Where does $5,568,231 go?
A line-by-line read of the ASSU Voluntary Student Organization budget for the 2026-27 academic year.
How big is it, really?
Every Stanford student pays into the ASSU. Two hundred fifty-three clubs split the pot. The money is not spread evenly.
The gap between the median ($12,750) and the mean ($22,009) is the first signal that the distribution is skewed. A handful of large allocations pull the average up; most clubs sit well below it.
Ten clubs take 26% of the pool
Sorted by dollar allocation, the distribution is top-heavy. The single largest recipient — Stanford Concert Network — will receive $276,846 in 2026-27. Together, the top ten clubs will receive $1,445,006.
- Stanford Concert NetworkPerformance & Arts$276,846
- Stanford Student Space InitiativeEngineering$229,557
- Speakers BureauMisc$203,398
- Muslim Student UnionIslamic$175,000
- Alternative Spring BreakMisc$137,071
- The Stanford DailyPerformance & Arts$94,600
- Stanford Robotics ClubEngineering$90,000
- Stanford Solar Car ProjectEngineering$85,650
- Stanford Marching BandPerformance & Arts$84,322
- Stanford African Students AssociationBlack / African$68,562
Top 10 clubs take 26.0% of the pool. The other 243 clubs split the remaining $4,123,225.
Performance dwarfs engineering
Grouped by tag, the biggest bucket is performance & arts: $1,540,548 across 62 clubs, more than any other category. Engineering — long associated with Stanford's public identity — sits at $677,635 across 23 clubs, fifth on the list. Each club is counted under every tag it carries, so these totals intentionally overlap; see Methodology.
- Performance & Arts62 clubs$1,540,548
- Other identity60 clubs$916,167
- Athletic41 clubs$845,986
- Misc23 clubs$714,244
- Engineering23 clubs$677,635
- Pre-professional26 clubs$429,731
- Black / African17 clubs$354,246
- Greek life22 clubs$236,279
- Islamic2 clubs$204,250
- Christian-related10 clubs$135,420
- Jewish / Israeli4 clubs$87,174
- Entrepreneurship6 clubs$69,521
- Catholic-related1 club$20,236
- Hindu-related1 club$17,875
At the school most famous for building engineers, performance & arts receives 2.3x the funding engineering clubs do.
Religion, read as dollars per student
Tagged by religious affiliation, the Islamic bucket leads, driven almost entirely by the Muslim Student Union's $175,000 allocation. Christian-related clubs come next, split across 10 groups. The remaining three buckets — Jewish/Israeli, Catholic, and Hindu — are smaller still.
- Islamic2 clubs$204,250
- Christian-related10 clubs$135,420
- Jewish / Israeli4 clubs$87,174
- Catholic-related1 club$20,236
- Hindu-related1 club$17,875
The Muslim Student Union's $175,000 allocation is larger than the combined $155,656 going to all 11 Christian- and Catholic-related clubs, whose affiliated student population is roughly 9× the Muslim one.
Per-capita ASSU allocation by affiliation
Population estimates are approximations, not censuses. Their derivation is documented in Methodology. ASSU dollars are the dual-tagged category total from the 2026-27 budget.
| Affiliation | Pop. est. | ASSU allocation | $ / student | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Muslim | ~315 | $204,250 | $648 | MSU carries $175,000 of this. |
| Jewish | ~590 | $87,174 | $148 | External funding via Stanford Hillel (501(c)(3)). |
| Protestant | ~1,500 | $135,420 | $90 | Parachurch orgs (Cru, InterVarsity) supplement programming. |
| Hindu | ~515 | $17,875 | $35 | One registered group (Hindu Students Association). |
| Catholic | ~1,420 | $20,236 | $14 | Archdiocese of San Francisco funds most programming. |
Most get a little; a few get a lot
The shape of the distribution is a power law. 148 clubs — 58% of all funded groups — sit in the $7,500–$15K range. Only 5 clubs receive more than $100,000, and exactly one — Stanford Concert Network — clears $250,000.
- $7,500–$15K$1.53M total148 clubs
- $15K–$50K$2.11M total87 clubs
- $50K–$100K$909K total13 clubs
- $100K–$250K$745K total4 clubs
- $250K+$277K total1 club
Who pays, who gets
Undergraduates receive 81% of the 2026-27 pool. Three categories route zero dollars to graduate students: Greek life, Jewish/Israeli-related, and Catholic-related. Engineering and pre-professional clubs also skew sharply undergraduate — only 6.8% of engineering funding and 3.7% of pre-professional funding reaches grad students.
What the data does and doesn't say
The ASSU VSO budget records how this year's grants were divided. It does not record where student money actually goes. Unspent funds accumulate in VSO reserve accounts across years. In February, UGS Appropriations Chair David Sengthay disclosed that roughly $2.1M currently sits in those reserves — funds this appropriation does not touch. Several religious affiliations documented above receive substantial external funding that never enters ASSU records.
Allocations are recommended by the UGS Appropriations Committee; Joint Bills (grants over $75,000) pass through both the Undergraduate Senate and the Graduate Student Council. Disbursement is handled by the Office of Student Engagement. How much credit elected student representatives deserve for the final numbers was a live dispute in the April 2026 ASSU Executive election.
Every chart on this page is computed from the underlying spreadsheet. If the CSV is updated — new allocations, corrections, re-tags — the page recomputes at the next deploy. Classification decisions and denominator choices are documented in Methodology. Corrections are welcome; the email is in the footer.