We make it up in volume

In the Eagle:

State funding per student within the Texas A&M System will decrease by more than 17 percent if a budget cut is as large as officials have been asked to prepare for.
...
The state provides $7,529 per student within the 11-university A&M System this biennium, the two-year period that began September 2009.
...
The projected funding per student for the biennium that begins September 2011 is $6,230.
That's based on a 10 percent state reduction -- as officials have been asked to plan for -- the loss of federal stimulus money and a 6 percent enrollment increase. Calvert said that's a conservative estimate and the system's enrollment is likely to increase by closer to 10 percent.

This is great news for Texas taxpayers: we've reduced the cost of higher education!

Enhancing the undergraduate experience

More from Loftin's email

- Unofficial preliminary fifth-day figures show another year of record enrollment - 49,426, or 724 more than last fall.
...
- We have two open forums scheduled for this week as we continue our discussions on the Strategic Budget Reallocation. The first, on enhancing the undergraduate experience, will be today from 4-5:30 p.m. in Rudder 601.

Our plan to enhance the undergrad experience is to reduce teaching staff while increasing enrollment. That way Aggies get to experience more of each other in every class they take.

Update: The email also says:

My memo about these forums, and how you can view them remotely if you are unable to attend, can be found at http://tamunews.tamu.edu/2010/08/31/strategic-budget-reallocation-process/.

But if you follow the link, all it says is

All open forums are taking place in Rudder 601 and will utilize electronic simulcast for maximum participation.

Note the email says today is the first, while the website shows one from last Friday on graduate programs.

Update 2: the streams are at http://ttvn2.tamu.edu/home/?p=streams

So, if it was an emergency it must have been important, right?

Hmm... no coverage of the yesterday's Emergency Faculty Senate Meeting in the online editions of the Eagle, KBTX, or the Batt.

But we do get coverage of how new Aggie license plates are available.

Anyone have a report? Vision1920 wasn't able to get away from more important things.

Emergency faculty senate meeting today

The Faculty Senate has called an emergency meeting today to formulate their response to the Strategeric Budget Reallocation Plan. The Faculty have this peculiar idea that the process should be open and transparent.

The faculty have tried to give their input on how the budget crisis should be handled before. In the wake of the layoffs of instructors and staff reported last week, Vision 1920 reminds our readers that in a survey over the summer, only 82.4% of the faculty agreed with the following statement:

I am willing to forego a merit raise for one academic year on the grounds that the money saved will be used to reduce the number of faculty and staff terminated.

And only 64.4% agreed to forego raises for two years.

This idea did not make it into the SBR Plan. But if the faculty could be less divided, then maybe the administration would have listened to them. And if you believe that, Vision 1920 thinks you would be an excellent Faculty Senator.

Shared Services

From Tuesday's Eagle

The university-wide plans had called for the elimination of 93 faculty and 117 staff positions -- along with 100 vacant faculty and 175 vacant staff positions -- to help meet a "worst-case" state reduction of $39 million and an internal $21 million reallocation plan to bolster a centrally administered pool to fund strategic priorities.

Across the university, non-tenured faculty have been given notices.

On Monday afternoon, all nine lecturers and senior lecturers in the biology department were set to receive notices of non-renewal.

Vision 1920 is thinking Chancellor McKinney and System VP Giroir, who both have MDs, could pick up a couple of sections of Intro Biology. If their student evaluations are good enough, they could even get some teaching awards.

Every Ag can dream of being Governor someday

Quoted in yesterday's Eagle

In the interview printed last week, Perry was asked about layoffs and buyouts of experienced faculty. He was quoted as saying, "We're laying off professors because there was a huge hiring increase that went on in the mid-2000s and these people are not even in the classrooms teaching our kids. I totally support that concept. Reductions in personnel that are nonessential at universities is good fiscal management."

The push to hire new faculty through the "Faculty Reinvestment Plan" was based on the flawed idea that A&M needed to reduce class size and increase our research prominence.

We could save a lot more and reduce the cost of college for students if we just got rid of the classrooms too. As the Governor's own career shows, all an Aggie needs can come from yell practice and Bonfire.

