Monday, March 22, 2010

The Future of the University: Funding Options for a Permanent Crisis

The Commission on the Future of the University’s Funding Strategies working group of has put together a document listing their initial proposals, and near the start of their report, we find the following ominous claim: “The funding gap is exacerbated by a significant unfunded post-retirement benefit liability, which is currently $1.9 billion and expected to reach $18 billion by 2013. Similarly, the University’s unfunded post-retirement healthcare liability is projected to grow from $13 billion today to $18 billion by 2013 . . . Because the PEB Task Force is scheduled to finalize recommendations by this summer, we do not address PEB issues in this report, but recognize that more than any financial challenge facing the University, the cost of providing these benefits has the potential to overwhelm our ability to continue our tripartite mission of teaching, research, and public service.” While these statistics are presented as neutral facts, they are in reality very complicated assumptions that require a deeper analysis. On face value, it looks like the UC faces an enormous fiscal crisis that will not go away, and so the future of the university entails a permanent budget crisis. However, we must understand that the pension and retiree healthcare liabilities are mostly accounting mechanisms that were developed under the George W. Bush administration as an attempt to undermine unions and pension plans.

According to new accounting requirements, institutions have to declare on their books all of the future payments that they will have to make to their retirees. In other words, in 2010, we have to calculate what would happen if everyone in the UC system retired today, yet, we do not have to actually put money into an account to fund this huge liability; rather, we have to make sure that in our audited financial statements, we declare the huge liability and subtract it from our total revenue.

In the case of the UC system, this accounting requirement has allowed the system to move billions of dollars from the unrestricted to the restricted category; in other words, UC has a way of declaring that it has no money to spend on things like instruction or employee salaries because it has shifted money from a usable pile to a non-usable pile. But, and this is a huge but, the UC has actually moved very little money; what they have done is just changed where the money is listed in their financial statements. For some strange reason, no one in the financial working group knows about this accounting move, or at least no one is admitting that they know it, and instead, they are using the post-retirement liability to call for a change in retirement benefits, while they declare a permanent fiscal crisis for the UC system.

I am not arguing that the UC should not fund the pension plan or the healthcare of retirees; what I am arguing is that the university should not use a new accounting requirement to manipulate the budget. After all, the UC has for the last two years declared a several billion dollar liability, while they have only shifted a couple of hundred million in to the retiree accounts. Moreover, this working group does not comment on any of the UC's questionable investment strategies that have resulted in billions of dollars of losses.

Another set of assumptions that this working group has accepted concerns the level of state funding and the amount of money the UC needs from the state: “The University of California Office of the President currently estimates that UC’s core funding from state funds, student fees, and other sources has fallen $1.2 billion below UC’s current needs. At current levels of state support, this funding gap is estimated to grow to $3.5 billion by the 2015-16 fiscal year. . . ” What this statement of fiscal decline does not show is how the UC has calculated what they need from the state or what they will get from the state in the future. While it is important to push for more state funding, it is difficult to ask the legislature to back the UC’s funding requests when the university is always using questionable numbers and trumped up statistics. For instance, the following statement is simply false: “State funding per student has declined by 54% since 1990-91.” As I have pointed out on several occasions, state funding per student has gone up since 1990; what the UC should say is that state funding has not kept up with inflation, but they would have to define the inflation rate and why the costs of a UC education have gone up; unfortunately, they never do this, and so they upset the legislatures who have fought for increased UC funding in the past.

Even with these major accounting issues, the report does make a few important recommendations that should be followed. One vital suggestion is to reduce the cost of administration related to the core mission: “Costs not directly related to research and teaching (herein called administrative costs) are estimated to be as large as 25-30% of that which is funded by UC core funds. While recent actions have been made to reduce these costs, they remain substantial.” The working group points to several recent efforts to decrease the cost of staff and administration to accomplish the goal of saving money: “When the University of Texas System enacted a shared-services model to improve administrative efficiencies, $250 million in value was added to system operations. The “Carolina Counts” program at UNC, focused on operational efficiencies, expects to deliver $90 - $160 million dollars of ongoing operational savings within five years. Most recently, UC Berkeley expects to generate tens of millions of dollars in annual savings as a result of administrative improvements suggested by external consultants Bain & Co. There is no reason to expect that similar results, scaled to the UC system, could not be delivered as well through the pursuit of an administrative efficiency framework.” We should applaud this effort to lower the administrative costs of the university.

