Students could be called upon to help offset recent reductions to the Board of Regents budget.
To counter cuts, handed down by the state legislature, USD administrators say the Regents will increase student tuition and fees.
The BOR saw their state funds slashed for the second straight year as a result of the struggling economy, ensuring another year without pay raises for regent employees. Of the $11.4 million total cuts to the state’s budget, the BOR is enduring 62 percent of state fund reductions, and USD President James Abbott said it isn’t fair.
“That’s a disproportionate cut and I don’t understand the reasoning. The tech schools got fewer growth dollars than they wanted, but they got some.
K-12 got something and higher-ed got cut,” he said. “I don’t know what that means.”
As it stands, USD’s share of the cut is projected to be $1,568,567, although Abbott said that figure will most likely be changing after the BOR meet this week to set tuition and fee rates.
Students have mixed reactions to the idea of seeing another tuition and fee increase.
Freshman Rozzie LaMie said an increase could lead to declining enrollment at BOR institutions. LaMie said people have already started to choose community colleges and technical schools because of annual increases in cost at state schools.
“I have a lot of friends who decided not to go (to state schools) because of the regular increases,” she said.
Though he doesn’t like it, Jordan Bordewyk, a second-year law student, said he understands the need for the BOR to raise costs when the state cuts their budget, and as the BOR has gotten used to tuition hikes, so have the students.
“I’ve gone to school here for seven years now and I’ve noticed (tuition and fees) always go up. It’s gotten a lot more expensive,” Bordewyk said.
“It’s just something you have to deal with. I think we’ve gotten used to it.”
During the past 10 years, tuition and fees were increased by about six percent annually.
Despite the historic tendency, Monte Kramer, BOR director of finance and administration, said a tuition and fee increase isn’t a done deal yet.
“(The Regents) will be looking at the cuts and determining what we can live with, what’s the right thing to do, what does it do to quality and what does it do to services,” Kramer said.
After seeing the budget cuts last year, the BOR asked all regental institutions to review low-enrollment degree programs in anticipation of another lean year. Recently, the regents announced nine programs at USD would be cut along with another 28 throughout the other colleges.
Chuck Staben, provost and vice president of academic affairs, disagreed with the BOR’s decision to cut most of the programs, arguing those specific program cuts wouldn’t actually save the university
any money.
“Many of these program (cuts) have a reasonably minor effect on students and no effect on budget,” Staben said.
Staben said the decision to terminate the philosophy degree didn’t make sense to him partly because USD is the only institution in the state to offer a philosophy degree. Despite not being able to offer a major, Staben said USD would retain a philosophy faculty and offer philosophy courses because they are clearly an important part of the institution.
“Eliminating the major would not really save money at this point and would simply limit student options, and I don’t see why we would want to do that,” he said.
The state government used more than $70 million in federal stimulus dollars to help balance the budget; $11,365,508 of that went to patch the BOR state allocated funds. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act expires at the end of the 2011 fiscal year and that has higher education officials concerned next year could cuts could be worse.
“The state in total has over seventy million dollars that’s going to go away. Stimulus money is still fixing the problem,” Kramer said.
Last year, Staben said, the effect of budget cuts on the students were relatively modest and the effects of this year’s cuts are anticipated to be of similar capacity; however, he warned that continued state fund reductions will become harder and harder to adjust to.
“It’s getting to where it’s tougher. As you cut deeper and deeper, impacts are going to start to be more perceptible,” he said. “There’s only so
much … shielding that you can do.”
Reach reporter Joe Sneve at Joe.Sneve@usd.edu.
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