With the lowest tuition and fees increase in 16 years, St. Thomas illustrated its increased focus on providing affordable education with the release of its annual budget Friday, Feb. 19.
It’s also the second lowest increase in 33 years and comes after a period of five years when the average increase had been 6.2 percent.
Joseph Kreitzer, associate vice president for academic affairs, said the primary focus in this year’s budget was accessibility and affordability for students.
“This was pretty clearly driven at the board level, saying, ‘all of higher education has to figure out how to be more like this on a regular basis and we’d prefer you guys to be the leader in trying to figure out how to make that happen,’” Kreitzer said. “This is a pretty audacious effort. We’re pretty sure many of the other schools will be unable to or will choose not to do the same.”
St. Thomas hopes to achieve this by a variety of cost-cutting measures including the elimination of staff positions, some increases in class sizes, the elimination of December commencement and the elimination of the evening custodial shift.
“To us, the affordability objective is an important one, just making a larger net bottom line isn’t really what we’re about,” Kreitzer said. “But like a for-profit business we have to make enough that we can pay for the maintenance and pay for the overhead and invest in the future.”
So while students will likely have more money in their pockets next year, what effects will this budget have on the institution as a whole?
Staff position cuts
According to Mark Dienhart, executive vice president and chief administrative officer, the university expects to eliminate up to 50 staff positions through voluntary early retirement programs and attrition.
“Rather than considering options that were as draconian as layoffs, we implemented a voluntary retirement settlement plan,” Dienhart said. “Avoiding layoffs was a major goal of mine and unquestionably of Father Dease.”
Other cut positions were those that remained open this year and will be eliminated because they’ve proven unnecessary.
Increases in class sizes
While overall class sizes may increase slightly, Dienhart said it will have little effect on the academic experience at St. Thomas and that the student to faculty ratio is not likely to change significantly.
“It’s a very important thing for us to provide personal attention to students,” Dienhart said. “The chances are that it won’t be a very significant portion of the cost-cutting. We had only three faculty members that ended up taking the early retirement incentive program. So we’ll try to live without those three full-time faculty positions.”
Kreitzer said the increases will be largely due to combining smaller sections of classes and reducing the number of adjunct faculty.
December commencement axed, spring downsized
Perhaps surprising for soon-to-be graduates is the news that December commencement exercises will be eliminated and spring post-ceremony receptions will be downsized.
Dienhart said eliminating December commencement was a sizable money saving cut that would have fewer negative effects than other cost-cutting possibilities.
“Many institutions don’t have a December commencement, they ask people to walk in the spring,” Dienhart said. “For years it had been suggested to us that we do the same thing. It was largely a matter of convention and convenience that we had it.”
As for the downsizing of spring post-ceremony receptions, Kreitzer cited poor attendance and the lack of necessity as reasons for eliminating this luxury.
“For a lot of people, they’re anxious to get off to their dinner reservations,” Kreitzer said. “In the midst of trying to find ways to reduce the budget we’d say, ‘what are the least onerous things we can do and yet accomplish the budget goals?’ That’s something that’s nice to do but is it crucial?”
Custodial cutback
Custodial services will now only function during the day with the elimination of the service’s night shifts.
Dienhart said it was a cost-cutting technique that will have little effect on the St. Thomas community.
“Having people working around the clock is an expensive proposition,” Dienhart said. “The feeling from our staff was that we would be able to provide the same level of service generally with the two shifts.”
Brent Fischer can be reached at bafischer@stthomas.edu
I feel a bit duped by this headline; it’s unnecessarily alarmist. When you write that UST is cutting staff, that reads “layoffs” to me. That UST is eliminating positions through voluntary early retirement programs and attrition? That’s quite typical for higher education institutions in these economic times.
@Pat Come on you know the whole point of a title is to get you to read the article right?
Pat–are you still working for University Relations? Not duping readers of headlines is important. It’s equally important not to “dupe” the casual reader who may or may not know a poster’s relationship to the story/entity itself and to point out when someone has a vested interest (i.e., that you work for the arm of the University responsible for portraying its best public face) in a story, and that that interest may likely be impacting his/her perception.
Yes, I work in University Relations; in fact, I do media relations and editorial work in the university’s News Service. So my accuracy-and-context barometer is set a little higher than most folks’, I suppose. I know the point of a headline, but given the number of folks losing their jobs in this economy, I think it’s important that the employees on this campus — and they’re readers of TommieMedia, too — know that UST isn’t laying off anybody. Having been laid off in a fit of budget cutting by another institution years ago, I will tell you that when I read that headline, I was thinking: “Oh, no. Not again.” Then I read the story. Whew.