Another very positive recommendation concerns the questions of research grants losing money: “For a variety of historical reasons and local campus practices, indirect costs charged to non-federally funded research projects – those funded by the State of California, foundations, gifts, and corporations – do not fully recover the costs of research conducted for these agencies. Hence, the university subsidizes this research with core funds. This can be rationalized in times of ample budget in fulfilling one of our primary missions – research. It cannot be rationalized in times of insufficient core budget to fulfill one of our other primary missions – teaching.” Here we find a clear recognition that funds that are supposed to be dedicated to instruction are being used to subsidize grants that do not come with enough indirect funding: “Preliminary estimates are that current policies and practices of recovering indirect costs on non- federally funded research throughout the University of California are currently leading to the use of core-funds to subsidize this research in the range of more than $300 million per year.” In order to rectify this situation, the working group suggests that “Preliminary estimates are that we are 5-10 percentage points behind our comparator institutions in ICR rates, and recover 75% of facilities and administrative costs attributable to federally- funded research. Increasing ICR rates by just 5% across UC could generate more than $150 million per year.” By increasing our indirect cost recovery for federal and state funds, the UC could turn a research deficit into a research surplus.

Another set of recommendations concerns student fees, and the movement here is towards privatization. Not only do they want to replace the term “student fees” with “tuition, but they call for a continual increase in the sticker price: “Notwithstanding recent major increases in student fees, the University of California remains a significant value within the marketplace of leading universities. At least in the short run, there is significant room to increase tuition levels without significant negative impacts on projected enrollment or access for students from low-income families.” From a purely free market perspective, the UC could get away with major increases in student fees; however, this proposal does not look at the effect on middle-class students and first-generation students who do not understand how financial aid works. This recommendation also fails to realize that a pre-planned, multi-year set of tuition increases will only make it easier for the state to cut its funding for the UC system.

The final recommendation is perhaps the most dangerous and likely the most attractive to some faculty and administrators. This suggestion is to allow professors to be partially compensated through non-state funds: “There are already examples in the UC system of faculty salaries being covered in part by fees (professional schools), or by a combination of income from clinical practice and research (medical school). There have been a number of suggestions of ways to extend similar or derivative practices to other faculty: Compensation plans similar to the medical schools for faculty in the biological sciences; the use of non-core funding (e.g., contract and grant money, or other external sources of revenue) to pay some portion of the off-scale component of faculty salaries, where feasible; More extensive use of contract and grant funds to support some fraction of faculty salary during their regular nine-month appointment.” At first glance, these look like great ideas, but they would function to undermine the humanities and the social sciences that do not receive large sums of money from external grants, patents, or services. This type of compensation system would also turn public employees into privatized entrepreneurs.

It is surprising that none of these commission members even considered increasing enrollments and holding fees at the present level. It is also alarming that this financial committee did not address the university’s questionable investment practices and secret compensation deals. By repeating the university’s standard budget propaganda, the commission reveals that its main function is to support the administration’s desire to privatize the world’s greatest public university system.

61 comments:

  1. Bob--Where is the proposal posted?? Thanks. michael m

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  2. this is an area CUE and other groups should be concerned with as well. If "This type of compensation system would also turn public employees into privatized entrepreneurs." for professors --
    than what happens to the support staff working on efforts for those professors? how do they do work for a private entrepreneur professor when the support staff are public employees?

    and what happens to Academic Personnel Memo-025 -- reporting on percent time and outside consulting in light of this?

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  10. That was past. Now what do you say about future of universities.

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  12. I totally agree with this "I am not arguing that the UC should not fund the pension plan or the healthcare of retirees; what I am arguing is that the university should not use a new accounting requirement to manipulate the budget. After all, the UC has for the last two years declared a several billion dollar liability, while they have only shifted a couple of hundred million in to the retiree accounts.More power

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  13. developed these concepts have little mixed. We can not go all the way with them, that universities must change and not to remove students Conveyor without them knowing about it.

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  14. Sadly... let's hope the crisis will pass..

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  15. and faculty they belong faced some financial problems, but eventually everything was set, and now we can smile with open mouth even

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  16. changing them will not bring anything new in life. everything is a race and you have to be prepared for it. both financially especially intellectual

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  19. At the moment, we are debating on whether or not to hire a new GM to do nothing but monitor and control the upcoming in-game cheat report database. We want to hire a new face for that, but we're running into some issues convincing those who handle the budget that it would be worthwhile. An alternative is distributing the database amongst all current GMs, or the current GMs taking turns handling it periodically.


