Balancing acts being perfected by state universities

Daily Record, The (Baltimore), Dec 12, 2003 by Kara Kridler

As state schools continue to deal with hefty budget cutbacks, university officials are committed to preserving the quality of education.

For fiscal year 2004, the University System of Maryland faced a $206 million shortfall in its budget, said Anne Moultrie, a spokeswoman for the network of 11 state institutions with enrollments of nearly 130,000 students, and two additional research institutions.

The University System of Maryland Board of Regents, the policy making entity for USM, was scheduled to meet today to consider a recommendation to require USM institutions with undergraduate programs to develop four-year tuition plans, Moultrie said.

This will ensure predictability for students and their families, she said.

The Board of Regents has taken a number of additional steps to try to fill the revenue gap, Moultrie said.

The most noticeable changes have been the elimination of nearly 800 positions across the 11 schools, as well as an average increase in tuition of about 21 percent throughout the system.

Only about 37 percent of the gap was absorbed from the tuition increases, she said.

The University of Maryland, College Park has taken huge hits from the budget shortfall.

UMCP experienced a $71 million funding decrease for FY04, said George Cathcart, director of university communications.

UMCP's budget is $1.13 billion, $306 million of which is funded by the state.

Two major events have taken place, Cathcart said.

The first is a more than 21 percent tuition increase in the last year. The second is a major spending reduction through the elimination of more than 400 positions including 77 actual layoffs, Cathcart said.

Cathcart said the depth of UMCP's budget problem was not known until the beginning of the 2003 school year.

In order to lay off people, you have to give them 90 days notice, he said. If we had known earlier, we could have managed less layoffs.

UMCP does not have any plans at this point to do a mid-year tuition increase, though the school did hike tuition in January of 2003, Cathcart said.

We are, however, talking about as much as a 10 percent increase for next year, he said.

We have got to find the money someplace, he said. The choice is, do we reduce the quality in the academic programs or do we find other places to cut. We do not want to reduce the quality, that's for sure.

Tuition increases are one way to gain additional money without risking the quality of the academic experience, he added.

Susanna Craine, assistant vice president for university relations at Towson University, agreed with Cathcart that budget reductions must be dealt with without disturbing academia.

What you do as a university is protect the academic programs, first the kids and then the professors, so that both of their situations are as protected as they can be, Craine said.

Towson's total budget is nearly $250 million, she said. The state funds about $58 million of the total.

From FY03 to FY04, Towson absorbed a decline in state support of $13.5 million. To offset the decline, tuition and fee revenues were increased by $11.7 million.

This has affected [Towson] in all of the obvious ways that everyone else has sort of dealt with, Craine said.

To deal with the cutbacks, the university has tried to really spread it out as horizontally as you can, she said.

If you are able to make cuts in many places, you end up making significant savings, she added.

While the university has not filled jobs that have come open, Craine said, I believe that we may be the only one of the system's schools that got away without cutting live bodies.

This puts added pressure on the administration staff, she said.

The [budget] pinch is taken more on the level of administration than in the academic area, which is, as it should be, Craine added.

Richard Pusey, vice president for administration and finance at Salisbury University, said budget reductions have affected the university quite negatively.

Salisbury's total budget for FY04 is $90 million; about $25 million of the total budget is state supported, Pusey said. From FY03 to FY04, the university endured nearly a $2 million reduction in state allocations.

To combat the decrease in state funding, tuition has gone up more than 22 percent from fall 2002 to fall 2003, he said. Assuming that there are no additional cuts, there will be no additional tuition increases for January 2004.

However, for fall of 2004 there is a planned 10 percent increase in tuition, Pusey added.

So far, students have responded reasonably to the tuition hikes, he said. As it stands right now, we have had a very limited fall out.

Pusey said that overall new students do not seem deterred by the swelling tuition.

We have seen a greater impact from students who were already enrolled, he said. The largest downturn has been with the non- traditional student base, which typically includes part-time students and those older than normal college age, rather than the traditional student, he said.

We are cautiously optimistic that there will not be additional [funding] cuts, especially for this school year, Pusey said. I don't know, it's a crap shoot at this point - but we certainly do not have our heads in the sand.