Spring Break
Budget Bust Part 5: Dollars Dissected
Tyler Will
Issue date: 10/31/08 Section: News
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A financial report that Budget Director Linda Barrett gave to the Cigar said those categories are Academic Affairs, Athletics, Research and Economic Development, the President's Division, finance and facilities, Student Affairs, University Advancement and utilities.
"Tuition dollars provide resources to administer the programs of the university, both academic and other," Barrett said.
Scholarships are a 10th category in the unrestricted budget, but it didn't go into Cigar calculations for the diagram because tuition dollars don't fund scholarships.
"Basically, that all comes from the state appropriation," Barrett said.
The report stated the entire unrestricted budget is $270 million, and scholarships make up $45.2 million of that figure. The money the university receives from the state is $77 million, Barrett said, which means that more than half of the state allocation could be used for scholarships alone.
The largest expense the university has is faculty and staff salary, she said. Records Barrett gave the Cigar stated there are 2018 authorized positions between professors and other staff, but not all of those are filled.
The records stated the two biggest chunks of the unrestricted budget are the Academic Affairs and finance and facilities categories. The Academic Affairs includes professor salaries, while finance and facilities includes salaries of non-academic staff and capital projects, Barrett said. The capital projects expenses include paying workers to oversee projects on campus, but new buildings are not included anywhere in the unrestricted budget.
"In the unrestricted budget, you're not going to find any building costs," Barrett said.