Deck chair arrangements being planned

The Eagle reports

Texas A&M officials have provided hints about what a planned $21 million internal reallocation could be spent on: increasing graduate student enrollment, improving the undergraduate experience, enhancing facilities and taking care of faculty.

Decisions about the reallocation -- which is stacked on a potential $39 million "worst-case" state funding reduction -- aren't final and the current discussion centers more on the process for deciding the priorities than figuring out what they are.

Some might be surprised that a process for figuring out priorities at an established AAU university doesn't already exist.

There's an old saying that one should measure twice and cut once. That's how we do things for Vision 1920... just not necessarily in that order.

Dear Faculty: please leave

The Eagle covers the Voluntary Separation Plan (VSP), and the details are here (pdf). Eligible faculty get either one or two years of pay to leave. For most colleges it's open to any tenured faculty member who has been at their current rank since 1995.

The application window is also pretty short: August 15- Sept 23, 2010.

The University can reject VSP applications, and VSP applicants can't bail out of their Fall teaching; the earliest separation date will be December. Who is the target demographic for the VSP?

Doug Slack, a wildlife fisheries science professor, said he will apply for the program. He said he's had his dream job for 37 years teaching students at Texas AM and serving the state, but it's time to move on. Though nearing retirement anyway, he said, he wouldn't have decided to apply now if it weren't for the incentive.

"The program enables the university to spend a little money on the front end and save a lot on the back end," said Slack, 67. "It will help with the remaining faculty members, and help our department meet some of its needs."

Slack chaired a search committee whose recommendations were rejected by the Regents, and was critical of the process. Vision 1920 sees the VSP as a great way to encourage senior faculty who have been around long enough so they are no longer looking to the administration for handouts able to lead new initiatives to retire.

Pulling savings out of our RASS

Last year, the BoR and the TAMU System created nine shared services teams to look for ways to

To review current services or activities and determine if there are efficiencies and any associated cost saving by sharing these services without sacrificing quality.

In January, Chancellor McKinney summarized (pdf) the progress on shared services. Notably absent from the list of possible savings was anything from the Research Administration Shared Services (RASS) team. It seems the RASS team didn't find very much to cut.

Yesterday, VP for Research Seeman updated the CPI on what happened after the RASS failed to find much to save from sharing services. It seems the Regents didn't like that answer and sent the team to redo the analysis. The RASS still didn't find things where sharing would cost less. Not willing to accept that answer, the BoR is now looking to pay an outside consultant to look for savings.

Places where shared services can save significant amounts without sacrificing quality were also elusive in 2007, when the Integrated Research Administration Project committee went looking for them. But Vision 1920 is confident that if we just keep looking, there will be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Vision 1920 is also proud of our BoR's patriotism. Research administration is part of the indirect costs applied to extramural funding, so we're sure that when those savings are found, the BoR will return an appropriate share of the found money to its rightful owners in funding agencies of the federal government.

Faculty and Staff Appreciation Night

Tonight's women's basketball game was Faculty and Staff Appreciation night. Vision 1920 hopes these people are feeling appreciated.

Jimmie Killingsworth has had easier Mondays.

It's not every day the head of the English department at Texas A&M has to call an 8 a.m. meeting and tell about 30 people that it would be wise to look for other jobs.

5% solutions

In the email from President Loftin:

I sent a memo to Deans and Vice Presidents last Friday that gave instructions for addressing the 5 percent budget reduction (about $28 million) that the Legislative Budget Board has requested from all state agencies. Each college and division will receive a target budget reduction goal and will be asked to give me a plan by Feb. 8 for meeting this goal. If you have a suggestion, please send it to me at president@tamu.edu no later than Feb. 5. These are tough economic times and we have tough decisions ahead of us, but our university is extremely resilient. Also, we are fortunate that our state is in better economic shape than many others. Our foremost guiding principle as we address these budget reductions is to protect our core mission of teaching, research and service.

Vision 1920 wonders if all the colleges and divisions will have 5% targets or if some targets will be more than 5% and some will be less. The future tense "will receive a target" suggests that tough decisions may actually be made to make the targets different. But the expectation of a plan by Feb 8; the first workday after suggestions are due suggests otherwise.

Byrning down the house

The Eagle has more from the BoR meeting

The Texas A&M Board of Regents grilled Athletic Director Bill Byrne and the department’s chief financial officer Thursday about a scathing audit released last month.

