Mississippi State University’s Robert Holland Faculty Senate met Nov. 11 in a meeting primarily concerning potential budget cuts, the uncertainty of the economy and the continued growth of the institution.
MSU president Mark Keenum spoke first. He said MSU planned to receive a 10 percent budget cut for the fiscal year of 2012 but ended up receiving only a 1 percent budget cut.
“I never dreamed that I would jump up and shout and yell ‘hooray’ for cuts, but I did,” he said. “When it was only 1 percent that was a big relief for me and this institution.”
Keenum said MSU is dependent on state funding and has received less in the last three budget cycles he has been through. He said he spends a lot of time going to state legislature sessions and will probably spend even more time working with the newly-elected leadership on budget issues.
Mississippi Institution of Higher Learning Commissioner Hank Bounds was another speaker at the meeting. His organization is responsible for the policies and finances of every university in the state.
Bounds said the state of Mississippi has around $500 million in one-time money to be used for appropriations but some programs, such as medicaid, will use a larger proportion of the money, as they are required to have more funding as they expand. Higher education does not require extra funding even if institutions expand and request more money.
“There’s some other things out there that could make this worse,” he said. “What I will soon ask (university) presidents to do is look at how they would deal with cuts of 5 percent or 10 percent.”
When institutions lose state funding, there are only a couple of things they can do to compensate.
This includes increasing tuition, retention and enrollment rates. MSU has raised tuition and increased enrollment rates. It also has the highest retention rate in the state.
“I’ve shared with presidents that they should think critically about how they raise tuition,” Bounds said. “I think that we’ll have to do that at every institution. We are in a pretty good place because our tuition is about 75 percent of the national average.”
Although MSU has grown substantially, it still needs to think about how long it will be able to sustain its growth without running into significant structural and infrastructural issues such as adequately paying faculty and providing enough dining services and housing for students, he said.
“We’re just not out of the woods yet,” Bounds said. “We’re going to work very hard to try to minimize cuts. I’d be delighted to see additional revenue come our way, but I think we all should prepare for the worst and hope for the best.”
Bounds said because of the political climate in Washington, there is no appetite in the federal government to provide additional funding for higher education. There may also be additional cuts to the Pell grant, which may hurt low-income students.
MSU needs to find as many inefficiencies as possible to save money, particularly with energy usage, he said.
“I think there’s room to find a million dollars in savings with people just turning off the lights (and) doing the things that aren’t painful,” Bounds said. “There should be a real effort around … not leaving computers on overnight (or) not having them on all day.”
Jerry Gilbert, provost and executive vice president, said MSU has saved millions of dollars over the past four or five years in energy conservation. Some of the success can be attributed to the President’s Select Committee on Efficiencies and Innovations.
Gilbert said graduation and retention rates should be taken into consideration when deciding how much state funding institutions receive.
“We need to reward universities for not only bringing students in the door but for graduating students,” he said. “We have the highest graduation rate in the system.”
Gilbert said if a student only pays for half of his education and the state pays for the rest and that student does not finish his or her degree program, the money the state spent on educating the student is wasted, which makes graduation and retention rates even more significant.
Bounds said economic recovery will likely be another two or three difficult years.
“The thing that keeps me up at night more than anything else on this issue is Mississippi is a little slower to go into a recession than other states, but we’re also a little slower to come out of one,” he said.
Keenum said as long as everyone is open and works together on solving problems, MSU will be very successful in the future.
“We have weathered the storm,” he said. “We’ve given pay raises for our faculty and staff. Our state pride awards have been very successful (in) recognizing the excellence of our faculty. It’s through our efforts of working together that we have weathered a pretty severe storm.”