They gotta find money some way, after trying to hide the plummeting enrollment by counting high schoolers.
Couldn’t happen to a better group of administrators. I have some comments to make:
Faced with falling enrollment, the University of Idaho will cut $5 million from its budget effective July 1, the start of the school’s fiscal year.
Provost John Wiencek, speaking Tuesday in a meeting of the UI Faculty Senate, said while “total enrollment” numbers have remained relatively steady over the past few years, the number of “degree-seeking students” has declined by about 17 percent since 2011. The decline means the university has lost out on roughly $15 million in tuition revenue, he said.
The UI’s 2019 fiscal year budget was set at $470 million.
Wiencek said about five years ago, the state Legislature started funding advanced credit opportunities that allow high school students to enroll in courses for both college and high school credit. He said participation of such students, who pay a greatly reduced, nominal fee for dual-credit courses rather than a full tuition, inflated the UI’s total enrollment numbers.
I’ve talked about this for years on this blog.
Now the kicker:
The UI has two major sources of funding, Wiencek explained, appropriations from the state and tuition revenues.
“If the state says, ‘Hey, I’m going to allocate $56 million,’ we get $56 million and we spend every nickel of that,” Wiencek said. “For tuition, we don’t know how much we’re going to get until the year is over and so we’re making our best guess at how much tuition revenue we’ve generated in a year.”
UI President of Finance and Administration Brian Foisy saidtuition revenue has fallen short of expectations nine out of the past 10 years, peaking in fiscal year 2017 when projections were nearly $4 million higher than what was collected.
If you were a business, and your financial team made projections that were wrong 9 out of 10 years (and two years ago were off by $4m), what would you do?
Someone should be held accountable for this.