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91Ě˝»¨â€™s senior administrators are actively having conversations with faculty and staff on campus about the impact of the University’s budget. OHIO Senior Vice President for Finance and Administration Deb Shaffer recently spoke at the Faculty Senate sponsored talk “Money Matters, an informative discussion,” where she addressed faculty and staff’s questions regarding enrollment, staffing and more.

This was the first forum in what OHIO’s Executive Vice President and Provost Chaden Djalali says will be a new, recurring series that will address the University’s budget as a whole and within each college and department.

Shaffer began the discussion speaking on how enrollment and tuition affect institutional revenue. Previous projections for enrollment growth have been replaced by new projections, seen as more realistic, that show a lower number of students enrolled. The decline is due to fewer expected first-year enrollments, along with increasing three- and four-year graduation rates. Projected over several years, the change in projections shows significantly fewer students enrolled.

“To put it in perspective, if our total enrollments – freshmen through seniors - decrease by 1,000 students, and each individual’s tuition is roughly $10,000, that means we are receiving $10 million less in gross tuition revenue to support our institutional operations,” Shaffer said.

From our high of 18,209 total undergraduate enrollments in Fall 2016, we have experienced a 10.6% decline in total undergraduate headcounts on campus. Shaffer said that with revised assumptions, the university is expecting another 5.7% decline in the total student body by FY2023.

Projections do indicate that by FY2024, there will be an increase in students. Candace Boeninger, interim vice provost for strategic enrollment management, explained that this increase comes from OHIO’s work to increase the number of transfer students, out-of-state students and international students.

“The University is working on a strategic plan to target these students, and by implementing this plan, we believe there will be an increase in students again by 2024,” Boeninger said.

The University did receive an increase in State Share of Instruction funding from the state after Ohio’s legislature increased the SSI budget by 2 percent for FY20. Ohio’s public universities receive a percentage of that budget based on their annual head counts.

Half of the aid from SSI is based on when students graduate. Since OHIO is seeing a combination of record high graduating classes and higher graduation rates, the University is receiving more aid for FY20. However, lower enrollments will lead to lower SSI allocations in future years.

Another major part of the discussion was how salaries and staffing are changing. Across the institution, headcounts in both faculty and staff are decreasing, aside from faculty in the Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine due to significant growth and expansion of the campuses. Some of these staffing changes come from academic strategies being initiated, such as new online and hybrid graduate programs, examining the academic efficiency of equitable faculty workload across colleges and redeploying teaching resources across OHIO’s campuses, reforming the general education courses to better meet modern students’ needs, and reimagining the academic enterprise in response to the students’ overall needs.

To address budget changes, colleges are focusing on producing new net revenues and programs, which can change what salaries and staffing will look like for that specific college. The University has moved completely away from RCM as a budget model, although academic resource allocation decisions will still be based on metric-drive data considered by the Provost in consultation with the Academic Leadership.

 Shaffer stressed that all areas and departments – colleges, academic support, administrative, auxiliary – will contribute to solving our budget challenges. Auxiliary units like housing and dining, as well as the areas supporting them (e.g. custodial) are expected to right-size in response to reduced student enrollments. “Currently, there is additional funding support from Residential Life being allocated to Counseling and Psychological Services in response to student demand and is an area of intentional investment at OHIO,” Shaffer said.

The conversation around the University budget will continue beyond this event, with OHIO’s administration continuing to talk with deans, faculty and staff about the effects it will have on them.