About

Common Sense Carolina is a non-partisan student advocacy organization at the University of South Carolina. We investigate how tuition dollars are spent, advocate for lower fees, and push for real accountability from Student Government and the university administration.

Students fund more than half of USC's operating budget through tuition and fees. Despite that financial stake, they have no meaningful representation on the Board of Trustees, little say in how mandatory fees are set, and limited recourse when the systems meant to represent them fall short. The systems built to advocate for students — Student Government, university committees, public comment processes — have repeatedly failed to do so.

We do three things. We investigate — digging into budgets, codes, and administrative decisions to find where student money goes and where processes break down. We advocate — drafting and supporting legislation that lowers costs, fixes broken funding systems, and strengthens accountability standards. And we publish — every report includes the data, documents, and sources we used to reach our conclusions so students can verify our work for themselves. Real transparency means clear summaries and accessible evidence, not burying people under a thousand pages of jargon.

Common Sense Carolina was born out of two tangential efforts — one focused on exposing issues and bringing public awareness to them, and one working from inside Student Government to fix them. Both aimed at making the University of South Carolina better, so we brought them under one roof to push for real change from every angle we have.