High enrollment not a budget cure
By Sarah Haefner | Feature Editor
An increase in enrollment at the University of Indianapolis has brought in additional unbudgeted tuition revenue, but the current economic climate and recent cuts in state financial aid are keeping the operating budget remains significantly slimmer than previous years.
Final fall enrollment numbers are evaluated as of the 100 percent refund deadline, or at the end of the first week of school. From the previous year, the total number of day undergraduates increased by 4.1 percent. The total number of students in the School for Adult Learning increased by 8.4 percent and 61 more graduate students are enrolled this year than last, increasing the graduate enrollment by 5.1 percent. The total head count increased by 250 students, a 5 percent increase.
“In the undergraduate full-time students, the increases were due to more students returning, and we also benefitted by an increased number of transfer students from a variety of different Midwestern universities,” said Vice President for Student Affairs and Enrollment Management Mark Weigand.
This increase in tuition revenue may seem to be the answer to the university’s current financial headache after creating a temporary assistance fund to aid those students who lost a substantial portion of their state financial aid in July. However, this revenue is subject additional expenses like more faculty, infrastructure expenses and institutional financial aid.
“Just as the other students that are coming back this year that were here last year, many of those students are getting some sort of a university scholarship in addition to any other aid that they got,” Weigand said. “So there still isn’t enough revenue with that increase to cover that kind of a loss.”
The university was forced to make several budgeting sacrifices, including frozen salaries for faculty and staff, as well as a tightening of departmental budgets and maintaining a close eye on the operating budget as a whole.
“Maybe some of the offices will not go to conferences that they normally go to. It will depend and vary within each department,” Weigand said. “There will have to be some cuts somewhere. The admissions office may need a different tightening than another department. And every department will have to make hard decisions on what they value and what they think they can cut.”
The preliminary budget had been submitted to the board of trustees in May, but underwent changes after the state legislature passed a budget in July designating an insufficient increase in funds for grants administered by the Student Assistance Commission of Indiana (SSACI).
“They didn’t get around to adopting a budget until the eleventh hour in July,” said Vice President of Business and Finance and Treasurer Mike Braughton. “Meanwhile we had already sent out bills and things like that to students under the assumption that the state was going to give what it had advised earlier and that was that they were going to leave SSACI awards flat, which they didn’t.”
The new SSACI caps and consequential temporary assistance fund greatly affected the operating budget because tuition discounts are a large part of the process.
“Those are basically unfunded scholarships that we award to students based on need or merit,” Braughton said. “That’s a pretty large number for us every year, so we wait to see what the state is going to be able to do for students that live in Indiana that will be attending colleges and universities before we make a projection about what we can do.”
Once the university realized a temporary fund would have to be implemented to keep student enrollment from decreasing, the budget was reduced by nearly $3 million, a number that the university hopes will be compensated for by the sacrifices faculty and staff have made, as well as departmental budget cuts and the additional costs students had to pay.
“We’re going to be all right, but we can’t do this two years in a row,” Braughton said. “We can’t do another $3 million. We’re making sacrifices. Everybody likes to have at least a cost-of-living raise every year and we’re not even doing that. Hopefully, the folks at the Student Assistance Commission were too conservative in their projections. Hopefully, there will be some money left on the table that will help out for next year that will enable them to move that maximum grant level up a little bit.”
Undoubtedly, the increased enrolment helped with the current financial predicament, but after having to recover such a drop in state financial aid under a time crunch, many are afraid it’s too early to be optimistic.
“What the total dollar magnitude of that [enrollment increase] is I can’t say,” Braughton said. “What I don’t want to do is create a false hope out there so that’s why I’m hedging my bets.”
