The last round of the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund has been given out and the Idaho legislature approved a budget for higher education of $643 million.
Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund
Formerly known as the CARES Act, HEERF followed the same stipulation as CARES, there being two parts. The first part being student-centered and the second focusing on the institution.
“We received an allocation for how much we had, at a minimum, to spend on student emergency grants,” Linda Campos, University of Idaho’s associate vice president for finance, said. “The amount available for the institution to use was the one big stipulation- that we couldn’t spend more out of the institutional amount than we spent on the student emergency grant.”
Campos said that there have been three different grants that were given to UI. Each one had the same stipulation of focusing on the financial need of students first.
“The first disbursement that we had was limited to people that were on campus, if you were already remote, they didn’t think that you needed it. It was also limited to FASFA filers,” Randi Croyle, director of financial aid, said. “This last iteration was pretty well open and they didn’t limit it to FAFSA providers is open to anybody that attended.”
There were a few exceptions regarding who got money. Croyle said that the regulation prioritized needy students based on expected family contributions.
“What we did to show that we were giving priority to need is we looked at EFC, that’s from the FASFA, and we also looked at enrollment to set our priority,” Croyle said. “We also looked at enrollment to set our priority and then we created a grid so students that had a zero EFC just under $7,000.”
Students who have attended UI and receive varying family contributions received a varied amount of the HEERF funding, with the max being $605. Those who didn’t file FAFSA received $105 for those taking under nine credits and $205 for those taking over nine credits.
Campos said that due to UI opening in the fall of 2020, following its shutdown in the spring due to COVID-19, the university incurred a lot of expenses to safely open.
“We really incurred those costs early on, so we were able to actually reimburse ourselves for all of those costs, and really draw down the last of the money till June 30, 2021,” Campos said. “But we still had the student aid portion to spend and so they took this year to spend that.”
The total amount that the UI received during the pandemic was $48.3 million. This includes all three HEERF grants, the governor’s emergency education relief fund, coronavirus relief fund and the Idaho Broadband Grant.
One aspect that the funding was not able to cover was the lost revenue the university incurred. Campos said that these are losses incurred by the pandemic, not to those services that were already losing revenue.
“We had to be able to justify that it was COVID related and then we had to compare that revenue to pre-pandemic revenue,” Campos said. “This is the amount we believe was caused and then we were able to actually apply those as an expenditure on the grant.”
These areas of lost revenue are academic and auxiliary services like Vandal Meats.
“When we cataloged all of that we basically came up with over $21 million that we identified as the total impact of the lost revenue at the UI going back to March of 2020,” Campos said. “We only had $16 million available in the grant at that time. That’s how much was left. That was the last of our awards that hadn’t been applied to expenditures.”
Overall, there was $5,313,917 that was not covered by HEERF, but allocated in the total funding that the university received.
As for the potential of more grants being given out to both students and the university, Croyle said that this would be the last time.
Budget
Trina Mahoney, assistant vice president for university budget, discussed the approved budget for the university.
“We’re getting an increase of about $5.2 million total, and we’re getting about $5.5 million for change and employee compensation, which is a really big deal,” Mahoney said.
Mahoney said that this increase for CEC is half the state fund and the other half from tuition, where the price of tuition would normally rise.
“They did what is called a fund shift, which means they looked at all of general education and said it will cost $5.5 million to do the CEC and we’re gonna give you 100% of that,” Mahoney said. “Which then means that the university didn’t have to increase tuition to fund salary increases, so we’re going to be able to keep tuition flat for another year.”
Last year, House Bill 387 passed through the legislature, cutting $2.5 million from UI, Boise State University and Idaho State University. Mahoney said that this was supposed to be a one-time cut, with the loss to be added back in 2023’s budget.
“However, when the governor’s recommended budget came out, he did not elect to add those numbers back,” Mahoney said. “What was a one-time reduction has become a permanent reduction to our base, but when I talked about us getting $5.2 million overall, that does take into account not getting that $500,000.”
Daniel V. Ramirez can be reached at [email protected] or Twitter @DVR_Tweets