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You may or may not know that the State Legislature has already cut
the CSU by five hundred million dollars for the next
fiscal year. That represents eighteen percent of our
support from the state. It's a huge amount of money
and it is challenging us to say the least.
We have figured out how to manage the first five hundred
million dollars. They have worked on that
ever since December. And I think, you know, the plan
that Robert and the presidents talked about, we can do that
without devastating the system. Here are the basic elements of that plan,
and one thing that the legislature already
recognized, is that the Board of Trustees last November
approved some tuition fee increases that are
going to create some more revenues for the system in the next
fiscal year. We expect to generate approximately one hundred and fourty-six million dollars
from the tuition fee increase that you have already approved
for the next fiscal year; planning to reduce enrollment
by some eigth thousand FTDS that will generate a net of about
sixty million dollars; and we are reducing the budget in the Chancellor's office
by close to eleven million dollars. That still leaves
a little over two hundred and eighty million dollars that we have to solve,
and our plan there is we have allocated
spending reduction targets to each of the campuses.
Already there is a shortage of educated workers for many of the
fields such as healthcare and some of the technology areas, and
when you get into further reductions, such as what we are talking about, that just
exacerbates the problem. The five hundred million dollars that we already know
that we have to deal with is challenge enough
in and of itself, and if you look at the CSU,
relative to other colleges and universities around the
country, we already were one of the most efficient systems
around. Some who like efficiency, that sounds great.
But to parents and our student that need more money spent on them in a
classroom or our faculty, this doesn't sound good. This shouldn't sound good
to California. That's the catch twenty-two of being the most efficient system in
America. And so, at some point you start cutting into
muscle and bone, and we're very afraid
that if the state were to cut us more, of what that would mean
for our ability to serve students well, what it would
mean for the quality of the programs, what it would mean for the value
of a CSU degree in the future. If we face this
contingency of an additional cut, what we concluded
in our discussion with the Board was, all of the
the low-hanging fruit is gone, all of the easy
options are gone, nothing but extreme choices would be left.
But the second five hundred million is nothing more than
just devastation, and then we would have to come up
with these choices of fewer students, and
much higher tuition. We would have to
look at the possibility
of me coming back here in July
and saying to the Board, the June vote
to authorize me on a contingency
basis to raise tuition up to thirty-two
percent. And also the possibility of wait-listing
applications for addmision to the winter quarter and the
spring semester. We say, "we welcome your application,"
and then send everybody a letter saying, "time-out,
we're going to wait to see what happens to the budget before we
give you an official letter of addmission. These are not
palatable options, but there about the only
feasible ones that are left.