RIBGHE commissioner says URI budget issue still 'tricky situation'

11/6/08 - Many students know the University of Rhode Island, for the moment at least, is partly funded by the state of Rhode Island, but few are aware of the actual system the funds flow through and how it affects their tuition.Jack Warner, the Commissioner for the Rhode Island Board of Governors for Higher Education, discussed the financial dynamic between state-funded institutions like URI and the financial institutions that help fund them. He also touched on how this will influence the choice of URI's next president.

Warner stood in the Memorial Union Ballroom last night in front of a crowd of about 60 explaining the ins and outs of state funding for institutions of higher education in Rhode Island.

The main issue students repeatedly asked Warner about was the mid-year tuition increase, and why other state-funded programs were not taking cuts to provide more money for higher education.

"This is a strong university, and it has been for some time," he said. "We compete with lots of embedded entitlement programs in Rhode Island, so if any money is going to be freed up for higher [education], it's got to come from somewhere."

Warner added the board has a lobbyist in the legislature pushing for increased funding of the university, but he added he was not optimistic about the situation. He said because of how the Rhode Island human service budget is set up and how URI's costs are interpreted, URI is less important.

"There needs to be a restructuring of state priorities on the one hand and ways to affect savings in some of those entitlement programs on the other hand for all this to work well," he said.

Warner said because higher education costs are considered discretionary, unlike those of other entitlement programs and human services that are considered fixed costs, they are given less priority in the state budget, and are cut more often.

Junior Allen Petit, a student senator and finance major, asked how the board is lobbying for more money from the legislature to stall tuition hikes.

Warner said it was a tricky situation, because when the higher education budget was in the drafting stages last year, it anticipated a certain amount of state funding. When the money was passed around, higher education came up $18 million short of projected funding.

He said the amount needed for URI to keep its projected tuition from last year's predictions is $4.5 million.

"We don't want to enact this $4.5 million revenue generated from tuition," he said. "So we've asked for $4.5 million of supplemental support from the General Assembly so that we won't have to do that."

He added that later this month there would be a conference that will decide the fate of this initiative and its plausibility.

"I'm not overly optimistic about it," Warner said. "But we've certainly made the ask, and we've put our mid-year budget in with that request in mind. Save us from assessing students by allocating this money, and we'll do our best to compete for resources."

The other major problem higher education institutions are having with money, he said, is that the state takes away funding from the university when resources are independently generated.

"In many ways, our higher [education] system generates resources that the state captures," he said. "My agenda for this year is to stop that. To say, if you want us to be more business-like, if you want us to generate more resources, then you've got to let us keep those, let us invest those, and then have the proceeds from those investments come back to make this an affordable place, and make it a quality place."

Warner said this is only one half of the funding problem facing higher education institutions, and the other half is the state pulling more and more funding from the university each year.

"If you trace the trend lines out, I think [URI's state] funding goes to zero sometime in the next decade," he said. "I don't think it'll end up going to zero. I think it has to settle out somewhere in between because there is still a set of public purposes that public universities have to fulfill, and you need public support to do it."

He added that URI is not the only university experiencing financial woes with the bad state of the economy.

"Someone has referred to Rhode Island as the 'canary in the coal mine,'" he said. "We were first in, we showed the symptoms that something was drastically wrong, then others quickly followed us."

Warner said there are alternatives the board is pursuing in order to help keep tuition down, especially in energy-saving measures. He mentioned the possibility of a wind farm being constructed at CCRI in Warwick, and the installation of a computer that regulates heating and air conditioning in higher education facilities to peak efficiency.

Warner said adding prestige to the university would also strengthen not only the state's reputation, but also how URI is dealt with when the budget cuts come down hard.

"Where I think URI could push harder would be on its research agenda," Warner said. "Our research and the quality of research our faculty perform is often a basis used to evaluate the prestige of universities around the country."

Helping the citizens of Rhode Island realize the universal benefits of this research would help keep the university off the chopping block, Warner said. He cited the Rhode Island media as the best place for students to voice their concerns about the budget.

"I think telling stories to reporters, news outlets and others, about the impact of higher cost on students, getting those stories out is a very powerful kind of message. I think people are sympathetic to stories," he said.

Warner also explained the process that goes into the selection of the next URI president and how students could voice their opinions and comments. Brandon Brown, the student representative in the presidential search committee of the RIBGHE, is that voice, said Warner.