A $3 million budget deficit and an additional $3.4 million in critical expenses in next year’s budget will prompt University of Idaho administrators to ask for a 5.9 percent tuition increase for Fiscal Year 2013-2014 at the Idaho State Board of Education meeting Wednesday.
UI has undergone 6 percent increases in full-time tuition and fees in each of the last three years. Statewide, the average cost of tuition at Idaho four-year institutions increased 88 percent from 2003 to 2012
“Fundamentally over the last decade … and this is true across the nation … public higher education has moved away from being predominantly state supported to being, in some cases, where the state is a minority player in the budget,” said Keith Ickes, UI executive director of planning and budget.
Ickes said the $3 million deficit is the result of two factors: a decline in full-time student enrollment that cost the university $2.3 million and a $750,000 mistake in overhead recovery of research grants.
Ickes said when budgets are set, projected revenue from tuition is based on enrollment of the number of full-time students from the previous year. He said while enrollment has increased overall this year, it did not increase in the number of students who pay full-time tuition and fees.
“It’s a numbers game,” ASUI President Hannah Davis said. “It wasn’t like money was just being spent and spent and spent, it was like we set a budget for a certain amount of students, we didn’t get those students and so we ended up putting ourselves in a deficit.”
Ickes said a small portion of the decrease in full-time enrollment was a result of graduation requirements changing from 128 credits to 120 credits. He said students discovered they could graduate earlier and many did.
The other portion of the deficit comes from a two-year-old mistake and is just now being made up for in next year’s budget.
“That one’s fundamentally an internal issue of the university,” Ickes said. “There was a mistake made two years ago in giving us the number for that material and the mistake wasn’t discovered for a while … until we’d already set the FY13 budget … and now we’re correcting that error.”
Earlier this year the Idaho legislature voted to approve a 3 percent increase in statewide funding for higher education. It was then up to the SBOE to determine how that money would be divided among Idaho’s higher education institutions.
UI will receive approximately $2.3 million from the increase — as well as $341,000 in additional funding to help cover the cost of $400,000 in employee benefits — for a total of $2.6 million in additional state funding.
With a 5.9 percent increase, the revenue from student tuition and fees for FY14 is predicted to be about $3.8 million if enrollment of full-time students remains the same.
“It’s not ideal but it’s one of those things where if we get what we ask for it’s going to level out,” Davis said.
Although the tuition increase and state funding will add about $6.4 million to the university budget, it will only cover the bare minimum.
“There’s one other thing that we’re not doing and that is a long time ago the state would pay for something they called maintenance of current operations,” Ickes said. “Now that’s up to us.”
Ickes said this budget item includes replacing lab equipment, repairs and maintenance in heating, ventilating and cooling equipment, and other general university building repairs. Right now, the university has $228 million in deferred maintenance from the last 10 years.
“The bill for that for the coming year we calculated to be $3.3 million and we are not going to address that at all. We simply cannot,” Ickes said. “That would require us to almost double the tuition increase so we’re not going to get there. Those are things that we should be fixing on buildings … well we just added another $2.5 (million) to the deferred maintenance because we are not going to get to it again.”
Ickes said if enrollment decreases or the state board approves less than a 5.9 percent increase and the budget is lower than anticipated for FY14, the administration will have to look to the rest of the university for budget cuts.
“If we don’t get the money that we’re supposed to get, we’re going to have to start cutting things out of our budgets and then things that are going to get cut are salaries and wages and those are going to encourage professors and instructors to go to other universities,” Davis said.
Ickes said despite UI’s financial difficulties and yet another proposed tuition increase, it is still one of the cheapest flagship institutions in the nation.
“We’re still the 47th lowest flagship in the nation,” Ickes said. “We’re just trying to keep it accessible for students.”
Ickes said in 2001 state funding made up 71 percent of the university’s budget while tuition and fees only made up 19 percent and land grant endowment made up the remainder. Now, state funding is only 49 percent of the budget and tuition makes up 47 percent.
“We’re right at the teetering point. If we had one more bad year in state funding we could see that flip,” Ickes said.
Davis said students who are upset should look to the state legislature for the source of higher education funding in Idaho — or lack thereof.
“I think if someone’s upset about how much it costs and how much it’s increased then we should really encourage people and look to our legislature, but it’s just hard because there’s not a ton to go around,” Davis said.
Kaitlyn Krasselt can be reached at [email protected].