University of Utah leaders discussed looming budget cuts and reallocation and how they can keep tuition low at a Hinckley Forum last Thursday.
U President Taylor Randall was joined by Provost and Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs Mitzi Montoya and Utah’s Commissioner of Higher Education Geoffrey Landward on a panel to make the case for higher education before the start of Utah’s legislative session.
Higher education ranks among legislators’ top priorities this year, with Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz calling for a 10% budget cut in October. In preparation, the U has been running through “budget cut scenarios,” Montoya said. She said the U has interpreted the legislature’s requests as a call for more transparency and accountability.
“We’re adding new tools so we are even more data-informed,” she said. “So that … the leaders of all of our units have the ability to demonstrate that accountability through transparency and planning.”
In November, the Legislative Auditor General ran a performance audit on Utah’s higher education system. The report recommended that university presidents start collecting “program cost, enrollment, completion, employment and workforce demand data to determine if programs should be expanded, reduced or discontinued.”
The Utah System of Higher Education is also developing metrics to help guide cuts and reallocations that align with the data recommendations from the auditor’s report. Landward said university presidents and their administrative teams will decide where to cut and reallocate funds.
“Having a framework that allows that kind of discretion and flexibility, I think, was critical for this to be able to work rather than the legislature coming in and saying ‘here’s the program that we want funded and here’s the one we don’t,'” Landward said. “Having that trust given to higher education was critical.”
Randall said the U has been pushing hard to ensure that academic programs do not disappear immediately as the standards for cuts are being worked out,
“We do not want you changing your major because a program left, so … one of the things we’re certainly looking at is if a program goes away, there’s … a teach-out period,” he said.
Keeping Tuition Low
In order for the U to focus on keeping its tuition costs low, the university needs to look at its administrative costs and ensure they are performing efficiently, Montoya said. She pointed to sharing academic advisors across colleges as an example of achieving efficiency.
“We’ve found that … some colleges had more advisors than others,” she said. “And so we’ve started bringing some of those groups of advisers together so that we share advisers, we cross train them across programs so … every student can be guaranteed access to the same quality and quantity of advising.”
Randall added that scholarship funding is an important part of keeping tuition low, and one of his main priorities for the next two to three years is raising “jaw-dropping” amounts of scholarship money.
“One of the big challenges we have right now is a challenge that society is facing, and that is housing costs,” he said. “So you are going to see us launching in the future housing scholarships and trying to take into account the entire bill that a student and family has to look at.”
