Chronicle article: what if everyone on campus understood the money?

[Vkw10]

The list of 10 questions related to campus finances is interesting. I know or could easily find answers to seven, but I'll be looking for the rest because I can see why this information is relevant to budgets.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/what-if-everyone-on-campus-understood-the-money?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_1517615_nl_Afternoon-Update_date_20200911&cid=pm&source=ams&sourceId=410706

[apl68]

If everybody understood the money on some campuses today, they would probably be a lot more worried than they already are.

[polly_mer]

If everybody understood the money on some campuses today, they would probably be a lot more worried than they already are.

If they really understood the money, many campuses would have few to no faculty in fields where good non-academic jobs exist starting about five years ago.

[Wahoo Redux]

Paywalled.

Polly, my friend, you are obsessed.

[spork]

It's obvious that my colleagues don't know the answers to any of these questions, because they think designing a curriculum is the same as designing a syllabus.

[San Joaquin]

Spork, I had just that very conversation with one of the AVPs this week.  He's trying to get faculty to use a template for program design and new program proposals that considers more than the curriculum itself.  Our accreditor has a nice outline they use for their approval of new programs that we may imitate with great appreciation, as it contains sections for budget, additional resource needs, potential demand and target populations, ideal faculty profiles and availability projections, and such.  We're going to need to educate up to it, but imho it is a worthy investment in a more informed faculty.

[polly_mer]

Polly, my friend, you are obsessed.

If you know and have a conscience, then you can't remain silent when actions can be taken to prevent entirely foreseeable disaster.

As Penn Jillette puts it, how much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize when you know the truth to your bones? 

The writing is on the wall and the best time to have acted was about ten years ago for many of the shakiest institutions.  However, individuals could still act now for at least their own families instead of waiting until they lose their jobs.

[spork]

Polly, my friend, you are obsessed.

If you know and have a conscience, then you can't remain silent when actions can be taken to prevent entirely foreseeable disaster.

As Penn Jillette puts it, how much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize when you know the truth to your bones? 

The writing is on the wall and the best time to have acted was about ten years ago for many of the shakiest institutions.  However, individuals could still act now for at least their own families instead of waiting until they lose their jobs.

The same applies to current doctoral students; to wit, I give you what seems to be the opening salvo in a social media flame war between two people I don't know:

https://twitter.com/CraigGaIIagher/status/1303793780894597121.

[Vkw10]

Paywalled.

Polly, my friend, you are obsessed.

Sorry, but I don't see an unpaywalled version. The gist of article is that few faculty and staff (and some administrators) understand inner workings of their institutions, especially finances, due both to difficulty of obtaining information and lack of awareness/interest. He also points out that the middle of a financial crisis is not the best time to begin learning, then offers a few questions that indicate the context employees should begin developing an understanding of if they want to participate effectively in discussions of organizational strategy and finance. The ten questions he asked are:


1. What was the annual revenue of your institution in the last year? What percentage of that was
2. What were your college's top three sources of revenue?
3. What was the total amount spent on faculty and staff salaries last year? And the total cost of annual benefits?
4. How much was spent on debt service and utilities?
5. What was the published figure for undergraduate tuition? What was the average price students actually paid?
6. What was the size of the endowment at the end of the fiscal year? What is campus policy on the percentage of the endowment that can be withdrawn annually to fund institutional needs?
7. What percentage of the alumni donated money?
8. What are the main reasons students choose to attend your two competitors?
9. What are the top two factors that prompt first-time students to leave your campus after a year?
10. Name the top three ways that the quality of the overall student experience affects your institution's short- and long-term economic viability.

In my opinion, being able to explain why each of these questions is important and being able to find at least 80% of the information fairly quickly (an hour or so) demonstrates minimum understanding of organization needed to be an effective administrator.

[Wahoo Redux]

Admin hide the answers to these questions to weaponize the answers.

Right now our union is battling it out with our administration which seems to be using the pandemic as a bargaining cudgel.

In a number of ways we are lucky: we're a commuter school with a very regional student demographic so we do not lose out on dorm & meal plan fees, and our enrollment is right on target, partly because so many students are not attending their name-brand schools and taking our meager offerings online.

And we are at the end of a (officially at least) very successful capital campaign. 

Yet the admin is pleading poor and hoarding the budgetary information, giving out incomplete spreadsheets, and refusing to openly discuss numbers.  Already the contract talks are in arbitration and we are being given strike strategy by the union.  Admin have refused a one-year interim COVID contract.

It is very worrisome.

In a moment certain posters will appear to tell us what we already know about the state of academia and defend this administrative approach, but if there are good reasons to bargain this way, they should be made public. 

You can get the article, BTW, by "signing up" for their email list-serve. 

[Hibush]

In my opinion, being able to explain why each of these questions is important and being able to find at least 80% of the information fairly quickly (an hour or so) demonstrates minimum understanding of organization needed to be an effective administrator.

For an administrator, even many department chairs, those are reasonable. For non-administrative faculty, of those questions address thing they can't influence and can't respond to.

I agree that administrators need to understand how to explain the importance of the question.

Percentage of alumni giving? That could be tough. But a department chair needs to know. Say that the second assistant vice provost for development comes to you and says that the archrival school is at 32.7% alumni giving while you are only at 32.2% and the university has made it a priority to overtake them. Your department teaches a lot of seniors. How can you revamp their senior year experience so that more will become donors in the next fiscal year? How do you make faculty respond to that call? /s

[Sun_Worshiper]

I will admit that I don't know the answers to most of these questions at my place

[Vkw10]

I will admit that I don't know the answers to most of these questions at my place

I doubt many people below the level of dean or VP know most of these. I understand why they're important, know a few, and could find most of them quickly, because this stuff is ammunition when I'm fighting for department budget. Getting the current year numbers for anything beyond my department is often impossible at my level.

I don't think most faculty need to know this specific information. For many faculty, it is often easier and just as revealing to notice that enrollment has been dropping 1% or more every year, that credit hours earned in the department are declining, that the relationship between official tuition rate and what students really pay is changing, that retention rates are declining. Those gradual but consistent declines should be scary. Instead, most of us overlook them until suddenly the institution where we've worked for 15 years is in serious financial difficulties because administrators have been bailing water without noticing that the crack in hull is getting a bit bigger every year. This pandemic is exposing a lot of cracked hulls.

My university is in relatively good shape now, but I can see problems developing. Five years ago, we shifted from slightly increasing enrollment annually to holding steady or decreasing slightly each year. There are other small indicators of stress, but that's the obvious one. All efforts seem to be aimed at returning to annual enrollment increases instead of recognizing the demographic indicators that enrollment decreases will continue and accelerate over the next ten years. We're in relatively good shape, but we won't be if we keep planning based on growing to 45k enrollment in ten years when we're more likely to drop below 35k.

[Wahoo Redux]

I don't think most faculty need to know this specific information.

You know, though, when they come at you with a "we-need-to-cut-back" mantra while your classes have waiting lists and admin are getting salary bumps and you are being told you can't have a COL raise this year, it gets a little hard to buy.

Respectfully, I think we DO need to know these things.  I think the public needs to know these things----particularly if we want to mollify the political sharks who circle our campuses demanding to know why tuition keeps rising.

[spork]

I think it would be helpful for faculty on my campus to know the answers to most of these questions because then some might understand why it's really stupid to add required courses to the curriculum when those courses invariably get taught by adjuncts.