UUP Binghamton

The information,

in Italics,

reflects UUP's analysis of the continuning cuts to SUNY's budget. The regular text is commentary on those facts.

• Over the past 18 months, state support for SUNY has dropped by an astonishing and recurring $410 million. The cuts to the State University’s operating budget have been proportionately greater than the state reductions for any other state agency and functional area.

Why is this? Doesn’t the state buy its own rhetoric that higher education is the solution to its economic woes. Why is it pulling up its newly planted seeds – remember Binghamton hired over 150 new Academics over the last three years – when they need to continue planting if any of us are to get out of this mess?

• In 2008-09, the Governor imposed two mid-year cuts on the state agencies – about $600 million in total. SUNY’s share was $148 million or about 25 percent of the total reduction in spending. In the 2009-10 enacted state budget, the Governor further reduced SUNY state funding by $172 million. When all of this is added to SUNY’s latest mid-year reduction of $90 million, SUNY will have lost over 17 percent of its operating budget, and in just the last 18 months.

I don’t dispute the serious budget crises that this nation and our state is facing. I won’t even dispute that cuts have to be made everywhere. But, and this is the BIG BUT, why SUNY?

• The latest $90 million reduction to SUNY was, by far, the largest among all the state agencies and represents about 18 percent of the combined spending on all state agencies this year.

After the previous cuts, someone in the governor’s office either doesn’t like us or feels we are just too fat and can deal with these cuts without any problems.

• Full-time faculty continues to be depleted and enrollment has grown to historic levels. Courses are being cancelled in great numbers, class sizes are increasing to dangerously high levels, graduation is being delayed for many of our students and admission is being denied to tens of thousands of qualified high school and community college graduates seeking admission to the University’s baccalaureate degree granting programs.

Binghamton had over 30,000 applicants for admission for the Fall 2009. If we had been provided additional funds, we could have admitted more students, of probably better quality than last year’s class, than we did. We hired only 29 new Full-Time Academics this year, compared to over 70 last year. Of those 29, only 4 were Tenure Track. The other 25 were all Temporary Appointments. Why? Budget. At least that is the response our president gave at a Labor/Management meeting in September 2009.

• These cuts have occurred during a time of economic recession, when educating or retraining New York’s workforce is particularly imperative, and at a time when college affordability has become an issue of state-wide importance.

Everybody keeps arguing we need an educated workforce to get out of our recession. And, education has always been the refuge of the laid off and underemployed. These cuts make no sense whatsoever.

• In1990, the state funded $915 million or 75 percent of the University’s operating budget – with the remaining 25 percent financed by the students and their families. After the Governor’s latest reduction, the state’s share of SUNY’s operating budget will be $907 million. The state is spending $8 million less this year to support public higher education at SUNY than it did in 1990.

When SUNY was created in the 1960’s, it was a system for everybody, financed by state support, not tuition. These numbers are not inflation adjusted. For comparison sake, the CPI rose over 69% during this time period; the HEPI (Higher Education Price Index) rose over 91%.

• For the first time in history, the students are now financing more than half of SUNY’s operating budget.

Tuition has always been a part of the financing, but never a significant part. Why now?

• The situation with respect to the University’s three teaching hospitals in Syracuse, Brooklyn and Stony Brook and four health science centers is equally dire. Over the past decade, these institutions have had to absorb, without state funding, more than half a billion dollars annually in state mandated expenditures and unavoidable price increases in categories such as energy.

SUNY’s hospitals have been treated differently for years. They are forced to fund their own salary increases. They are seen as cash cows for the state even though many of their patients are indigent and those individual’s health care is paid for with government funds.

• Over the past 18 months, the resource base for these the SUNY hospitals and HSC’s have been strained to the breaking point – not only by the absorption of state mandated cost – but by recent Medicaid cuts and reductions in the state subsidy which is also less now than it was 10-15 years ago.

Again, the state has refused to properly fund not only the educational mission of these essential parts of SUNY but they are also decreasing care, especially specialist care, for a significant portion of the state’s population.
Why is the state doing this? Doesn’t the state buy its own rhetoric that higher education is the solution to its economic woes. Why is it pulling up its newly planted seeds – remember Binghamton hired over 150 new Academics over the last three years – when they need to continue planting if any of us are to get out of this mess?

UUP encourages you to respond to the “Call to Action” at UUP’s homepage, http://www.uupinfo.org/. Click on the link to contact your legislator and let them know how important SUNY, and our campus, is to the vitality of New York State.