Our Recommendations
In our budget breakdown, we found that Georgia Tech forecasted that it is losing 18% of its revenue this semester. Tech has already made cuts to its budget, but we do not agree with the nature of these cuts, and we have recommendations for future action. To see Georgia Tech's current budget and how we came to make these recommendations, see the budget breakdown page.
Tech has cut funding to several departments, and one of the first cuts made was to the Institute Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Office (IDEI). This office is responsible for many accessibility measures taken here at Tech. IDEI houses the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance office, which is partly responsible for guaranteeing that buildings and classes are accessible (by requiring elevators and captions on lecture videos, for example). IDEI also houses the Center for Student Diversity and Inclusion which helps underserved populations with academic success. A reduction in funding to IDEI would very likely hamper efforts to make Tech more accessible because the offices responsible for accessibility are part of IDEI. In addition to ensuring that Tech is accessible, IDEI also supports diversity measures like providing support for women and minorities at Tech.
In the short term, we recommend that Tech reinstates funding for IDEI in the next semester and does not continue with its current cuts to this office. We understand that Tech has to make cuts, but we find it unreasonable that Tech is cutting funding to IDEI as one of its first budget cuts. To put this in perspective, Tech has funding to IDEI before cutting athletics funding, while parts of IDEI are integral for some students to be able to learn here. This strongly suggests that accessibility is not a top priority at Tech, so we have started a petition that asks for Tech to restore funding to IDEI for next semester.
Long-Term Recommendations
In addition to our short term recommendation, we also have recommendations for Georgia Tech to increase accessibility in the long term. Other universities, such as Harvard and Yale, are putting in policies to require that all new content added to their websites be accessible, and we believe that Tech should do the same. We believe that Tech can make significant improvements to its websites for under $100,000, possibly by spreading work over multiple semesters or using 1.8% of the athletics fee charged to every student.
We also ask for Georgia Tech to make public the accessibility features being put into the new student center that is currently under construction. It would be beneficial for the new student center to serve as an example for future buildings at Tech, and designing the building around accessibility features from the start, rather than adding these features on at the end, would serve that purpose. One example of how designing a building with accessibility features in mind is making every entrance accessible, not just one. Often, buildings may have only one accessible entrance which makes it more difficult for those with disabilities to navigate these buildings.
We believe that Tech has the ability to add a second accessible entrance to all other buildings in addition to the new student center. According to homeadvisor.com, the average cost of building a disability ramp is about $2,000 and the average cost of an automatic door opener is $2,200. Tech has about 100 academic buildings, found by counting the buildings on the campus map, and assuming that each building will need an entrance renovated to be accessible that brings the total cost to roughly $420,000. At first glance this seems like a large amount of money but when compared to Techs total revenue it is less than 0.042% of Techs expected revenue during the pandemic, and will be an even lower percentage of revenue after the pandemic is over. This cost could be easily covered from the athletic fee that is charged to each student. This cost would take roughly 7.6% of the athletic fee which is already just a small portion of Techs athletic funding. We believe that if Tech would prioritize accessibility more it would easily be able to make the campus more accessible to its students.