How we read the ASSU budget

ASSUTracker works exclusively from the public ASSU Voluntary Student Organization (VSO) budget — the annual appropriations document that distributes the student activity fee across undergraduate and graduate groups. For the 2026-27 academic year that budget totals $5,568,231 across 253 clubs.

We do not estimate general-fund University spending, department budgets, or athletic expenditures. When you read “$5.57M goes to X” on this site, the denominator is always the ASSU VSO pool, not Stanford's operating budget.

Each of the 253 funded clubs is assigned one or more category tags. Categories are derived from the club's public name, its ASSU-registered description, and, where ambiguous, its public-facing website. We do not contact clubs to ask which category they “belong” in — that would introduce non-response bias and make the classification un-auditable.

The current tag set:

• Performance & Arts (a cappella, dance, theater, music ensembles)
• Engineering & Technical (project teams, hack clubs, robotics)
• Cultural & Ethnic (identity-based organizations)
• Religious & Spiritual
• Pre-professional & Academic
• Political & Advocacy
• Service & Volunteer
• Recreational & Club Sports
• Media & Publications
• Greek-adjacent & Social

Every tagging decision is stored in the raw CSV on the data page. If you disagree with a specific classification, email the address at the bottom of this page and we will update the file and attribute the correction.

Many clubs straddle more than one category. A Christian a cappella group is both Religious & Spiritual and Performance & Arts. The Black Pre-Law Society is both Cultural & Ethnic and Pre-professional & Academic.

Rather than force each club into a single bucket and lose that nuance, we allow up to three tags per club. When we report the dollar total of a category, we include every dollar going to any club carrying that tag. The trade-off: the category totals intentionally do not sum to the pool total — a club tagged in two categories is counted in both.

On every chart that displays category totals, we label this behavior plainly. Single-tag totals — useful for pool arithmetic — are also available in the raw CSV.

“Per-capita” numbers — dollars per participating student, dollars per affiliated undergraduate — are estimates, not censuses. Stanford does not publish a directory of which students belong to which club, and asking individual clubs for membership lists produces inconsistent answers. We construct denominators from three public anchors.

1. The Hillel anchor

Stanford Hillel publishes the size of its active student community. That figure gives us a floor for Jewish-affiliated student population when computing per-capita estimates across Jewish-affiliated organizations. It is a self-reported figure and we treat it as such.

2. The 2007 ORL survey

Stanford's Office of Religious Life conducted a campus religious-identification survey in 2007. It is the most recent comprehensive snapshot of self-reported religious affiliation at Stanford that we can cite publicly. We use its population shares — rescaled to current enrollment — to set denominators for Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and unaffiliated groups.

The 2007 survey is old. Where we use it, we say so explicitly, and we treat the resulting per-capita numbers as estimates with wide error bars.

3. Demographic adjustments

Current Stanford enrollment — undergraduate vs graduate, international vs domestic, by declared ethnicity where Stanford publishes it — is pulled from the most recent Common Data Set. Ratios from the ORL survey are rescaled to today's enrollment before being used as denominators. This is a blunt instrument; we do not pretend otherwise.

Per-capita numbers are reported with a visible note of their denominator and vintage. If you think our anchor is wrong for a given population, we would rather hear it than quietly be wrong.

• ASSU 2026-27 VSO Budget — the primary source for every dollar figure on this site. Downloadable from /data.
• Stanford Common Data Set — used for enrollment denominators.
• Stanford Office of Religious Life 2007 Survey — used, with rescaling, for religious-affiliation denominators.
• Stanford Hillel — published active-community size.
• Stanford Daily reporting — cited in news summaries; never used as a primary data source for dollar figures.

Every correction we receive is logged, dated, and, if it affects a published figure, reflected in the next site deployment. If the error is material, the affected chart or paragraph carries a correction note for at least thirty days after the fix.

Email assutracker@proton.me with: the page URL, the specific figure or claim you dispute, the value you believe is correct, and a source we can verify.

We do not correct on the basis of private membership lists or unverifiable self-reports. If a public source exists — a posted roster, an audited budget, a registrar extract — that is what we use.