The Summer Forty-Niner has chosen to extend publication of the July 23 opinion article CSU can balance budget without cuts by Professors Michael Pounds and Alan Lane online at www.daily49er.wpengine.com for your reference to this article.
The opinion article by Professors Pounds and Lane in the July 23 issue of the Summer Forty-Niner included misrepresentations and inaccurate information based on a significant misreading and misunderstanding of the university’s budget documents and financial statements.
Faced with the prospect of drastically reduced resources, as a community, we are going to have to make difficult decisions. It is critical that we make strategic decisions that allow us to emerge from this financial crisis as academically strong as we entered it. We must act on accurate and comprehensive information.
As a start, I would like to correct the numerous misrepresentations made in the July 23 article:
Assertion #1: The statement “30 percent of the university’s total operating costs go to administration — executive and management employees and their costs” is based on faulty assumptions. This percentage includes the library, academic advising, classroom technology, student career counseling, the Student Health Center and virtually all administrative support on campus. Clearly, these functions cannot be classified as “executive and management employees and their costs.”
Assertion #2: The inference that 43 percent of cumulative salaries go to administration as defined by the authors is also inaccurate. Their “43 percent” includes all administrative support, custodial, grounds workers, plant operations, student academic advising and health counseling, disabled students support, student testing and evaluation, student life and all academic department support staff salaries.
Assertion #3: The 20 percent higher benefit costs for “administration employees” includes benefit costs for administrative support, student services and academic department support staff; employees whose benefits are a higher percentage of their total compensation. The actual cost of benefits for executive and management employees is equal to that for comparable benefits-eligible faculty positions, i.e., tenure/tenure-track faculty and lecturers.
Assertion #4: The “administrative costs” for the university have increased 55 percent over the last 10 years not 85 percent as stated. Student enrollment has increased nearly 27 percent over the same period not 20 percent as stated. This faster rate of growth in administrative costs as compared to student enrollment is explained by fixed costs, such as the expansion of facilities and technology infrastructure, which must increase before student enrollment does. Furthermore, the increasing percentage of lower income students during this same period has been accompanied by significantly higher support costs.
Assertion #5: We are cutting back administrative positions and staff through nonrenewal of contracts, attrition, freezes, consolidations and reassignments. Rolling back these costs to 1999 may not be feasible unless the campus’ facilities and technology infrastructure is radically reduced. Furthermore, the doubling of our lower-income student population requires that we maintain targeted services for them.
Assertion #6: The quoted figure of “more than $140 million per year” includes all non-faculty employee salaries and benefits. The implicit suggestion is that the campus could operate without any administrative support. This would mean faculty would have to provide all non-instructional services themselves, including processing their own paychecks, cleaning restrooms, evaluating over 60,000 student enrollment applications, processing all financial aid applications, staffing the library and data centers, etc.
Assertion #7: The total number of MPPs increased by 20 percent not 100 percent as stated.
Assertion #8: It is assumed that “upper level administrators” refers to MPP employees in the top two classifications. The average salary of these employees is not 2.5 times the average salary of a tenured professor, which vastly overstates the differential in these average salaries. The only difference between benefits provided to MPP employees and tenured professors is in life insurance: MPPs are insured for $100,000, tenured professors are insured for $50,000. All other benefits are the same.
Assertion #9: There is no categorization of “upper level administrators” and their corresponding staff or “instructors” and their staff in the cited source. Consequently, we do not know how the quoted ratios were calculated.
Assertion #10: The cited $50 million cut is inaccurate. Additionally, administrative consolidations have been and will continue to be among actions taken, as may consolidation of inefficient academic units. Regardless, it would be infeasible to operate the campus under the proposed strategy outlined by the authors. Please see item #6.
Assertions #11 and #12: There is agreement that protecting instruction will remain the campus’ top priority. However, it is infeasible to operate an institution as complex as the university without any administrative support structure.
-Mary Stephens
Vice President, Administration and Finance