Word: budgets
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...need for an early decision on tuition charges demands this fiscal prescience. Most businesses budget on a "rolling quarterly basis," changing estimates and adjusting prices as they monitor the flow of cash. A university can't change the price of its product in the middle of the year, and so Faculty budget-makers are locked into an annual budget. They have to make crucial financial decisions based on fuzzy guesses about the inflation rate a year and a half from now. "I sit here in September with a budget of $50 million and I have very little control over that...
ATTEMPTS AT PREDICTING the future aren't the only imprecision in the budget, however. Every budget table has items in it that don't seem to mean very much--things like "miscellaneous income" and "all other expenses." Officials can break such categories down to their individual elements, but they can't carefully predict how these grab-bags will change each year--their miscellaneity precludes any overall guesses. More often than not, officials simply plug in figures based on instinct and past experience and watch with anxious eyes during the next year to see how accurate they were...
This year, these miscellaneous groupings-- and other budget categories, which exist more concretely in budgetary tables than anywhere else--made possible a $223,000 surplus in the Faculty budget. That money looks insignificant next to the gargantuan $50 million overall Faculty budget, and you shouldn't expect it to help moderate next year's tuition increase. The $223,000 will disappear into the Faculty's Fund for Instruction, a $4 million account which has absorbed past surpluses and from which the Faculty covers any deficit it runs...
More significant than the size of the surplus is the simple fact that Rosovsky and his University Hall accounting team have balanced the budget again. From 1968 to 1977 the Faculty found its budget over-extended across new programs and expanded services begun in the prosperous '60s, and it ran a deficit in most of those years. The 1976-77 budget was the first to show a surplus in almost a decade...
Kaufmann says the savings that have balanced the budget occurred in "marginal" areas, and potential savings were always weighed against the inconveniences to students and professors. A plan to end hot breakfasts in all but a few Houses last year, for example, created such an uproar it was withdrawn. "I don't think students are as interested in the marginal $20 or $50 savings on an $8000 bill as they are in the quality of life," Kaufmann says. So officials have so far avoided introducing money-saving measures like requiring pre-registration for courses or abolishing second servings at meals...