| Alumni and friends:
A few months ago, I visited with our College of ACES Alumni Association Board members about the current financial situation in our college. Following my presentation, a Board member asked a couple of excellent questions. First, why must we (the Board members) come to campus to learn about these very important matters? And second, why are we not informing others well beyond the few people sitting in this room?
In response to these questions, this communication represents the first in a series of updates to help keep our ACES friends and alumni up to speed on some of the most critical issues facing the College. My goal is to make each update short, clear, and to the point, encouraging further discussions around questions or thoughts you might have.
I would like to begin this "Illinois for Illinois" series by focusing on a critically important change in our "base" funds. That is, those funds provided by the State of Illinois and by the student.
These base funds are used mostly to pay our faculty and staff, and to cover much of our overhead. They provide the basic infrastructure for all of our teaching, research, and service. While we rely tremendously on other types of support - such as federal grants and contracts for research, corporate support, gifts from friends and alumni, and other sources - our foundation is based on state appropriations and student tuition.
Nine years ago, our campus received about $494 million of direct annual base support. The annualized growth since then has been over 5 percent per year, resulting in about $785 million of support this year. In other words, and perhaps to the surprise of many, our average annual growth in base funds for our campus has been good over the past decade.
The big change has been in the composition of those funds. Since 2001-02, state support to our campus has fallen at about 3 percent per year, while tuition revenue has increased by about 14 percent per year. In 2001-02, state support comprised approximately two-thirds of the base funds. Today, it is less than one-third.
The decline in state support has been offset with significant increases in tuition, raising obvious issues about affordability and access for students. It also raises issues about how non-tuition related activities are funded.
The College of ACES is committed to the land-grant missions of teaching, research, and extension. Providing our students with a first-class education is our foremost responsibility. It is the fundamental reason for our existence. But, we are much more than a teaching college. Our extension and outreach programs serve the state, the nation, and the world. Our research is second to none. And all of these missions - whether it involves teaching, research, extension, or any other service - are addressed by faculty and staff whose pay checks are increasingly covered by student tuition.
The change in funding, away from the state and towards the student, raises basic questions about activities beyond the classroom. For example, how much of our extension program, if any, should be funded by students? What about research? Does the State of Illinois want to continue to provide support for research and outreach activities that serve the state? If so, how should the state and the university set those priorities and the attendant funding levels?
These and many other issues have surfaced prominently during the past few years. Given the land-grant tradition of our College, what we look like 15 years from now very much depends on how we answer these questions today.
In closing, I would like to encourage the readers of this series to feel free to get back to me with questions, thoughts, and ideas for future updates. The next issue will be on the restructuring of University of Illinois Extension.
Take care,
Robert Hauser Dean, College of ACES
Join Illinois Connection today! Strengthen your support of the College of ACES and the University of Illinois by joining Illinois Connection, a grassroots advocacy network for the University of Illinois. Through this initiative, alumni, students, faculty, and friends serve as advocates for the University to ensure support from the state and federal government. To learn more about Illinois Connection, visit www.ic.uillinois.edu.
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