A handful of New York businesses have been closed, the city’s unemployment rate has already exceeded ten percent, and Wall Street is a mess. Are student groups at Columbia going to start feeling the pressure of the bad economy this year?

"The total amount of money going to student groups has been pretty steady," explained Scott St. Marie, President of ABC. "Where the economic situation has affected, however, is that it has really had an impact on local businesses and on corporations in New York and this means that it is a lot harder to get big Wall Street investment banks or an airline company or the local sandwich shop to donate either money or goods to a student group. What that does is that it means they have to stretch the budgets they get from ABC or the other governing boards a lot further."

"I know Community Impact was having a tough time because their corporate sponsorships have gone down drastically," expressed ESC Vice President of Inner Group, Gunnar Aassen.

Joffre Andandre, Treasurer of the Korean Student's Association, reflected upon the effects the budget cuts will have on his club. "It’s a huge impact on the group. It really limits what we can do in terms of planning and programming. It will really limit our culture show this year."

"Even though this is the beginning of the year right now we are already feeling the pinch because of the economic downturn. Even for Lunar Gala later on in the spring we don’t expect much money from corporate sponsorships."

"We get the same response from every single council that they don’t have much money to give out, especially ABC saying that they are not going to be responding to any appeals this year."

"It definitely affects a lot of our grants because most of the funding we get is from corporations and the fund raising events are actually for publicity. So if we don’t get enough of the funds and the funds mainly go towards our spring break trip, the international service trip to Brazil, then it mainly affects how much help we can actually offer these countries."