The University is due to receive less funding from the state for the next academic year.
Traditionally, the University has been funded through inputs, or simply the number of students that were at a University on the 15th day after classes start fall semester, said Chief Financial Officer Sherideen Stoll.
“When the state made a change in the formula for the fiscal year 2010, the governor really wanted to begin to incentivize outcomes or outputs,” Stoll said. “There was concern that Ohio had slipped below the national average in terms of the number of citizens that had a completed degree.”
So the governor decided to change the way universities were funded to focus on the completion of degrees, she said, and instead of phasing in the change, the governor decided to completely move to the new system by 2015.
The University has been experiencing an overall reduction in enrollment, Stoll said.
“These changes happened at a point in time when Bowling Green is trending downward and if your enrollment trends downward, then it’s pretty difficult to have more students graduating,” she said. “By definition, unless we dramatically increased our transfers, if we start at low number, we are going to end at a lower number.”
The University has already lost 33.3 percent of state funding during the past five-year period, Stoll said.
Although they don’t know just yet how much they are going to lose from the state for next year, the University has taken proactive steps to prepare for the change.
“We have made a number of cutbacks across the institution,” she said. “Whether it’s in operation budgets, personnel … anyway to improve efficiency and reduce our costs.”
Using technology to delegate the work for humans to other things, energy conservation and consumption are things the University has done on the expenditure side to save money.
Stoll said to focus on retention and increasing students completing their academic programs, the University has tried to improve their system through ways such as linked courses and their strategy to attracting non-traditional and international students.
Some students, like sophomore Rachel Dutton, wonder if they will be impacted by they decrease in funding.
“I think we need as much money as we can get,” she said.
To help retention, Dutton recommends improving class scheduling.
“It could be made easier,” she said. “I am an education major; there are a lot of us here, but I struggle with scheduling classes. They fill up so fast and I have to panic every time and wonder if I will get the classes I need for the next semester.”
Stoll said the University has worked very hard to try to make sure that is not the case.
“I’m sure there will be students that will be affected to some extent, but I think the greatest number of students will probably not see an impact.”
To help the students, the University has frozen the tuition rate for the next academic year.
University Spokesman Dave Kielmeyer said that decision was made to recognize college is expensive.
“We want to do our best to make sure that BGSU education is within reach and as affordable as we can make it and we are also concerned,” he said. “A nation wide crisis is going to be the level of student debt for new graduates. All those things are factors.”
