|
|
|
|
Strategic Planning and Budgeting University Reaccreditation 2007 MSU Moorhead (218) 477-2243 |
"The Story is Our Students"By President Roland Barden Thank you Dr. Williams. Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Moorhead. Welcome to the largest city in the western half of Minnesota and welcome to the campus of Minnesota State University Moorhead, the foremost university in the western half of Minnesota. Our academic community includes 7,400 students, 900 full and part-time employees, well over 40,000 alumni of whom 10,000 contribute very significantly each day to the high quality of life we enjoy right here in our primary service region. We are a growing academic community. Our enrollment is up almost 17% over the last four years, including up 5% this year. Minnesota State University Moorhead’s commitment to transforming students into well-educated, highly skilled professionals remains strong and firm, but we are concerned about the Governor’s budget recommendation. Let me get right to the point. Let’s just take a look at inflation. The Board of Trustees requested for this university $5.3 million dollars for the biennium to cover inflationary costs. By my reckoning, Governor Ventura’s budget recommendation for this campus is $2.4 million. You can compare these numbers against the actual and real inflation that we calculate for this campus, which is in the range of $7.2 million to $10.4 million, taking into account the health cost increases and heating increases that we know about today. Let’s take a look for just this next year, for just one year. Let’s take a look at our revenue. Our revenue for instructional programs, which we call the M&E budget, funds the general support budget for all of our educational programs. By public law in Minnesota the expectation is that 1/3 of the cost of these general educational programs will be paid by students through tuition and that 2/3 will be paid by the state of Minnesota through appropriations. Today, on this campus, the students are paying 36 almost 37 percent of the cost of our education programs and the state is only paying 63 to 64 percent from state appropriations, in violation of the compact written in public law. Now let’s take a look at the student’s side of this revenue stream. I have proposed, and the student leaders here have agreed to, a 5 to 7 percent tuition increase for next year. They will cover actual inflation on their portion of the revenue stream up to 7%, and that does cover inflation as we see it. The students are standing in there and doing their share on their portion of the revenue. Let’s take a look at the state’s share, represented today by Governor Ventura’s budget. The Governor has proposed funding for this university sufficient for a 3% adjustment, way below what our administration and students understand to be the actual inflation and significantly below what the students are willing to do. On top of that, the Governor wants the student’s tuition raised yet further to cover a good portion of the inflation on the state’s portion of our funding stream, on top of all of the inflation on the student’s portion of our funding. Well, who is supposed to pay for this if it is going to go against our students? I want you to know that in FY99, the last year for which we have comparable data, 29% of the students at this university qualified for Pell grants. Federal Pell grants are awarded according to the criteria of need as determined by the Federal government and according to those criteria, 30% of the students here meet the test of being the neediest of the many needy students who attend American higher education. A state university, and this university in particular, needs to be affordable and needs to be accessible to this kind of student. We are not going to raise the tuition to exorbitant levels. The students have said that they would stand with us for 7% and I am not going to go above that. It is up to the citizens of this state to decide whether they are going to maintain their compact about public education. I could not have gone to college, had there not been inexpensive, accessible public education available to me, and these students cannot go either. In fact, I would guess that a large percentage of the professional people in this room could not have gone to college if there had not been inexpensive and accessible public education available to them. The Governor wants to break this compact, the compact that has made America great, that being that in America, and especially in Minnesota, everyone has access to a good, quality education and that people have the opportunity to elevate their lives through education. The story here is not the Governor. The story here is our students! Look at the students, all 7,400 on this campus, all 34,000 in northwest Minnesota and all 160,000 across our state. The Governor is a celebrity and may be rich, but these students are not! The story here is our students. Let’s go from inflation to new ventures and meeting the challenges that we face in society right here in our primary service region, today and in the next couple years. For its 35 institutions MnSCU requested $157 million in biennium funding for expanded programs, to build on competitiveness, and to build our quality in targeted areas. Of this amount $4.8 million in biennium dollars is for this university. An overview of our request is included in the press kits that are available to the media; these handout sheets come from a very well prepared book that is available from our System Office. Let me just highlight a couple initiatives that we have prepared for this university to meet goals the Chancellor and Board set. For example, in the area of education, we project in Minnesota 25,000 teaching vacancies in just the next half dozen years. All Minnesota colleges and universities, in total, graduate about 2,500 licensed teachers a year. If you multiply that by six it doesn’t add up. There is a tremendous gap coming toward us in terms of the availability of teachers. Our university’s targeted response to this fast developing crisis was to establish a new collaboration with our foremost two year college partner, Fergus Falls Community College, to provide university courses on their campus to elevate access to teacher education programs in the local region, extended now to the local region served by Fergus Falls Community College. Here is another aspect of the same issue. Everyone here today knows that technology supporting instruction, remember our focus here is K-12, has undergone a remarkable changeover in just a very short span of time. Our teacher preparation programs have to be reformed to educate and train a teacher with new-age expertise in technology assisted instruction. These are the kinds of programs that we need new funding to get into. They are not razzle-dazzle. They only meet pressing needs right here in our service region. Right now, the amount of money that is provided by the Governor is so small I have not even tried to divide it up amongst 35 institutions or 50 some campuses. It is minuscule. We are extremely concerned. We want the community in this region to understand the position we are in. We are not going to jack up tuition to sky high prices here. We stand for the compact that public education has always met with the people of this country and the state of Minnesota. There is a long legislative session ahead. It is off to a very discouraging start, and we need the help of the people, the people who understand and support us, to turn this story around. Thank you. |