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  22. because I have already spent several hundred dollars in KC for premium on my main account, and would hate to kiss it all goodbye by leaving the game for good due to lack of support. I am happy to p2p, if I know that I will receive help when I really need it.

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  23. Players could potentially be banned for partying with a hacker.


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  24. acetiousness aside, yes, GM presence to witness bug abuse is pretty much mandatory to punish it. That goes into why we can't ban based on user-submitted screen shots or video. In the case of the GM War bans recently, all those guilty players who got punished were being fairly foolish by bug abusing in front of a GM they could actually see for once.

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  25. This has the effect of making more teaching work for the remaining staff members in the department but also means that it could be increasingly difficult to move from PhD to temporary contract to permanent contract this year.
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  26. As I mentioned before, the maintenance is affecting the entire GamersFirst offices. That even includes non-game related portions too, such as human resources, IT, billing, and customer support.

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  27. I know the easy answer would be to xp my own toon(which I have already done). However, with the current restrictions on the GM toolset, I can't move my own character.

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  28. in the last couple of months dies server has got a massive grow of mages in both sides.. and now it has get to the point that the pk in ronark land has been most of it screw up every day mages are nova towning like for 3 hours town making this imposible to get a fine pk.. i was just wondering if any1 asked this before but have you guys plan in changing the damage on the towers because it 's obvious that the players dont get affected by towers that get hit for 300 or 400...

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  29. Starting in November 2010, GamersFirst as a whole underwent a massive maintenance that involved a complete overhaul of all of our systems and databases. Because our employee resources (ie, how many people we can work to death) are limited, our tech guys have to spread their time and energy carefully. As such, getting some of these important functions back online end up taking a while. In the case of our Trade Logs, we got them back online, but only have access to a portion of the database.

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  30. The new KO is being run from your office(New company registered at that address) with Sean Lee the current USKO technical director CEO of the new division. Thats why everyone thinks GamersFirst knows about it.

    My question is has Korlash been in the office. Its ages since he looked at the forum?

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  31. You criticize my logic using examples of a wide character range and overpowered items against a comparatively low-level or undergeared user? That situation holds true even in Ardream, or any other PvP zone for that matter -- players will still get wiped out if they run blindly into a fight outgunned. At least in a peaceful spot like Moradon the fights can be somewhat controlled and, with some coordination, players can actually organize to have equal matches or train their friends/clannies who are new to the game or fighting as a certain class. There's a difference between actually making an effort to learn how to fight in PvP as opposed to just running into the ring flailing at the nearest opponent regardless of how great a rift may exist in level, gear, and experience. I like to assume that our players actually put some thought into their actions, after all. It helps me sleep better at night.

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  32. The person a few posts above me choose to use the word "lie" which i think is wrong. I don't think Encino lied to us when he said we would get the updated version of the game prior to EUKO's release. However I do share this persons disappointment. I feel like K2 or Gamersfirst whichever name I should use, could use a big lesson on under promising and over delivering. We are constantly over promised as long time (paying in my case) customers. I have purchased premium every single month since 2005. It doesn't feel right to me that we have a game that is an older version with more bugs compared to EUKO.

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  34. are you guys able to disband clans w/ multiple npt yet? or are the tools not fully functional yet?
    We've got all the important tools back online, though some are still a bit wonky and the whole system isn't exactly user friendly at the moment. I'd say we're running at about 70% efficiency, to give a baseless number to it. In regards to clan disbanding, we have the functionality available but there has not been an official decision on how to handle NPT clans as of yet -- the full policy on how we'll handle such things is still under discussion. Personally, I'm in favor of the more heavy-handed option of simply destroying any guilty clan entirely and wiping all the members' NP.

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  35. Hmm, I can't make this post into a question, so I know it will be deleted.
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    If G1 says that +10 items and +4 accessories are illegal, then they sure have to have the tools to safeguard it.
    You say the tools are here (sort of), but you don't have clarification what to do with it.
    Well, I hope with you and us, the loyal usergroup, that you soon have clarification what to do with it in the nearby future.

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  36. Any chance we can leave RLB open during CSW? maybe also invasion?
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