By Ellery Snyderman
The National Student Leadership conference (NSLC) earns between $2,716,000 and $2,956,000 per nine day session at American University (AU). Student tuition is between $3395 and $3695 per session with around 800 participants.
The combined tuition goes toward paying for a variety of expenses which include paying faculty and staff, housing, on-campus meals, course materials, and activities.
Peyton Proksch, NSLC AU logistics coordinator and film journalism and media arts program director, said the largest expense is “what we pay to campus, what we pay to AU” because “they manage food, housing, and different things”.
NSLC pays AU for usage of campus buildings, dorms and food for NSLC students.
Proksch said “we (NSLC) pay AU and they provide the food, but we are still responsible for telling them how many students will be there on a given day… We give the meal counts to AU, and they provide the food, and provide the staff. ”
“AU is pretty hands off though, they have lists of what rooms we are using, like dorms, and things like that for safety reasons, but it is still our (NSLC) responsibility to assign rooms so it’s kind of a mix and AU does have somewhat of a role, more so in food than housing, but the vast majority of the work is done by NSLC,” Proksch said.
Proksch said she doesn’t know the exact value that NSLC pays to AU in order to run the program, and the divisions between how much all food costs along with how much renting the dorms cost are incalculable.
According to the NSLC Team Advisor Summer 2022 application, the role of Team Advisor (TA) “will be paid $765 at the end of each session” and reinforced by a report on Wayup.com
According to Proksch, “the vast majority of NSLC staff on site are TAs, ATAs (Assistant Team Advisor), or HTAs (Head Team Advisor), some form of staff working with students.” But “the admin staff, anything above a TA, there are less of them, but they make more than a TA.”
Proksch said she didn’t know the total cost of the 85-100 members on staff at NSLC AU.
Students say the cost of the program is expensive but is reasonable in comparison to similar summer programs. Dilan Parekh said “(the tuition) compared to other programs was not too high.”
Among NSLC students there was a mix of public and private school attendees, most of whom thought the program was a little expensive but cheaper compared to similar programs, student Paloma Rampama said, “I’m attending a program in New York at Sotheby’s auction house and the price for that is $6,000, so it is a lot more expensive and they are doing basically the same thing.”