On Wednesday night's AMS Council meeting, Councillors met to see presentations about the 2022/23 Services Report and the Academic Student Experience Survey results.
Here's what you might've missed.
Services and experiences
Student Services Manager Kathleen Simpson presented on the 2022/23 AMS services report.
This year AMS services saw a total of 23,417 interactions, nearly double the 10,674 interactions saw last year.
AMS Food Bank was the most used service and saw 16,253 interactions, another huge increase compared to last year's 7,496 interactions.
Simpson said they had changed their "distribution model to be more efficient so that folks don't have to wait as long in line and our groceries last a little bit longer until the end of the day."
72 percent of student food bank visits were international students, and 52 percent were graduate students, although these groups only comprise 30 and 22 percent of the student body, respectively.
Simpson also said the Food Bank saw spikes in usage towards the end of the year.
"We can only really speculate at this point why that was, but I think one thing that we hypothesized it could be is that students are potentially running out of student loan money towards the end of the year," said Simpson
Arts Councillor Anna Shubina asked how UBC staff no longer being eligible to access the Foodbank had affected the operations and finance.
Simpson said the decision was made when forecasting the grocery costs for the year. It was "estimated that with faculty and staff, we were going to be at around three-quarters of a million dollars in food purchasing alone. And so ultimately, that was what really drove the decision to prioritize students because we just weren't going to be able to bring in that much … and we'd have to do grocery reductions for everyone."
Two services that have been "winded down" were eHub and AMS housing services.
AMS housing has been integrated into AMS Advocacy "to be able to provide more specialized support to students involved in a conflict with their landlord," reads the report.
eHub, which provided mentorships and networking opportunities for student-led start-ups, was discontinued on May 1, 2023. The report says this was to "direct more resources to Services that are experiencing greater demand."
AMS Tutoring also saw an increase in use this year, with 1,724 interactions. Simpson said this service mostly supports first-year students. MATH 100 and 101 were some of the most common courses students were seeking support in.
Students report feeling that UBC doesn't care what they think about costs
Next was a presentation from VP of academic and university affairs Kamil Kanji, which broke down the 2023 Academic Experience Survey (AES) results.
The purpose behind the survey is to ensure "we have the most up-to-date data possible to help aid our advocacy endeavours and to aid our advocacy efforts," said Kanji.
This year's survey received 3,413 responses, the most in the AES's history, with 65 per cent of students reporting satisfaction with their university experience.
Kanji also noted some more alarming statistics.
Only 11 percent of students reported believing that UBC cares about what students think about the cost of education. UBC passed another tuition increase this year, despite student protests.
Similarly, only 35 per cent of students believed they were receiving "good value in proportion to their tuition fees," reads the report. This number has declined since 2020, when 50 per cent of students agreed with the statement.
Another notable statistic was 57 per cent of respondents reporting financial hardship related to the cost of housing, a 17 per cent increase from 2021.
"Having a number of statistics that are quite low ... I think there's huge concern there because of the fact that students have less and less faith in their institution," said Kanji.
Kanji ended the presentation with some advocacy goals stemming from the report, such as promoting the work of the Student Affordability Take Force, obtaining long-term funding for the AMS Food Bank, limiting tuition increases and mandating racial and unconscious bias training.