University Budget

An-D

So, my school recently started making some crazy budget cuts and some of my favorite faculty (and other people's favorite faculty) is being let go. Is there a way for me to get a look at the university's budget for the last couple of years? There is a lot of murmurs that the Chancellor has been using school's money to buy ridiculous things for his office and have a driver take him around our tiny campus. This makes me angry and I'd like to see if there's any fact to it.

Can a student get a hold of this information? I go to Western Carolina University (www.wcu.edu). The searches I've done so far have not led me to much success, but in all reality, I'm not 100% sure what I'm looking for. A break-down, of some kind?

Any help would be fantastic!

Sentry

Go to the schools library. They should keep that on file there, alone with salary's.

Reiten

If it's a public school, I believe that information is all public knowledge. The only question is if that info has been placed online or not. Leaving it offline is one way they hide it (by making it inconvenient).

Serpent

keep in mind the salary of faculty is probably a lot more than 'stuff' for the chancellors office. each faculty member probably costs >$100,000 a year, PLUS all their benefits like healthcare and whatnot.

TaGuelle

Universities are really sneaky though about giving benefits out and that sort of thing. Deans, presidents, and the other big whigs are also known to give themselves ridiculous salary rises and crap. An-D is probably on the money that there is some fishy crap going on.

Sentry

the fact is though, almost every school is cutting faculty and staff, a lot at a crazy rate.

TaGuelle

Fair enough, the question is here is why does the school need to cut faculty and staff instead of, say, lowering the insane salaries of the higher ups. I know I'm being simplistic and generalizing, but its a huge problem in a lot of Universities.

NotYou

TaGuelle wrote: »

Fair enough, the question is here is why does the school need to cut faculty and staff instead of, say, lowering the insane salaries of the higher ups. I know I'm being simplistic and generalizing, but its a huge problem in a lot of Universities.

I understand where you're coming from, but even a really high salary for some of the higher ups isn't a huge part of a school's budget.

No doubt there are things to cut though.

When I went to school I was continually pissed at how tuition was raised every year I was there, when they were doing things like building a new library, to replace the old library, where the new library had less books, and was smaller than the old one. And while they were making the library, there was a chainlink fence surrounding the construction. They decided to custom design and buy a fence-wrap that went around it with pictures of books that the faculty liked or soemthing. It cost 60 grand.

Sentry

There's a lot of shit that goes into a University, and some of the weirdest stuff can add immense value to your degree. It's just not value that is easy to quantify.

By value I mean marketing it after graduation, not in terms of knowledge or skills gained.

VisionOfClarity

TaGuelle wrote: »

Fair enough, the question is here is why does the school need to cut faculty and staff instead of, say, lowering the insane salaries of the higher ups. I know I'm being simplistic and generalizing, but its a huge problem in a lot of Universities.

Because when you lower the Dean's salary they'll leave and go to a school that pays better, you'll also then have a harder time filling the position with someone of quality because top Dean's want top pay. Also, many schools tend to let adjunct faculty go first as they are paid on a class by class basis and then tenured faculty pick up the slack.

Also, at most school's the Dean's don't give themselves raises and have no say over what they make. The board of trustees or something similar makes that decision. It is very difficult for Dean's to just spend recklessly when anything they want to spend has to be approved by a board.

You also have to spend money to make money. A state of the art library attracts students more than an old one does. A new theatre to replace an old one also is attractive to prospective students.

TaGuelle

All fair points. My point however is that sometimes that is done without the best interests of the University and Students at heart.

Inquisitor77

TaGuelle wrote: »

All fair points. My point however is that sometimes that is done without the best interests of the University and Students at heart.

Wow, welcome to life. Seriously, this type of thinking is naive. Sometimes people don't always make a decision motivated 100% by the "best" intent. But you know what? If people did that, they'd make tons of stupid decisions, because the tough choices entail a lot of competing priorities and shades of grey not always 100% readily apparent or tailored to a specific concept or constituency. Also, try making a decision when you don't always have 100% of the relevant information immediately at hand (also known as the "What do you mean you can't see the future?" rule).

Also, sometimes people make decisions with the exact same intentions as you but end up at a completely different choice. OMG, what a crazy concept.

If you think you can find examples of significant greed, self-interest, or corruption going on, more power to you. But I'm betting that things aren't always as simple as they seem, so what you might assume is one thing may turn out to be something completely different.

saggio

You go to your student union and get them to ask the Board of Governors for a copy of the University's budget.

Sometimes your student union will have a seat on the Board of Governors (mine does), so they can give you that information straight up. Other times, they just have to ask the University for you.

TaGuelle

Wow, way to take what I was saying and run with it. I don't think its naive to be unhappy about corruption or to feel that it could be avoided. I'm not saying judicious use of funds has to be utopian, but there is a difference between judicious and crooked use of money.

Reiten

Serpent wrote: »

keep in mind the salary of faculty is probably a lot more than 'stuff' for the chancellors office. each faculty member probably costs >$100,000 a year, PLUS all their benefits like healthcare and whatnot.

Absolutely not true. Starting salary at a non top tier research, public university for non science and engineering positions will be between $40k-$60k. He's at a public, non top tier research school. For the humanities and social sciences at his school, I'd be surprised if the top salaries for full professors was much over $100k, if it even crosses that line. If you count all the benefits, then the price of any worker goes up quite a bit.

Science and engineering is a different ball game due to competition for applicants w/ the private sector and grant/research money they can bring in. Those salaries tend to be higher.

Edit: colleges and universities have seen large jumps in administrative costs in the last several decades. It's partially due to more regulation and legal requirements from legislation and part bureaucratic creep.

supabeast

TaGuelle wrote: »

Fair enough, the question is here is why does the school need to cut faculty and staff instead of, say, lowering the insane salaries of the higher ups. I know I'm being simplistic and generalizing, but its a huge problem in a lot of Universities.

Because the higher-ups aren’t making much to begin with. Anyone capable of running even a small college could earn many times that by going to work in the private sector (or at least he could have before September).

And while it is true that people in these positions sometimes abuse their discretionary spending privileges you shouldn’t just assume that’s what’s going on here. If the dean is dressing up his office and driving around campus is it because he’s an ass? Or is it because the school is broke and he needs to impress rich alumni so they’ll donate enough money for your dorms to have heat in the winter?

Sentry

Additionally, budgets work at Universities the same way they work everywhere else.

You have a salary budget... that's used for salaries. The travel budget is used for travel. You typically can't take part of your travel budget and use it for salaries, or vice versa.

VisionOfClarity

In addition, many states are facing their own budget crises and are unable to fund public high education institutions as much as they have in the past and many states are making hefty mid-year cuts to balance their own budgets. This is forcing many colleges, nonprofits, towns, etc to make huge cuts ASAP.