The audit, which was formally presented to regents at the daylong meeting in College Station, cited inadequate reporting and financial controls, along with expenses not abiding by the university’s established reporting standards.

“Are we going to live within the budget? We’ve been asked to reduce things all over the university,” said Regent Gene Stallings, a former Texas A&M football coach. “How did it get so far off?”

Inadequate reporting and financial controls. Hmm... that sounds familiar. Hey Gene, as long as you're focused on the budget, we have a couple of questions you can pose to your colleagues on the BoR:

• How much did it cost to replace the paper towel dispensers in every restroom on campus?
• What's the going rate for two first class round trip airfares to Qatar?
• How much did that search firm cost?
  

How to save 28 million over two years

The Eagle reports on the long-expected budget changes for Texas A&M:

Texas A&M may have to cut $28 million out of its budget over two years.

University officials had expected budget instructions from state officials for several weeks. They came Friday, as state leaders directed all agencies and higher-education institutions to plan for a 5 percent reduction in spending.

The reduction averages $14 million a year over the two years -- or biennium -- that began Sept. 1. The university has flexibility in deciding how much to reduce each year. Since more than four months have passed in fiscal year 2010, one option would be a smaller cut this year and having fiscal year 2011 shoulder the rest.

Back in June, we pointed to a letter from former TAMU CFO William Krumm about budgets. One of Krumm's points is that the total budget aggregates a lot of sources that are neither tuition nor state funds. We could reduce the total TAMU budget, for example, by faculty losing their extramural research grants. While some might favor this to force the faculty to focus on teaching, this doesn't actually save much money.

To save significant amounts, you have to look were the State money actually goes. Last August Vision 1920 linked to an analysis of where the growth in the cost of higher ed is coming from: universities are adding administrators and staff at rates much higher than the rate of inflation. In the comments, Karl Katzke explains one important reason why staff and administration keeps growing faster than faculty:

We do end up spending quite a bit of time reading SAPs, collecting and collating documentation to prepare for audits, and making sure that we're in compliance with some very detailed, mutually contradictory, and absolutely nonsensical state and federal laws.

As Karl points out, this is unlikely to change.

Vision 1920 will try to explore other ideas or saving money in future posts. Send us your ideas!

Shared services

Over the break, Chancellor McKinney announced the results of the shared services analysis. The TAMU community heard about this via email. For the rest of you, here's the Eagle

Though more than $16 million in savings were identified, no savings have yet been implemented. And Wednesday's announcement provided administrative reshuffling, but still no savings, aside from two positions being cut from the A&M System. It was unclear late Wednesday what those positions were.

The "savings" consist mostly of moving administrators from the University to the System. Vision 1920 is sure that the resultant changes in the power of the System are just a coincidence.

Oh, and we'll save more money by hiring a consulting firm to redo what the internal committees have been doing for the past six months.

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum

Vision 1920 was not able to attend President Loftin's second open forum, and is relying on the KBTX story to figure out what happened.

Texas A&M Interim President R. Bowen Loftin held the second of open forums for the Aggie family to ask questions and make comments Friday morning. Loftin has been told by the Board of Regents to slash 20 million dollars from next year's budget. Loftin says over 6 million dollars has already been saved at the central administration level.

Is the number shrinking? When the Regents met, the savings were reported as $6.8M.

The beauty of asking all units to cut the same amount is that the pain is not based on arbitrary and capricious criteria like what they contribute to teaching and research.

Advance to the rear

KBTX reports on budget presentations made Wednesday to the Regents. Interim President Loftin described how $6.8M has been trimmed already. Most of the savings come from reducing the merit pay pool, but Loftin is also cutting the fat from his own office.

Reductions in the president's office included the elimination of the Office of the Executive Vice President for Operations, a position created by former President Elsa Murano.

By August 31, the Office of Advancement will also be eliminated.

Advancement? Aggieland is already the best place on earth.

Gold plate budget

KBTX reports:

You may have already seen the new Texas A&M personalized license plates around the community. You can get your own for $30, but if you want it to spell out a message, it'll cost you $40 more.

For every Aggie plate sold, $22 go towards student scholarships.

