Facing severe budget deficits, Governor Martin O’Malley proposed cutting the Sellinger Fund, which provides support to private colleges accross Maryland, by $11 million on November 18th.
In response to protests from Goucher and other independent colleges, the governor first reduced the proposed cut to $9 million, and then at a Board of Public Works (BPW) meeting, under the advice of Treasurer Nancy K. Kopp, the cut was reduced to $7 million.
Under the proposal, Goucher will lose an additional $303,000 in operating funds for the current fiscal year from the state. This is in addition to the approximately $291,000 already cut from Goucher’s share of the Sellinger appropriation during the BPW’s July and August meetings. Last April, at the end of the 2009 General Assembly session, Goucher’s income from the Sellinger Program for the 2010 fiscal year was supposed to be approximately $2.26 million; it is now down to $1.66 million.
The college annouced the cut in a e-mail to faculty and staff sent on November 19th.
In an interview with The Quindecim, Goucher College President Sanford J. Ungar said, “the primary use of the fund is for financial aid, need-based financial aid for students from Maryland. What happens is when there is a cut and we have to figure out how to adapt that cut, we are not going to withdraw the financial aid from those students after it has been offered.”
According to Wendy Belzer-Litzke, Director of Government & Community Relations and Special Assistant to the President, the fund “is based on a per student basis.” It is also tied to funding given to the public institutions from the prior year.
Interestingly, Belzer-Litzke says funding for public universities is up 13% and funding for community colleges is up 21%. Currently, the State appropriation to the Sellinger program is 23% below the fiscal 2007 amount.
Ungar said there is a general stereotype that students who attend private institutions like Goucher can afford it.
“All private schools they have all these big endowments. It’s just a public stereotype. The fact is in Maryland most of the financial aid in the University of Maryland system is merit-based aid. For example, the students in our educational opportunity program generally speaking get a better deal at a private institution like Goucher than they would in the public system because they might not qualify for the merit-based aid. That is something a lot of people don’t realize.”
There is a dispute over whether the governor and the BPW, consisting of O’Malley, Treasurer Nancy K. Kopp and Comptroller Peter Franchot actually have the legal authority to cut this much; it cannot exceed 25 percent of the appropriated level of the Sellinger Program. Both Belzer-Litzke and Ungar attributed this to the fact that “it is statutory law.” Ungar also said, “Now [the state’s] argument, [T. Eloise] Foster who is the budget secretary for the state of Maryland and others argue no it’s 25 percent of the whole education budget is what is at stake.”
He also said if Goucher is correct then the state has “overcut the Sellinger fund by over $700,000. So if they have to give back $700,000 our share of it is not going to be huge. It’s not pocket change but it is not going to wipe out the $303,000 they cut. It might be $20,000 or $30,000.”
The Sellinger program is only one-fourth of Goucher’s revenue budget. Student tuition and fees, the endowment, and gifts and donations are the three other crucial parts of the college’s revenue. The Sellinger cut will have an effect on Goucher’s budget, but Ungar and Belzer-Litzke both expressed the importance of strengthening enrollment, the college’s main source of revenue, through retention and recruitment of students.
Ungar says the college is “watching registration, enrollment, new enrollments [for the spring], retention, and the discount rate.” The college cannot yet anticipate how everything will affect the budget. Ungar did express that “the college is relatively speaking in good financial condition. We are not a desperate case, we are not anywhere near the way some schools around this country are. Our endowment is going back up.”
As previously reported in The Quindecim, the endowment has increased by almost $30 million, from $138.1 million to $164 million in available funds.
At a faculty and staff meeting on November 30th, Vice-President of Finance Tom Phizacklea addressed Goucher’s budget. “The Sellinger hit happened two weeks ago. We lost an additional $300,000 in Sellinger money. Now what was a $13,000 deficit is now a $316,000 deficit, knowing what we know today. This is a dynamic budget with hundreds of moving parts, but this is what we know at the moment.”
Maryland Board votes to cut key college funds
Published: Thursday, December 10, 2009
Updated: Monday, August 9, 2010 20:08
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