Budget Bust Part 5: Dollars Dissected

10/31/08 - When University of Rhode Island students pay their tuition and fees to attend the university, those dollars will go to any combination of nine categories that make a pool called the unrestricted budget.A financial report that Budget Director Linda Barrett gave to the Cigar said those categories are Academic Affairs, Athletics, Research and Economic Development, the President's Division, finance and facilities, Student Affairs, University Advancement and utilities.

"Tuition dollars provide resources to administer the programs of the university, both academic and other," Barrett said.

Scholarships are a 10th category in the unrestricted budget, but it didn't go into Cigar calculations for the diagram because tuition dollars don't fund scholarships.

"Basically, that all comes from the state appropriation," Barrett said.

The report stated the entire unrestricted budget is $270 million, and scholarships make up $45.2 million of that figure. The money the university receives from the state is $77 million, Barrett said, which means that more than half of the state allocation could be used for scholarships alone.

The largest expense the university has is faculty and staff salary, she said. Records Barrett gave the Cigar stated there are 2018 authorized positions between professors and other staff, but not all of those are filled.

The records stated the two biggest chunks of the unrestricted budget are the Academic Affairs and finance and facilities categories. The Academic Affairs includes professor salaries, while finance and facilities includes salaries of non-academic staff and capital projects, Barrett said. The capital projects expenses include paying workers to oversee projects on campus, but new buildings are not included anywhere in the unrestricted budget.

"In the unrestricted budget, you're not going to find any building costs," Barrett said.

Those costs are paid for by bonds, and some fees go to unrestricted general obligation bonds, which are voted upon.

"In November, we're also voting on a number of issues," Barrett said. "Do you want to approve a new building at URI, do you want to do this, do you want to do that."

The non-academic staff in finance and facilities includes janitorial staff, campus security, parking staff, mechanics to fix the university's vehicles and building maintenance staff. Records said the university allocated $183 million for faculty and staff salary and benefits and student help.

Barrett said the student help is broken down into stipends for graduate students who student teach and per course instructors, who she said are part-time professors hired by URI to teach two or fewer courses per semester.

Some of the benefits included health and dental insurance and vacation payout, Barrett said.

"The reason it's looking so high is there are so many people there," she said. "You have just a lot of departments."

Of the 2018 jobs, records said 1374 are in Academic Affairs, 395 are in Administration, one is in Research and Economic Development and 58 are in Student Affairs, which includes services like counseling, Career Services, the Multicultural Center and the Talent Development programs. forty-nine jobs are in University Advancement, which involves publications and other marketing, and 77 jobs are in the President's Office.

The 77 jobs includes 64 in athletic departments, and the other 13 are in the president's and the provosts' office, who provide leadership to academic, research and building development programs.

Barrett said other sources of revenue are fees that the university charges professors when a research grant is obtained. But she said the university obtains only about 7 to 8 percent of those grants, and out of a possible $10 million in grant projects, only about $700,000-$800,000 would be transferred to the budget.

"It's recuperating some of the costs that we are actually paying," Barrett said, explaining when a professor conducts research, URI has to pay for electricity, water and other expenses. "I guess it's pretty standard across the country."

The university also receives revenue not in the unrestricted budget from Dining Services and Housing and Residential Life, which Barrett called auxiliaries. By state regulation, she said, auxiliaries must be self-sustaining, and must charge students enough to operate without funding from the university.

"They cannot be helped by URI," Barrett said.

The two chief factors that drive tuition up are decreasing state allocations and rising expenses, she added.

"Many times that's what happens," Barrett said. "The state allocation goes down so quickly we have to raise tuition more than we would like." If the allocation were to decrease more slowly, she said tuition would also increase more slowly. "We'd be able to minimize the increase, absolutely," she said.

Government regulations may require expansion, further driving tuition up, Barrett said.