To date, A&M has generated more than $2.6 million, by far the most of any Texas university and more than the second- and third-place universities combined.

Vision 1920 suggests that in the spirit of shared services, we should make a single personalized plate design for the TAMU System.

Irrelevant

That Eagle story from Sunday included the graphic above. Vision 1920's analysts say the red part is a combination of in-state and out-of-state students. In state tuition and fees for some peer institutions:

School	2008-09 In-state tuition and fees
Penn State	$13,706
U Illinois	$12,240
U Michigan	$11,037
U Minnesota	$10,634
Ohio State U	$8,679
UC-Davis	$8,635
UT-Austin	$8,090
UC-San Diego	$8,062
TAMU	$7,844
Purdue U	$7,750
U Wisconsin	$7,658
UC-Berkeley	$7,656
UCLA	$7,551
Georgia Tech	$6,040
U North Carolina	$5,397
U Florida	$3,790

UNC shows higher per capita support from tuition and fees because about 20% of Tar Heel freshmen are from out of state, while only ~5% of Aggie undergrads aren't Texas residents. However:

Stallings said that other universities' financial situations were irrelevant.

"I am not concerned about what other universities are doing as much as what we can do for A&M," he said. "We have no agenda other than trying to have the best university we possibly can and make it as affordable as we possibly can."

because we know that none of those other states cares about keeping costs down and making their schools affordable.

Never let a crisis go to waste

Today's Eagle has an article casting doubt on the fiscal crisis at A&M.

The university undoubtedly faces a tougher economic outlook than it did a few years ago, but the severity of the situation is a matter of debate. The potential impact of the proposed cuts on the quality and reputation of the university is also unclear. Regents say that it will have no effect, but many in the community are skeptical.

The regents are set to meet and review next year's budgets for all system schools and agencies late this week. They are also expected to review initial reports on the cost-cutting measures.

The skeptics point to the costs of ex-Pres. Murano's severance, the Chancellor's Teaching Excellence Award, the commitment of University resources to TIGM, TIPS, and NCTM, the creation of new Vice-Chancellors since 2005, and junkets to Qatar as evidence that cost-cutting is a smoke screen.

The 2009 budget for the system offices -- excluding money spent on debt services -- was 82.5 percent higher than it was in 2006, when McKinney took the helm. A&M's budget for 2009 was 22.4 percent higher than the budget for 2006.

They also complain that they should have been asked to plan for belt-tightening earlier

"I think the critical issue is we are not aware of the finance issues that are emerging as the result of our president resigning," said Dennie Smith, head of the Teaching, Learning and Culture Department in A&M's College of Education and president of the university's Department Head Council.

Smith, like many other members of the faculty, has acknowledged that the cost to attend A&M has increased and that the economic times have become tougher, but he said that he thought statements about skyrocketing costs and financial crisis might be overblown. Skeptics also said they had heard little concern about the situation until the regents and McKinney came under fire in recent months.

Why should the Department Heads hear about things beforehand? That's not how we do Shared Governance here.

There should be no doubt that A&M faces a fiscal crisis when we have to have layoffs in the athletic department, and former university officials suggest

...examine the costs of running the system offices and the Board of Regents. All costs must be captured and addressed, including services and hosting activities provided by the university to the system offices. Some of these costs may have to be imputed, as there is no current market price for such items as the chancellor's private box at Kyle Field and similarly provided services and activities

Meat cutting

If that woman hadn't blabbed about the $16M loan, the University wouldn't have had to do this

Two of the longest-tenured members of the Texas A&M University athletics department lost their jobs Thursday in a budget-cutting move that eliminated 17 positions from the department.

Billy Pickard and Jim Kotch have a combined 73 years of service in the department. They were casualties of what athletics director Bill Byrne called a reduction in force that was required to complete a $4.5 million budget cut.

Byrne said in a statement that the athletics department had to eliminate the positions because A&M officials could make only $3.5 million in cuts without reducing personnel.

Now that the $16M loan has to be paid back, Vision 1920 is looking at creating a Systems level Athletic Director, which would allow us to eliminate the redundant athletic department services at the various schools. Each school would keep its own teams and coaches, but the System would handle the luxury boxes and tickets.