Faculty questioned whether the schools at Syracuse University could maintain their high faculty and program standards under the current budget system at Wednesday’s University Senate meeting.

Robert Van Gulick, a member of the Senate Budget Committee, said at the meeting that some junior faculty came into the university two years ago and are still receiving a flat salary.

‘They’re disappointed. How can we continue retaining faculty? If we don’t remain competitive, academics will decline,’ he said.

Despite the tuition increase of 4.5 percent this year, individual SU schools saw a decrease of 0.7 percent of revenue per student. More of the money is going toward financial aid and non-revenue-producing institutions like the administration, library and Hendricks Chapel, Van Gulick said.

In response, the administration offset the schools’ smaller budget by giving them a one-time lump payment of $6 million, said Vice Chancellor and Provost Eric Spina. But some faculty argued this is not an effective and reusable answer.

One reason for budget shortfalls at schools is the increasing amount of financial aid, Van Gulick said. SU is seeing a trend of enrolling more lower-income, higher-need students, and fewer students are paying tuition in full.

This results in more revenue going toward financial aid and taking away from other needs, such as pay raises and program enhancement, Van Gulick said. Members of USen refer to financial aid as the ‘discount rate.’

Financial aid was 35.8 percent of the schools’ budgets in the 2009 fiscal year but rose to 38.3 percent in 2010, said Van Gulick in an e-mail to faculty detailing his concerns about the budget. After discounting financial aid payments, schools only saw a 0.4 percent increase in their allotment of university tuition.

‘The question is how high can that go and at what point do you lose the full-price students?’ Van Gulick said. ‘From a social point of view and from a political point of view, I endorse increasing the number of lower-income students. But if the discount rate continues to increase, we wouldn’t have enough money to pay raises going forward that would allow us to remain competitive.’

Another reason why schools and colleges are seeing less revenue per student is because the administrative and support tax schools have to pay went up by 4.47 percent from the 2009 to 2010 fiscal years. The support tax goes to SU institutions that don’t have a way of bringing in their own revenue, such as the administration, Bird Library and the Department of Public Safety.

Reasons for the increase in the administrative tax on schools were to compensate for the loss in endowment and to raise the salaries of supportive staff like secretaries, Van Gulick said.

Members of the administration, including Chancellor Nancy Cantor, said rising financial aid and administrative tax are not significant concerns in regard to keeping up high academic standards.

The university moved $3 million to schools from alternative sources and cut $3 million from the auxiliary services’ budget, totaling $6 million transferred to schools and colleges to offset their budget shortfalls, Spina said.

Don Saleh, vice president of enrollment management, added that financial aid went up because of the current recession, in order to continue to make SU accessible to students hurting financially. If the university hadn’t increased financial aid this year, it would not have been able to bring in the same number of freshmen, he said.

‘Families lost many millions, billions of dollars across the country. We wanted to retain the number of undergraduate students,’ Saleh said.

But Van Gulick said the bad economy only accounted for part of the increase in financial aid. This year’s financial aid also increased because of permanent policy changes, such as reaching out to lower-middle-income students, that if continued could strap the schools and colleges with increasing budget shortfalls. Increasing financial aid may also escalate the trend of decreasing numbers of students who can pay full tuition, he said.

‘They say they want to help students, but it really depends on what student you talk to. We’re actually asking some students and their parents to help other students, and I approve of that, we’re a progressive institution,’ he said. ‘But the question is how high can that go?’

rastrum@syr.edu

Published on March 3, 2010 at 12:00 pm