High school students who compete in math team competitions have probably heard of the American Regions Math League, or ARML for short. Many states struggle to come up with enough funding to send their kids to this prestigious competition, so I decided to look through their tax forms to see how efficient this organization is. (All non-profit tax forms are available at guidestar free of charge). The below chart is what resulted from my analysis (note this is not all of ARML’s expenses, executive compensation and conference costs have been left out on purpose):
There are several things of note here.
- How does the current arml.com cost $1,000 to develop and $215 a yr to maintain?
- Granted ARML is not an easy competition to write, but does it really warrant an average of $5,000 annually to develop the competition? (That’s excluding the $2,800 paid to the head question writer annually.)
- ARML claims to be an organization dedicated to its participants, then why is the amount dedicated to student awards so low in 2005? (2003: $11,171, 2004: $18,116, 2005: $7,566)
Outside of the purely quantitative data, I’m also increasingly annoyed at ARML’s board for making ARML a cesspool of commercial spam. At last year’s Penn State ARML award ceremony, some prizes were given alongside what amount to sales pitches for companies. If ARML is going to be TI’s lapdog, they should at least charge significantly more than a few calculators.
It is also infuriating to see teams spending significant amount of money just on traveling to one of three designated test sites. It seems like this year, two teams from Turkey will be participating in ARML via the web (news release here), why can’t teams from the US do that as well?
