JUNEAU — Tuition at the University of Alaska could rise between 10 and 15 percent in response to pending cuts considered by the Legislature.
University of Alaska President Jim Johnsen presented budget contingency plans to the Board of Regents at its Thursday meeting in Anchorage as the system waits on the Legislature to settle on a funding level.
The presentation is so far the best look at what a third consecutive year of cuts made by the Legislature could do to the UA system, but Johnsen stressed that it’s just a first draft.
“Hopefully with the budget coming in from the state we will come to you in June with a set of decisions,” he said. “There are no decisions here today. It’s more a presentation of our thinking.”
The draft response to the cuts includes an across-the-board hike in tuition, hundreds of job cuts, a scaling back of academic offerings, dozens of cuts to administrative programs and even the elimination of some unspecified athletics programs.
“There are lots of things here that make total sense and we ought to have frankly done a long time ago, and there are other things that are forced upon us by the severity of the reductions we’re looking at,” he said.
The increase to tuition would be expected to occur midway through the next academic year in order to allow student input on the change and raise between $6 million and $9 million. The increases would go beyond a 5 percent increase already approved for the upcoming academic year.
Currently the UA-wide cut from the Legislature will be somewhere between $25 million and $50 million depending on how end-of-session negotiations play out, and Johnsen’s presentation estimates the effective cut system wide would be between $52 million and $77 million when rising costs are factored in.
The presentation included breakouts of the potential impacts to each campus, with the University of Alaska Fairbanks taking an effective cut somewhere between $26 million and $38 million.
Under the worst case scenario, nearly 500 UAF positions could be impacted through cuts, furloughs, reduced contracts or the elimination of vacant positions, according to Johnsen’s presentation.
More than $4.1 million would be cut from the university’s research budget, with cuts spread across UAF’s different programs.
UAF Chancellor Mike Powers also sent an email to staff on Thursday giving additional information on the cuts, a follow up from one last week.
In it he wrote the university is considering the elimination of undergraduate degrees in Russian Studies and theatre. The bachelors degree in journalism could be combined with the communications program. Admissions to the undergraduate economics and philosophy programs are already suspended and will be evaluated among a slew of other programs.
Graduate programs would also be impacted, and Powers’ letter says admission to the masters mineral preparation engineering and software engineering programs has already been suspended.
Both the University of Alaska Anchorage and Southeast would also see sizable cuts, as well as the system’s many smaller community campuses.
The regents withheld giving Johnsen too many directives on the budget and most of the day was spent simply understanding the size and scope of the impacts.
Still, among all the cuts Johnsen said he hopes the university can focus on specific areas to continue to invest and excel in. Those include arctic research, finishing the engineering building at UAF and developing more K-12 teachers among a dozen others.
Regent Mary K. Hughes said she respected the list but felt the board should narrow the list down.
“Perhaps at the end of this meeting our goal should be to really narrow what we think we can do in the circumstance we are in,” she said. “We need to look at these and say what’s realistic.”
There was relatively little talk about Strategy Pathways, a long-term plan by Johnsen and approved by the regents to overhaul the entire university system to refocus its campuses into core strengths and reduce duplication.
In a news conference afterward Johnsen said many of those decisions he had hoped would take place over a year or two may be forced in a matter of months or even weeks if the session goes long.
When asked about a general feeling in the Legislature that more could and should be cut from the university system, Johnsen said there are no easy cuts and every program has its supporters, including the Legislature.
“Of course there’s more that could be cut. At the same time every single program, every degree, every single service that we provide meets the needs of the state and there’s a constituency for them,” he said. “We didn’t make up these programs. Often it’s legislative mandates. It’s legislators saying, ‘We want you do to this.’ And we develop a program. But that’s not my point. … There’s a tradeoff in every decision that we make.”
