UConn President Susan Herbst traveled to the legislative office building Wednesday morning to plead for more funding for her institution. Budget cuts proposed by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy , she said, would threaten its mission.
Herbst told legislators Malloy’s proposed spending plan is approximately the same as it was in the 2009 fiscal year. “In that time, costs have risen by 36 percent,” she said.
The 2016 fiscal year appropriation for the university is $243.1 million. The overall university budget is $1.3 billion with about half of its revenue coming from student tuition and fees.
In her testimony, Herbst said, “There is no university that cuts its way to success. There is no university that strengthens academics or student outcomes through budget reductions.”
Malloy has proposed a combined $31.2 million funding cut for UConn and its regional campuses and the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington.
Herbst said the cuts this year “wouldn’t make or break” the system. However, she said, the school has “accumulated years of cuts, rescissions and fund sweeps that are digging deeply into UConn’s fiscal health and threatening our ability to carry out our mission most effectively.”
In documents supporting her testimony, Herbst pointed to the increase in faculty to student ratio from 14.2 to 1 in 1996 to 16.9 in the most recent fiscal year. That number peaked in 2012 at 18.3. In the last three years, the university added 159 faculty but 28 positions are expected to be cut under the proposed budget.
Herbst also said tuition increases alone won’t close the budget gap. She said next year a tuition increase will generate an estimated $12.8 million. “It seems likely that all of the new revenue from the tuition increase – and then some – will be lost due to cuts in state support, wiping out the increase and leaving the university deeper in deficit,” she said.
