 "Photo: Alisen Downey/ The Daily Campus")
UConn’s Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Richard Gray, presented his plan for a 6.3 percent increase in tuition and a combined 13 percent increase for room and board for the 2011 fiscal year at a town hall meeting in the Dodd Center on Monday.
Gray’s budget proposal will be presented to the Board of Trustees at a meeting on Thursday, Feb. 18. The tuition raise is merely a proposal; last year, Gray recommended a tuition increase of 8.6 percent, but the board enacted a much lower 6 percent.
The presentation in Konover Auditorium outlined the main sources of revenue for the university. The largest portions coming from state support at 33 percent, with 46 percent from tuition, fees and room and board, and 17 percent from private supporters and grants.
Due to the poor economy and flat-state funding, the university has restricted hiring, frozen wages for the 2010 fiscal year, taken furlough days, limited purchasing and reduced other expenses including energy, said Gray. The Costs, Operations and Revenue Efficiencies (CORE) task force continues to search for alternative ways to save money. Gray pointed out that total savings from all cuts and restrictions has been $40 million.
Despite these efforts, the university predicts an approximately $20 to $40 million deficit by fiscal year 2012, said Gray. This means a projected double-digit tuition raise in fiscal year 2012, in order to balance the expected deficit.
According to Gray, some would prefer to see the tuition increase be low, continue to freeze salaries, carry on the hiring freeze, and to take more furlough days.
“With collective bargaining contracts in place, you don’t have a lot of flexibility if one of your revenue sources of support decreases,” Gray said in a press conference prior to the town hall meeting.
Sixty percent of the budget is made up of faculty benefits and salaries, Gray said. But layoffs would cause larger class sizes, and as anecdotal evidence shows, additional time to graduate, as students can’t get enrolled in required courses, Gray said. It also takes six months to a year to lay off a faculty member, and layoffs are only an option starting in fiscal year 2012, Gray said at the press conference.
The 2010-2011 fiscal years will be in balance, according to Gray, but fiscal year 2012 could be problematic, as a result of the lift in flat funding that was provided to the university as a result of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. In fiscal year 2012 flat funding is no longer in effect, which means major cuts in staff, raises in tuition, lower enrollment or a mixture of all three could result.
“I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this [recession] for a long time,” Gray said at the press conference. “I’m concerned […] Connecticut often lags going into a recession and coming out of a recession.”
At the town hall meeting, many students posed questions regarding the tuition increase, and where other revenue is going in the budget. There will not be a survey asking students which budget plan they prefer as there was last year due to the closing of the CSRA, Gray said.
“These tuition increases are forcing me out of here,” said Stephen Bean, a 6th-semester real estate and economics major.
In order to fund his education, Bean is a resident assistant and bus driver on campus.
Another student brought up the issue of athletics and the high salaries of the coaches on campus. Andrew Grubb, a UConn graduate student and president of the Graduate Senate, asked President Michael J. Hogan what were the benefits between athletics and academics here. Hogan said the athletic program at UConn is almost entirely self-supporting and the attention it gets brings in new students.
For the FY2012 there are a multitude of options for gaining revenue on the table, Gray said. This includes the remote possibilities of higher sporting-event ticket prices and increasing the number of out-of-state students, Gray said at the press conference.
Toward the end of the meeting Jason Ortiz, a 7th-semester public and community relations major, and commentary writer for The Daily Campus, asked university administrators to work with students to address the financial situation. Preceding the town hall meeting, Ortiz and other students played music and called attention to the meeting as students walked by.
Half of the Arjona-Monteith building replacement project will also be stalled as a result of a $140 million deferral of funds that was enacted in fiscal year 2010 by Gov. M. Jodi Rell. The second building in this project is delayed until further notice, Gray said at the press conference.
UConn has the fifth-lowest tuition among many public universities in New England, behind the flagship universities in Maine, Rhode Island, Delaware and Maryland
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They just up the interest rate on the loan to 16.9