Charlie Faas, San Jose State’s vice president for administration and finance, highlighted deficits and revenues of the university budget while Vincent Del Casino Jr., provost and senior vice president of Academic Affairs, presented the Academic Affairs budget, which mostly focuses on issues dealing with faculty members and staff.
Faas and Del Casino said drawing from SJSU’s reserve funds for the 2020-21 academic year has helped maintain similar spending compared to previous years.
University Budget
Faas compared SJSU to Harvard University and said he wished SJSU had a similarly large endowment of reserve funds. While he said SJSU is staying afloat financially, the loss of on-campus housing revenue has been costly.
“Student housing is the single biggest driver of our deficit,” Faas said. He said limiting the number of students living in the dorms to 800 from the normal 4,200 student capacity decreased student housing revenues.
Faas also said the loss of international student tuition is the second-biggest part of the deficit.
Even though there are fewer international students enrolled for the 2020-21 academic year, he said the number of in-state students who enrolled increased and students are taking more classes compared to previous years.
Faas also agreed to continue funding Transformation 2030, President Mary Papazian’s initiative.
Transformation 2030 is SJSU’s plan to financially invest in future projects such as constructing the Interdisciplinary Science Building and attain goals such as student and faculty member inclusivity, according to the SJSU website.
He said his main priority is to rationalize the amount of money the university spends this year compared to the amount of money spent in previous years.
During the meeting, the university’s deficit was dubbed “the $92 million problem” which includes $43.7 million in coronavirus impacted costs such as purchasing personal protective equipment, campus cleaning supplies and other campus modifications.
“When you have enrollment, when you have reserves and you have the level of leadership that we have, there’s a path to get through this downfall that we’re in,” Faas said.
Kenneth Peter, a political science professor, asked Faas if SJSU administration members would use up 60% of its reserves to maintain its programming, staff and services if next year is tough financially for the university.
“In the short term, state revenues are pretty strong,” Faas said. He also said SJSU is still receiving around the same amount of funding from the state compared to previous years.
“What we’re anticipating is the housing problems that we have this year when we’re only at 20-22% of capacity, if we can get up to the 50-75% next year, that’s what’s baked into my numbers,” Faas said.
Academic affairs budget
Del Casino said high student enrollment and changes in department budgets in the 2020-21 academic year resulted in an Academic Affairs budget similar to previous years.
“We’re over-enrolled in total,” he said. “We’ve funded every single one of these seats at the same rate that we’ve always funded them, so we have not taken a hit relative to this slight overall decline in relation to the overall instructional budget.”
Del Casino displayed an enrollment projection graph showing that 27,420 students enrolled this year, which is the highest number the university has seen in the last four years.
However, he said establishing the Academic Affairs budget was challenging because Academic Affairs, faculty members and staff have centralized and managed the budget to compensate for slight declines in revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We have, however, had a movement of dollars around the campus and those movements have impacted certain programs . . . these are just the [operating budgets],” he said. “There's about $4 million in surplus teaching.”
Certain departments, like the Lurie College of Education and the Davidson College of Engineering, have saved money in operating costs because of fewer in-person classes, which created a surplus in the departments’ budgets.
“We are repurposing dollars relative to some other things . . . we’re doing things like this only because of the creativity that’s happening across the campus in relation to the budget,” Del Casino said.
Biological science professor Brandon White asked Del Casino to clarify the Braven program’s funding, which is an SJSU student leadership program that connects employers directly to undergraduate students.
Del Casino said the program is still receiving $200,000 from the university this year.
Faculty Hiring and Diversity
Del Casino said in his presentation that he’s committed to hiring more faculty because he's concerned some faculty members are resigning because they have found better opportunities and living costs in San Jose make their continued employment untenable.
“We did not call off one search last year [for tenure and tenure-track professors] and instead [we have] completed successfully 67 searches,” he said. “While it’s not directly ‘budget’ it’s a big piece of [Academic Affairs] resources.”
Psychology professor Mark Van Selst responded to Del Casino by asking if there was a hiring faculty plan to address the California State University ethnic studies requirement.
The California ethnic studies bill requires freshmen in the 2021-22 academic year to take an ethnic studies course in one of four ethnic categories, according to an Aug. 17 EdSource article.
Del Casino said his approach to hiring faculty would gradually increase the number of diverse professors in all departments, and to help students satisfy the ethnic studies requirement, his first action would be to search for a Native American studies professor.
