Nowadays, when you book a flight, you don’t just reserve the right to a seat, you also book a date with a laundry list of fees — pillow payments, soft drink surcharges and of course, a baggage fee, just to name a few.

Much like the cost of flying, the cost of attending ASU isn’t only the comparatively low price of tuition anymore. We reach a grand total in a way that is likewise very underhanded, with cleverly-disguised fees — and in the same way airline passengers have lamented the extra charges that add up fast, the fees at ASU have become an unfair expense for students and the carte blanche of the administration.

ASU students are not strangers to the pile of uninvited charges tagged onto their tuition bills. If you’re blissfully unaware, a glance at your tuition receipt will make it painfully clear.

ASU hides behind a relatively low up-front number, which is great for recruiting students. But lurking behind a fairly friendly total tuition figure are hundreds — if not thousands, depending on your program — of extra dollars in fees.

And while it makes sense that College of Liberal Arts and Sciences shouldn’t pay for a Cronkite student to use a fancy camera, with huge fees in specific colleges, ASU is in danger of pricing students out of majors.

Still, we understand that fees provide a significant amount of revenue to the University — revenue that is geared toward a specific area. (Though tuition dollars can move around fairly easily, fees don’t. For example, the Health and Wellness fee is channeled specifically to that department, whether you personally use the service or not.)

What we’re still a little fuzzy on is the actions ASU student government takes to “represent” the student body.

It’s no secret any call for a hike in costs will incite riot from most students — but is it because the fee is just another way to suck us dry, or is it because the actual benefits of the potential fee are unknown?

The Downtown student government voted down a $75 facilities fee Friday with some of its student input based on a survey of 71 people. That’s less than 1 percent of the student body on the Downtown campus — is it really representative of the more than 7,000 students who are based there? Probably not. And how much does the average student know about any proposed fees anyway? Considering elections for the Undergraduate Student Government on the Tempe campus only boast a 4 to 5 percent voter turnout, we’re willing to bet the answer is not much.

It’s the job of student government on all campuses to find out how a fee will impact students, and we credit them with investigating the benefits of paying into the system. But it’s also their job to disseminate the information to the students they represent. Operating under the assumption that students are far more connected to the issues than they are will only lead to students assuming student government officials are in the pocket of the administration, always voting for fees because they are “forward-thinking” and “beneficial to the University.”

If student government claims to represent us, they need to make sure their decisions fly with their constituents. Otherwise, they may need to pack their bags — and be ready to pay the luggage fee.