By the 2005-06 Gargoyle Senior Editors
Posted Friday, June 30, 2006, The OG, opinions

Uni could take a lesson from St. Thomas More High School.

According to their Web site, our Catholic friends from across the way raised $150,000 in a single night by hosting a spring charity gala to benefit their school. With guests paying as much as $500 per ticket, such a windfall of cash is to be expected. We believe Uni should resort to similarly styled parties as a supplement to asking parents to write checks.

According to Newsweek, Uni is a “public elite” school. We don't pay thousands of dollars in tuition, and we still receive an education on the level with the nation's top private schools. Surely, then, parents and Uni alums are willing to throw stacks of cash at the feet of the administration, correct?

This is not the case, unfortunately. Each and every year, Uni seems to struggle to meet its fund-raising goals.

Why couldn't Uni, with an enrollment size comparable to St. Thomas More's, throw a similar gala featuring overpriced food, program ads, and a live auction?

Many families who normally would have no interest in giving large sums of money to the school might feel differently with an event such as a gala. Nobody sees who sends the biggest checks to Uni every year, but many families might feel encouraged to turn out for an evening fund-raiser and show their support for Uni.

While $500 per ticket seems like an outrageous price, this figure could be lowered to become more palatable to Uni parents while still drawing in a significant amount of money. Even though a lesser figure would be more inviting, there is no reason why the STM parents should be able to put up more money than the Uni crowd. The vast majority of our students have parents who work in professional fields and have incomes similar to those of private school parents.

Aside from similar levels of family affluence, Uni students do not pay tuition. The parents at STM donated $150,000 in one night in addition to paying $5,000 annual tuition. Our parents should certainly be able to come close to that.

The greatest advantage in fund-raising that Uni has over STM is a well-developed alumni base. STM was created less then 10 years ago, and it does not have the economically powerful alumni that Uni does. Uni, on the other hand, has been host to some of the brightest and now most successful people in the country. A fund-raising gala would surely attract not only current parents but Uni alums as well.

Some might say that the elitism of such an event is antithetical to what Uni is about. The financial benefits of such an event would outweigh the cost of the transient alienation for an evening or two per year. Some look at prom with similar disgust.

It is time to finally fix Uni's age-old financial situation. All we need are a couple good parties each year, and that mission will finally be accomplished.