Southeast's budget realities — less state money, fewer students

Southeast Missouri State University is getting used to doing with less state funding and fewer students.

The university’s Board of Regents this week approved a $139 million operating budget for the fiscal year (FY21) beginning July 1, which is a 2.7% decrease from the year before.

The two main pressure points on Southeast’s budget continue to be drops in state revenue allocations and declines in enrollment.

“Declining state appropriations and the COVID pandemic have significantly impacted Southeast’s budget,” Carlos Vargas, the university’s president since 2015, told the six regents Monday.

The upcoming FY21 budget anticipates a 20% or $8.96 million cut in funding authorized by the Missouri General Assembly.

Vargas also told regents the trend of falling total enrollment is expected to continue. The institution’s highest-ever mark of 11,580, established in the Fall 2014 semester, fell by nearly 12% in five years, according to official Dec. 13, 2019, minutes of the regents board.

In Spring 2020, a total of 9,546 undergraduate and graduate students matriculated to Southeast, a 4.9% decline from 2019 and an 8.2% drop from 2018.

The percentage drop was steeper among undergrads as the Spring 2020 graduate enrollment has increased by 9.3% since 2018, from 1,047 to 1,120.

More than 60% of the university’s total student census is female.

In an effort to breach the funding gap, Southeast’s regents gave approval Monday to the administration’s plan to cut 36 vacant faculty and staff positions.

The cost to attend Southeast will go up this fall.

In May, Southeast regents approved a $7.75 per credit hour increase of in-state tuition to take effect for the 2020-2021 school year. The Fall 2020 semester begins Aug. 24.

Kathy Mangels, Southeast’s vice president for finance and administration, said the university has completed a study showing the university’s pay rates by position were 45% below the market rate, using comparable local, regional or national data.

As a result, the administration plans to implement salary adjustments to bring compensation levels up at a total budgetary cost of $761,363, assuming university revenue at the time will support the increases.

Vargas also reported Southeast will spend $170,000 for a new learning management system (LMS) to replace the free and open-source program Moodle, which has been in use at Southeast for most of the past decade.

Training of faculty to use the new LMS, called Canvas, is expected to begin this fall and is expected to be in place for the Spring 2021 semester.