STATE FUNDING SHARE DECREASES; EMPLOYEE NUMBERS UP

THE FUNDING DILEMMA IN HIGHER EDUCATION

(Third in a series)

State funding for general operations at Southeast Missouri State University increased 83 percent over the past decade while the percentage of state money in its budget declined, university figures show.

Also during the period, the number of university employees grew while student enrollments remained about the same.

In 1980, Southeast received $16.6 million in state funding for general operations and another $2.85 million from tuition. In 1980 state funding accounted for 80 percent of the school's general operating budget and tuition 14 percent.

The percentage of state funding since has declined. State funding for general operations at Southeast totals more than $30 million this fiscal year, but that accounts for only 66 percent of Southeast's operating revenue. Tuition generates about $13 million, or almost 30 percent of the university's $48 million operating budget, university records show.

Still, state funding for Southeast has grown at a faster rate than inflation, show the university's budget figures.

While state funding increased by 83 percent from the 1980 to 1990 fiscal year, the Consumer Price Index rose by 63.6 percent and the Higher Education Index climbed by 82 percent.

The Higher Education Price Index (HEPI) measures the effects of inflation on higher education. It reports changes in the prices institutions pay for a fixed group of goods and services purchased for education and general operations.

Art Wallhausen, assistant to the president at Southeast, said HEPI better reflects the effects of inflation on higher education than does the CPI. The CPI measures changes in prices paid for food, clothing, shelter, transportation and other goods and services that people buy for day-to-day living, he said.

Southeast Missouri State University President Kala Stroup said that Missouri's universities have not been expanding at will.

"I think that people really believe that we are organisms that just like to grow," she said. "But we have been held to minimal growth based just on funding alone."

Missouri's public colleges and universities have been forced to trim operations because of tight state finances, Stroup said.

"This university alone has discontinued 53 programs since 1982," she said.

Missourians for Higher Education said the state's public colleges and universities have closed 260 academic programs and have sharply defined their missions and program priorities over the past five years.

Missourians for Higher Education comprises representatives of both public and private colleges and universities in the state. The group has been at the forefront in a call for increased funding for higher education.

Said Stroup: "When I looked down the list of programs discontinued in Missouri, I was not seeing glamorous, esoteric programs; I was seeing some pretty basic programs being discontinued."

Missouri's public colleges and universities have been victims of "slow, silent erosion" over the past decade as a result of limited state funding, she said.

"In higher education, erosion occurs in a lot of things: in the quality of your programs, your stature among your peers, in the selection you can offer students," said Stroup.

Increasingly, Southeast officials said, the burden of financing public education has shifted from the state to the students.

They said:

Between the 1978 and 1988 fiscal years, tuition, which Southeast refers to as incidental fees, increased 348 percent, from $270 to $1,210 a year.

A Missouri resident attending Southeast from 1980 to 1983 paid an average of $425 per year in tuition; from 1983 to 1987, an average of $851 a year; and from 1987 to 1991, an average of $1,355 per year. Undergraduate students will be paying $1,716 in incidental fees for the 1991-92 academic year.

More than 24,000 students in Missouri who qualified for state financial aid in the 1989 fiscal year were denied the aid because of a lack of state funding. At Southeast, only 65 of 1,896 eligible students received Missouri Student Grant aid that year.

With state appropriations expected to remain at existing levels for the 1992 fiscal year, any major revenue hikes at Southeast and other Missouri colleges and universities will have to come from increased student fees and private gifts, Southeast officials said.

At Southeast, the largest tuition increase in history ($113 per semester) still will not provide enough revenue to compensate for an expected $2 million increase in the cost of continuing current operations for the coming fiscal year, officials said.

Even with the tuition hike and, if all salaries were frozen at current levels, they said the university faces a shortfall of at least $1 million in building its budget for fiscal year 1992 because of an anticipated 25 percent rise in health insurance costs and other ongoing cost increases.

University officials said Southeast will have to make a number of budget cuts to bring expenses in line with projected revenue.

Despite that, the university's budget has grown considerably over the past decade. The total budget (auxiliary services, restricted funds and general operations) at Southeast grew from more than $27 million in fiscal 1980 to more than $62 million in fiscal 1990, a 127 percent increase.

Auxiliary services at Southeast involve such things as the textbook operation and dormitories. Restricted funds deal primarily with scholarships.

Revenue from auxiliary services, including room-and-board fees, has increased from $5.4 million to more than $11 million over the past 10 years.

The $62 million budget also includes such things as private funds, federal grants and contractual services. Stroup said, "A comparable-size institution without residence halls would not have that budget." The university, she said, operates basically on a $48 million budget.

While the university's budget has grown, the enrollment has remained fairly steady.

From the fall of 1979 to the fall of 1990, the total headcount enrollment increased 157, from 8,659 to 8,816. Spring headcount enrollments from 1980 to this semester declined by seven, from 8,116 to 8,109.

At the same time, the number of full-time employees at Southeast climbed from 805 in fiscal 1980 to 927 in fiscal 1990, an increase of 122 employees.

In the fall of 1989, Southeast had a total headcount of 8,528 students and a total of 927 employees.

By comparison, as of that date, there were 1,100 full-time employees at Central Missouri State, which had a total enrollment of nearly 11,000 students; 1,475 full-time employees at Southwest Missouri State, which had a total enrollment of about 19,000; and 570 full-time employees at Northwest Missouri State, which had a total enrollment of more than 5,800 students.

The Missouri Coordinating Board for Higher Education said total headcount enrollment at Missouri's public colleges and universities increased 12.3 percent from fall 1981 to fall 1989. In fall 1989, there were 192,332 students enrolled.

The biggest increase occurred at Missouri's 16 community colleges, which, as a unit, saw enrollment jump by 26.4 percent, CBHE statistics show.

The number of full-time faculty members and administrators at Southeast has remained fairly constant over the past decade; but the number of professional staff members and clerical-technical-service (CTS) employees increased significantly.

In the 1980 fiscal year, Southeast had 70 full-time professional staff members and 143 CTS employees. In 1990, there were 117 professional staff members and 199 CTS employees, university records show.

Wallhausen said the increase in the number of professional and CTS employees is at least partly the result of increased and expanded services.

Southeast's computer center, for example, has expanded over the past 10 years, and six jobs have been added to that operation, he said.

In 1980, Southeast did not have a university foundation. The development of the fund-raising arm of the university has led to creation of an entire office devoted to fund raising, Wallhausen said.

Printing services now has a larger staff as does career-planning and placement services.

The opening of the Show Me Center and the Student Recreation Center also led to hiring of additional personnel, Wallhausen said.

A period of declining enrollments in the 1980s prompted the university to establish a program to recruit students. That operation also led to the hiring of additional personnel, he said.

"There's just a whole list of positions (created) for which there has been a demand over the years," said Wallhausen.

Much of the university's costs are in the area of personnel. In fiscal 1990, labor costs, including student labor, at Southeast totaled more than $36 million, or about 60 percent of the university's total budget, records show.

In fiscal 1980, personnel costs, including student labor, totaled more than $18 million or nearly 68 percent of the $27 million budget.

(Wednesday: A look at Missouri's ranking on higher education funding and problems of deferred maintenance on campus.)