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This month the University of Maine System unveiled a five-point plan – the Agenda for Action – to increase the role, value, reputation and impact of the universities of the UMS.
For students, the plan could mean a slow-down in the rate and size of tuition increases, an improvement in the quality of education and an increase in the amount of financial aid available to students.
Goals include an increase in the number of bachelor’s degrees to 5,000 per year by 2012, and a 20 percent increase in non-loan financial aid by 2012.
Campus programs are largely safe from cost cutting. “The guidelines for reducing costs include instructions to protect the academic integrity of programs and services for students,” said John Diamond, executive director of external affairs for the UMS. “The presidents of each university are responsible for finding the cost reductions on their respective campuses. The chancellor is responsible for identifying those that pertain to system-wide services.”
Diamond said local cost control will help to make operational changes easier on campuses. “The chancellor does not believe that these changes can be achieved if they are imposed on the universities,” he said. “Instead, he feels that the universities must collaborate on finding ways to achieve these goals.”
Last week the UMS chief, Chancellor Richard Pattenaude, released to members of the State Legislature’s Appropriations and Education Committees a plan to reduce the operational costs of the UMS by $5 million.
His short-term cost-savings plan includes reductions in the size and cost of the system office operation, to be attained by merging system functions with campus offices. It also includes an elimination of senior administrative salary increases for one year – which includes every administrator at all seven universities and the system office with an annual salary of $100,000 or more. The chancellor said this “will reduce overall expenses by as much as $300,000.”
The system’s long-term savings initiatives include a cost-cutting collaboration with state government and the Community College System, focusing on collective purchasing and potential sharing of administrative functions. The system hopes to secure private funds to improve facilities, while using the savings from reduced energy consumption to finance this work.
The Agenda for Action was first publicly discussed in a Bangor Daily News (BDN) editorial on Jan. 19. “Maine’s chief executive has spared the state’s higher education institutions from his budget-cutting plans,” the staff editorial said. “Instead, Gov. John Baldacci has asked the colleges and universities to look for cost savings and use that money to minimize tuition increases and boost scholarships.” The BDN editorial criticized the University System’s spending on administrative costs, suggesting that the system spends more on administration than the national average.
Pattenaude agrees that the system must find more financially lean ways to operate but was concerned about factual errors in the BDN editorial. “Unfortunately, the news editorial contained an error which should be corrected for the record, as it deals with a particularly sensitive point,” the Chancellor wrote in an op-ed response on Jan. 26. “Specifically, it involves the assertion that the university system’s administrative costs are ‘above the national average.’ This conclusion appears to be based on a reporting error contained in a national higher education database, which skewed and misrepresented certain calculations pertaining to Maine,” he continued. The UMS employs one administrator for every 127 students; compared to the national average of one for every 69. “Without question, we must continue to search for ways to operate our universities in as lean and effective a manner as possible.”
Bangor Daily News