Meeting Date: 
April 8, 2016
Date: 
04/08/2016 9:15 am to 10:15 am
Event Description: 

A PDF of the minutes can be found here.

Minutes: 

Voting members present: Luke McIlvenny, Seunghae Lee, Michelle Kutzler, Kate Fields, Emily Shroyer

Ex-officio present: Sherm Bloomer

 

SHERM BLOOMER’S REPORT

Next year’s budget

  • Next year will be pretty challenging (flat will be good and down is more likely)
  • Extremely low tuition increase (2%) to keep numbers up (saw decline in freshman –500 in 2015 and 200 in 2014)
  • Impact of Oregon’s community college program starts in fall and expecting fewer freshman
  • New building (Johnson Hall) coming on line in fall with lots of expenses associated with it
  • How we move forward with this maintaining the investments already made to student diversity, etc. is not known
  • High school graduates have been declining across the US; we have been making improvements in retention
  • INTO enrollment is still increasing
  • Applications for non-resident students is up from last year
  • Getting lots of community college transfers
  • $4M short in tuition from what was projected because of non-residents taking Ecampus courses at Ecampus rates, but we get less money from Ecampus courses
  • New phenomenon: freshman paying enrollment fees, going to START orientations, etc., for several schools, even registering for classes in the fall, but then not showing up (need to rethink these orientation efforts to increase the “Wooing” of new freshman)

 

New budget model: Education and General (E&G) operating budget

  • Handout distributed
  • Built to be forward looking modelling tool (FY17 is projected)
  • Years are weighted (maximum of the average (if shrinking) or the trend (if growing))
  • Not conceptually complicated, but policy complicated (e.g. how units will teach)
  • As we build next year’s budget, lots of incremental decisions
  • Almost all of the student growth this year and next year is in Engineering and smaller increases in Public Health & Human Sciences (PAC courses)
  • Budget committee is setting up a steering committee to be a policy forum to determine high cost degrees vs. low cost degrees
  • FY 17 (calibration and policy)
  • FY 18 (run model and fix hiccups as they occur)
  • FY 19 (just let it run; should be close to what an operating budget should be)
  • Floor adjusts from year-to-year depending upon discrete commitments
  • Academic units are budgeted on these productivity measures
  • Denominators are either square footage (for facilities) or students (e.g. library)
  • On the E&G side, 70% is paid by tuition and the remainder is mostly paid by the state
  • 28,000 is the absolute maximum number of students that can be on campus (currently at 26,000)
  • Could help budget by increasing professional and self-paid graduate students growth and not other graduate students (research graduate students, PhD, etc.) who may be important for the unit's misson but do not generate significant net revenue.

 

Proposal for Evaluation – Graduate Certificate in Financial Planning

  • Existing classes but new sections for the students in this certificate program
  • If there are at least 10 students, there would be no net budget deficit for adding this program

Action: The committee was unanimous in moving this proposal forward

 

Proposal for Evaluation – Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (BMB) new undergraduate degree

  • Realigning their program with what their students are really doing or wanting
  • Some of the students in their other degree (Biochemistry; BB) will be cannibalized by the new program

Action: Please increase the clarity in the budget narrative. The budget doesn’t add up across columns, the student numbers don’t match across the proposal and the differences in lab fees per year is confusing.

 

 

Minutes prepared by Michelle Kutzler, Secretary