State budget tightens college belts

The state budget is handing Virginia colleges and universities lemons, but VCU administration is trying to make lemonade with the resources available.

“The state budget is painting a poor picture for higher education,” said Paul Timmreck, senior vice president for finance and administration, prefacing his presentation to the Board of Visitors Feb. 13.

The budget submitted by Gov. Mark Warner to the General Assembly, Timmreck said, has profound implications for higher education. These implications include creating a structural imbalance in 2004-06 and will affect faculty salaries and result in a loss of ground in competitive rankings.

As a result of the state budget shortfalls, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia reported that annual general fund appropriations to the budgets of Virginia’s institutions have been reduced by more than $291 million, Timmreck said.

Budget cuts to each institution vary from 4 percent to 31 percent based on the percent of funding guidelines, tuition charges and the ratio of students from outside of Virginia. VCU received a 25 percent budget cut.

The upside to that, Timmreck added is, “whenever the General Assembly comes across money for financial assistance, VCU is a big winner because of the disproportionate population of students.”

Prior to budget cuts, the cost sharing between the state and the student was 60 percent to 40 percent, respectively. Now with the cuts, the student and state shares make up 50 percent each.

Timmreck spoke about another potential problem that the university faces.

“With no salary increases since fiscal year 2001… without competitive salaries, there will be problems with faculty recruitment and retention,” he noted.

The House of Delegates and Senate are working on their amendments to the budget and have proposed some actions that will affect higher education such as caps on tuition increases, reductions to eminent scholars funding and additional funds for student financial aid.

President Eugene P. Trani doesn’t agree with the proposed tuition caps.

“I don’t want a cap because students still aren’t paying as much as they did in 1998,” he said.

In the meantime, VCU has put together a game plan. The university plans to focus on out-of-state recruitment, which Trani said has had a robust season.

“Our out-of-state enrollment is up 25 percent,” he said.

The proposal also seeks to attain higher levels of private giving and pursue entrepreneurial initiatives.

“If we didn’t have our self-help list,” Trani said, ” we would be hurting more.”