Full report here.
UO’s student government has already voted to repurpose the current fee for student housing assistance etc. They’ve also refused to accept President Schill’s proposal to retroactively charge the students $1M for games that never happened.
UO’s Tuition Fee and Advisory Board – normally a rubber-stamp group for the administration – has now held two meetings on this. They also refused to support Schill’s plan.
It’s now up to President Schill to either recommend that Chuck Lillis’s Board of Trustees raise in-state tuition by 4.5%, and non-resident 3.0%, or let the Ducks siphon off part of that potential increase to the academic budget for a mandatory fee to help pay for the recent and future increases in salaries for AD Rob Mullens etc.
So Pres Schill and our Board of Trustees have a simple choice: Spend the 3.0% and 4.5% Tuition and Fee increases for UO’s academic purposes, or give part of them to the Ducks:
The full TFAB report includes a caricature of the actual discussions, which ignores the many well-thought out arguments from UO students and others against the fee for athletics but highlights the comments of one Duck fan – who as faculty, won’t have to pay the fee:
They are crazy if they try to raise tuition by that much for any purpose. If the students bail, UO will deserve it. But maybe UO knows something. How has enrollment been doing?
With no disrespect to any individuals, let’s engage in this cost-reduction experiment. No job reductions in academic departments and all data from the Office of Institutional Research complied 11/01/20
100,282. Director of Communications. University Communications
135,419. Director. University Communications
95,000. Director, Development Communication. University Communications.
69,984. Senior Associate Director. University Communications.
278,168. VP. University Communications.
91,167. Director of Communications. University Communications.
83,000. Director of Communications. SOJC
115,815. Director of Marketing Communications. University Communications.
132,762. Director of Strategic Communications. University Communications.
168,506. Assistant VP. University Communications.
117,969. Assistant VP. Equity & Inclusion
107,293. Assistant VP. Equity & Inclusion
179,920. Assistant VP. Admissions
146,914. Senior Director. HR Programs and Services
151,158. Assistant VP, President’s Initiatives. President’s Office
123,000. Director of Strategic Communication. Strategic Communication
171,948. Associate VP. VPSL Admin Operations
142,759. Senior Director, Development. SOJC
168,066. Associate VP. DOS Operations
134,765. Assistant VP, President’s Office.
Projected annual savings north of ~$2.7 million
*majority of University Communications staff left intact.
What better University Communication and Strategic Marketing than cost savings so students can be featured on nationally televised sporting events?
Did I budget right? #value
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I think the word “crazy” continues to be kind to the inept, insensitive and real-world moronic behavior of those who “run” the UO and I am no longer sure who those are …
Will someone please explain why the resident/non-resident tuition rate should depend AT ALL on whether the Athletics Ticket Fee is adopted? It comes across as essentially imposing a higher tuition rate as a penalty for not agreeing to the Athletics Ticket Fee. How can that be justified?
Pres Schill had been hoping the TFAB would endorse his new Duck fee. They refused. As a compromise they gave him a total number. The alternative would have been for them to propose a 4.whatever tuition increase, and leave it up to him to tack on the Duck ticket fee. That would have been a little too transparent, hence the attempt to bury it in the 4.5%
I know I say this every year about this time, but I am still amazed that an undergraduate degree from a highly ranked research university (I know it’s not Standford or whatever, but it’s ranked about #100 by USNWR every year) costs only $40K to $50K, depending on how hard you worked in high school, how heavy your credit load is, and how clever you are about covering your non-tuition expenses. That is a hell of a deal.
“An investment in Knowledge pays the best interest.” – Poor Richard, aka Ben Franklin
The education certainly has significant value. The real sticker cost price for an undergrad degree currently hits over $55,000 with all the mandatory fees for an in-state student, not including materials and not factoring living expenses.
The issue though seems to be the continued and pervasive growth of expenditures and salaries that are not part of the educational or research core of a university. It becomes incredibly difficult to trust the apportionment of additional tuition when the history of budgets has shown how the general tuition fund is spent inefficiently, inappropriately, and with reckless abandon.
Are those increases below the threshold that requires the state to approve them? Given covid can the state come in and meddle?
It would be good to know what final FTE enrollment was for this year: If it is up, then why the huge huge increases; If it is down then what makes them think such a (relatively) small increase will yield less dollars when more students pass on UO; and why the need for the increase anyway, my gut says operations costs will be down this year (before the end of year party).
Love the VP list… I am going to have to share that one. Were all the Com VPs that did not have a school listed part of central Communications? It would be fun to add any communication consultants contracts to this as well. I bet there is more than the 2.7M there :)
In this calculation is it possible to know what the one time cost of the early retirement incentives is estimated to be? Moreover, do we have any idea of how many folks (career and tenure track) took that deal? It seems to me that with applications up there is a better than even chance that our enrollment will bounce back up — so if teaching class sizes are going to be expanded and those positions not replaced, or replaced at a lower cost — perhaps the university is trying to restore itself to positive surplus territory?