A&S Planning and Budget Commmittee Minutes April 4 2002

Minutes: A&S Planning and Budget Commmittee

April 4, 2002

 

Members present: Bruce Adams, Susan DeWitt, Dean Julia Dietrich, ex officio; Linda Gigante, P. J. Ouseph, Thomas Riedel

Guests: Dean James Brennan

The meeting was convened at 1:07 P.M.

The only agenda item was the Dean briefing the Planning and Budget Committee on the budget.

Dean Brennan noted that the budget was still a work in progress and that the president wants a plan from each unit by April 26. The Univeristy overall has to permanently cut 2% from its budget. Non-academic units have to make up a higher percentage than academic units. The cut for Arts and Sciences is about 1.4% or $494,000. Since 97% of our budget is salaries and the reallocations of the past 3 years have trimmed any fat that was left, we need to either cut people or generate new money. The Dean proposes to increase enrollment and has the agreement of the provost that we can use any increase in tuition to offset our part of the cut.

The Dean's plan is to increase the number of students at the upper level undergraduate and at the master's level. In both areas, we have capacity, i.e., classes that are not filled. We do not have capacity to increase Freshmen enrollment, that would require new classes and cost money. To help this effort, the Dean has identified between $250,000 and $350,000 in unused scholarship money from gifts and endowments. Admissions together with the Dean's office will target community colleges to identify qualified transfer students. At the graduate level we will be targeting Juniors with a GPA of 3.5 or above for some of our 5-year master's programs.

There will be a recruiting event on April 18 at noon in Lutz hall, sponsored by Arts and Sciences. To attract outside students, another recruiting event will take place on May 16 at 5:30 PM, also in Lutz hall. In addition to this, we will run an advertising campaign on NPR, consisting of 76 spots of 10 seconds per week for 5 weeks.

It will be the end of August before we know whether this plan works or not. Therefore, on April 26, the Dean will submit two plans for the A&S; budget. One containing the tuition money generated from increased enrollment, plus some banked money from unfilled positions and another containing a list of programs to cut. The second plan will not be needed if the first one works.

The meeting adjourned at 2:00 P.M.