to other options. Misztal said she and many other students have noticed that other colleges and universities do not require their organizations to pay to use campus space for programming, such as Cornell University, where the student fee is higher but this room rental fee does not exist.’Here, we have to pay for everything,’ she said. But Don Sawyer, associate director for diversity initiatives for OGLEL, said the fee is necessary and that no matter how it is administered students will still have to pay for it.At other colleges and universities, Sawyer said, the student activity fee goes to subsidize these programming fees. He added that while the SCPS fee does seem high, Syracuse University’s student activity is rather low at $144.50.’It’s always tough for students to see they have to pay to put on their programs,’ Sawyer said. ‘These costs are needed to put on the programming.’ The raise in the fee, however, is cause for concern, Sawyer said, especially if the costs for booking the event become higher than organizing the event itself. He recommended lumping the fee into one sum in the beginning of the year so student organizations do not directly pay it every time.Gina Alterio, a junior fashion design major and the president of Groovestand, said the fees the university places on the a cappella group’s campus performances interfere with their other plans.’We have a very limited amount of money, and we want to record a CD and do other things like traveling,’ Alterio said. ‘But if that other stuff keeps going up, concert by concert, it’s going to limit our access to leaving the campus and going out and getting our name out.’The fee and demand for space in Schine, in particular, poses a hurdle to the group.’The Schine Student Center is the mecca of SU: Everyone wants to perform there,’ she said. ‘It’s so hard to get, and they make you pay so much money.’The fees and restrictions, she said, add up to a difficult situation for performing groups. With little money and faced with high prices for campus space, they’re largely restricted from achieving many of their plans.’That’s never going to be the case where things are going to be totally free,’ Sawyer said. ‘And I don’t think students are going to want to raise the student activity fee.’ The rise in fee is especially troubling given the limited amount of funding SA has for student organizations, according to Carrie Grogan, assistant director of OGLEL. ‘It’s a touchy situation,’ Sawyer said. ‘We’re going to start looking into it.’