UWG News Archive

No mid-year tuition increase

October 13, 2004

CARROLLTON, GA - A mid-year tuition hike for the University System of Georgia’s (USG) 250,000-plus student body has been averted as a means of generating some of the revenue needed to accommodate the latest round of state budget cuts. This is good news for the more than 10,000 students attending the University of West Georgia.

Weeks of planning and discussion by Board of Regents’ officials have resulted in the identification of alternative means of generating the required $68.7 million in cuts to the USG’s current budget. The USG’s original share of the $179.3 million in cuts sought from all state agencies’ FY 2005 budgets was $68.7 million. After a $3.9 million adjustment from the state, the USG’s amount was reduced to $64.8 million.

The Board of Regents approved the plan for absorbing the cuts presented to them today by University System of Georgia Chancellor Thomas C. Meredith.

A combination of three different “one-time” fund sources will be used instead of a tuition increase – along with $20.3 million in continuing reductions to the University System’s operating budget.

“This is a mixture of both good news and bad news,” stated Meredith. “On the one hand, we feel quite positive about mitigating the immediate financial impact a mid-year tuition increase would have had on our students. Still, we know the one-time cost cutting solutions we have identified are frankly stop-gap measures that only temporarily solve our problems. We will have to find these dollars from other sources for our FY 2006 budget.”

Dr. Beheruz N. Sethna, UWG president, expressed his relief that the mid-year tuition increase was avoided and his delight that the USG was able to work with the Governor to find a satisfactory solution.
“We need his support for higher education,” Sethna said.

“For the sake of all our students, and particularly those who face serious economic hardship, I certainly am pleased that there will be no mid-year tuition increase,” Sethna said. “Being a low tuition state (with 35 states having higher tuition than Georgia, it is likely, to preserve quality, that tuition will gradually increase over time. However, those increases will be well researched and planned increases, and so will enable students to plan well in advance.”

The $20.3 million in reductions to the USG’s operating budget will be identified via additional position eliminations, hiring freezes, delayed business purchasing, deferred maintenance, reduced operating hours and by hiring more part-time rather than full-time faculty to meet instructional demands – all impacts which will continue to hamper the University System’s ability to deliver high-quality academic instruction in appropriately sized classrooms and facilities.

The largest single portion of the $64.8 million in cuts will be absorbed by extracting nearly $28 million from the University System’s employee health-plan reserves -- reducing the fund from a recommended 60-day reserve to a 30-day level.

Another $9.4 million will be generated by utilizing the matching-funds reserve previously set aside to construct the Merial research facility at the University of Georgia – a project that has been scrapped due to a change in plans by the private-sector entity that initially sought the cooperative venture with the state. Efforts are underway to identify another $7 million in additional cuts.

Sethna expressed his concern with the drawing down of the employee health plan reserve “because it is not prudent to do so. Assuming that we stay healthy, we should be able to manage our way through this problem, but it still is a source of concern,” he said.

Sethna’s biggest concern is that the need for strong and enthusiastic support for higher education remains a priority.

“Education, including higher education, is a public good,” he said. “Higher education positively impacts most social variables that we wish to address, such as increased income, savings, assets and job opportunities for our fellow Georgians as well as increased SAT scores and better success in schools for our children. So, our state and our future would be well served if higher education is a major (if not the major) focal point of the budget each year.”

Sethna pointed out that even with today's news, UWG's share of the budget cuts will be approximate $7 million over the past three years on a state allocation base of approximately $38-39 million. This is about an 18 percent reduction of the state allocation, while enrollment has increased by 13.6 percent – a gap of approximately 32 percent relative to three years ago.

“While senior administrators at UWG have used very conservative budgeting strategies to try to spare the pain of cutting personnel, there have indeed been layoffs and there could possibly be more,” he said.
Sethna shared a quantitative analysis of the budget situation.

“In 2001, our ratio of full-time equivalent students to full-time personnel was 9 to 1. We were understaffed even at that time, before the budget cuts started. If we used the ratio of full-time employee size to students that we had in 2001 and applied it to 2004, we would have had a full-time employee size of 983. However, today we have only 872 full-time employees. That is the equivalent of a workforce reduction (some might say that these are equivalent to nominal layoffs) of 111 employees in the past three years,” Sethna said.

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