In December, Terrace Club passed a measure to allow graduate students to sign in to the club during this year’s round of spring sign-ins. Despite the club’s advertising at TigerTransit stops, high-traffic areas and the Graduate College, no graduate student took advantage of the policy change.
Terrace’s president Ricardo Lopez ’12 and Sandy Harrison ’74, the vice chairman of the club’s graduate board, cited the cost of membership as the main deterrent for graduate students.
“In the last few weeks, we decided that graduate students have a more problematic financial situation than the typical undergrad,” Harrison said.
Lopez agreed, noting that the club’s “membership is catered to and designed for undergraduate students who have a different financial setup.”
Several graduate students whom Lopez spoke to at recruitment dinners thought they could opt in for a solely social membership — a common misconception, he said. For many of them, Lopez explained, a full-fledged dining membership is too financially strenuous.
However, a strictly social membership is not currently available and is unlikely to become an option, Harrison said.
“We want them to be real members in the sense [that they are] interacting with the full experience of the club,” he said. “There’s also a fairness issue; we don’t allow pure social membership for undergrads.”
As the issue is primarily a financial one, Terrace is currently working to eliminate additional costs for graduate students looking to join the club next year in an effort to make its membership more appealing, according to both Lopez and Harrison.
Graduate students living in the Graduate College must pay at least $3,035 to the University to purchase a meal plan. The cost increases along with the size of the plan.
“We managed to negotiate with the University a special plan for graduate students, [in which Terrace membership] would be $5,000 as opposed to $7,500,” Lopez said. “This is a substantial decrease in price.”
The plan would function similarly to an undergraduate shared meal plan, in which undergraduates pay their regular eating club fees and the eating club reimburses the University for however many meals the student eats at the residential dining halls.
Unlike with a shared meal plan, however, graduate student members of Terrace would only be allowed to take meals at either Terrace or the Graduate College and not at any of the residential dining halls.
The modified plan, both Lopez and Harrison explained, is justified by the fact that graduate students would likely not be using the club as frequently as the typical undergraduate student does.
“This frees up $3,000 a year [in graduate students’ budgets]” Harrison added. “They get a lot from Terrace: a clubhouse, all the amenities that it comes with, social events, an interesting mix of bands. The social life is a very strong drawing point. We get a lot of non-members that attend social events. [But] as a member, you get first priority.”
Another issue is the length of membership, as graduate students are typically affiliated with the University for a longer period of time than upperclassmen members are. Harrison said that this graduate membership arrangement would only be offered as a two-year term, as “it’s not fair to undergraduates to allow [graduate students] to be members for longer than that.”
For the 2011-12 academic year, Terrace plans to set a maximum limit of 10 graduate student members. In spring 2012, the officers and the graduate board plan to evaluate the success and logistics of the program in order to determine whether or not to continue with it.
Lopez said success would be characterized by other eating clubs following in Terrace’s footsteps and opening up membership to graduate students.
“What Terrace is doing should be viewed as a pilot program with the possibility that it could become a model for other eating clubs in the future,” he explained.
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