NEW: a @calstate top official says that there are no plans in the 2020-21 year to recommend tuition increases. Given Covid's impact on family finances and anticipation economy will rebound, "the option of increasing tuition is not an appropriate strategy today," Steve Relyea said
Relyea: "If the state's economy becomes more dire later this year, it may be necessary to revisit this and other options, but as of today and assuming current conditions and assumptions persist, we have no plans to recommend increasing tuition during the 2020-2021 fiscal year."
Trustee Sabalius proposes an incentive to give tenured faculty an incentive to retire early and then leave those positions open during the financial downturn. That frees up revenues to keep more lecturers, who have less stable job promises, on board. Relyea: We're considering it.
A CSU official says that particular idea would run into complications with retirement plans and the suspicion that the state retirement program would not agree to this incentive. But the official says thinking outside the box is necessary now. I skipped a lot of detail here.
Relyea: CSU has spent down $67m of reserves. That’s out of $467m. So system down to $400m in economic uncertainty reserves. CSU is imagining a three-year timeline for this reserve.
Some background: State budget surplus in January was projected to be $5.4b. B/c of covid, it became a $54b deficit. In final budget deal, the CSU got $299m less from state compared to 2019-20. That's a 7% drop in state support and 4% decline in total operating budget.
Anticipated revenue drops, including the $299m drop in state support:
Revenue drop from tuition = 24m
Unfounded mandatory costs = 46mil
Total rev reduction = $369.7m compared to 19-20.
Auxiliary revenue will be down, too (think bookstores, parking fees).
Revenue drop from tuition = 24m
Unfounded mandatory costs = 46mil
Total rev reduction = $369.7m compared to 19-20.
Auxiliary revenue will be down, too (think bookstores, parking fees).
If federal government passes another stimulus package this fall, CA budget will refill CSU state support from 71m to 498m. The range is based on a pro-rated amount of CSU's share if feds dole out $2b to $14b to CA.
Strategy for managing budget cuts at CSU: 50% of each CSU campus's reduction is based on prorated share of operating budget. The other 50% is based on student demographics. Campuses with more low income students will retain more of their funding than campuses with fewer students.
Next up, the government relations committee. Trustee Sabalius complains that the minutes of the May meeting are too brief. He asks for more detail going forward.
The highlight is that Trustee Simon asked for an analysis and support of the CSU's issuing contracts that take gender and race/ethnicity into account. The context is that the CSU supported ACA 5, which led to Prop 16, which would overturn bans on affirmative action if passed.
(A cute moment: The committee of the whole conferred an emeritus title to outgoing Student Trustee Garcia. During the unanimous vote for this title, Trustee Firstenberg said, "go to UCLA law school and I told you I will take you to lunch whenever you're hungry.")
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