The second Senate meeting of the year occurred on Feb 22nd. A lot of focus in the past little bit has been on budget concerns and updates regarding the creation of the 2010/11 budget. Summarized below are the highlights from this meeting:
1) For 2010/11, hiring ‘freeze’ will remain in effect, only Mission Critical hiring will be pursued.
2) Looking at a 3 to 3.5% budget cut across the board (some special areas may be exempt from such a cut, such as student services and libraries)
3) For the 09/10 Fiscal year (the one coming to an end this April) we are on track for a $400 000 University wide deficit. Since we are carrying a ~5 million dollar balance from previous budgets, that deficit will be absorbed without significant adverse impacts. We are doing OK relative to other universities as seen here:
- U of Manitoba -> 36 000 000 deficit
- U of Calgary -> 25 000 000 deficit
- U of Alberta -> 60 000 000 deficit
- Queens will be undergoing a 15% cut of all budgets for 3 years
4) One area identified that can have a drastic positive impact on fiscal health is UW’s student retention rate. This is defined as the number of students who choose to leave Waterloo before finishing their degrees. Remarks were made that there a significant number of students in very good academic standing who end up leaving the university, and the reason isn’t clear cut or similar for everyone. For every 1% increase in UW’s retention rate, we can save 2 to 3 million dollars. A working group has been setup under the guidance of Bruce Mitchell (Associate Provost, Academic Affairs) with collaboration from Associate Deans of the faculties to help identify primary reasons why people leave, and then come up with solutions to address those reasons. Pres. David Johnston commented that Waterloo tends to have a lower retention rate because we often loose students to high performing professional programs like Medical School or Law School. If you have any comments on what the Faculty of Engineering can do to increase its retention rate, send me an email and I’ll make sure the information gets passed on.
From the 2010/11 budget perspective, we are waiting for the Provincial Budget to be released, so as to find out what decisions the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities has made, and how they will reflect in University grants. Until then, there are a lot of question marks, making the actual budget difficult to put together with any length of detail.
Hope everyone had a great reading week! Good luck on the home stretch of the term :)!
Feel free to email me about anything remotely related to Senate matters, or anything I’ve written about above at senate@engmail.uwaterloo.ca
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