Proposed cuts and funding issues addressed with Multi Year Plan
On Wednesday, April 2, President Alastair Summerlee and Provost and Vice President Academic Maureen Mancuso held a Budget Rumour Mill to address potential concerns within the university community regarding the budget breakdown for the next few years.
“The big message … is that we are not anticipating any further funding coming from the province,” said Mancuso.
The government has encouraged universities across Ontario to take on Strategic Mandate Agreements (SMAs) and pursue differentiation. System metrics, in addition to institutional metrics, have been adopted to measure these agreements, but Mancuso said that the question still remains as to how these metrics will lead to a new funding formula.
“[The government] is looking really hard at redundancies,” said Mancuso. “At the moment, they are not approving any additional undergraduate programs [or] undergraduate enrolment until … we have gotten through the official SMA process.”
Another issue the university faces is that most of the funds making up the budget – the OMAF-MRA fund, Research and Trust funds, and capital and endowment funds – are restricted and must be used very specifically. “The MTCU operating budget [is] the only budget at which we have discretion and latitude with respect to how we spend it,” concluded Mancuso.
“There’s very little leeway in terms of moving monies around to be able to deal with things,” added Summerlee. “We’ve put back the Priority Investment Fund, [which] has the ability to make … allocations to projects that we hope are going to … help us deal with the budget challenge that we have.”
The budget remains of interest to faculty, staff, and students, as September marks the beginning of the three years of Multi-Year Plan 2, which is meant to address the university’s $32.4 million deficit. “The cuts are smaller next year, larger the year after, and then maximum in the third year,” said Summerlee. “We absolutely must be able to achieve those targets that we’ve set … If we can do better in the first year when the cuts are smaller, that’s actually going to help reduce the amount of cut later on.”
Regarding the Program Prioritization Process (PPP), which made headlines in the fall semester, President Summerlee reiterated that the allocation of cuts is not overwhelmingly based on the PPP. “Because the majority of the costs come from the fact that units are employing people, 50 per cent of the allocation of those cuts is based on compensation … Just less than 20 per cent comes on the basis of the PPP rankings,” explained Summerlee.
“As we are beginning to see some shifts in enrolment – that is, shifts between programs – [it] is quite possible that there may be an opportunity for us to reduce that 32.4 million,” Summerlee added. “For example, recently we’ve seen more students going into engineering, and they bring in a larger grant, and so if we can sustain that – that actually cuts the amount of money we would need to find in the cut.”
Rising tuition fees, however, will likely remain an issue for students. According to the proposed budget, students can expect to see their tuition fees rise by the approved three per cent to cover the costs of salaries, benefits, and utilities.
“We’re not really expecting to see huge shifts in the first year,” concluded Summerlee. “The bigger changes will probably come in the last two years.”