The Florida Legislature expects FAMU to raise $4.4M in new revenue from tuition and fee increases next year (for a total of $57.1M). But, President James Ammons says that number is unrealistic.“They have projected full payment from every student,” he told the Tallahassee Democrat. “But as you know, when you do projections, sometimes they’re different from reality.”
Most of FAMU’s students take smaller course loads as college gets more expensive. That directly slices into overall tuition revenue and hurts the university’s graduation rate.
The inflated tuition projections appear to be a smokescreen to hide the damage that was done to the State University System’s budget. This year, SUS leaders lobbied for big tuition increases. The legislature used that as political cover to continue its long history of raising tuition in one hand while cutting university appropriations in the other.
FAMU started out with $104.2M in general revenue during the 2008-2009 fiscal year. That was cut down by $4.1M to $100.1M during a special session held after the recession ripped a huge in hole in tax collections.
This year, FAMU starts out with only $87M in general revenue, a difference of $13.1M.
The university was also appropriated $7.4M in federal stimulus money. Stimulus funds will only be available for one more year.
FAMU received the following nonrecurring sums from the Public Education Capital Outlay fund: $1.6M for utility upgrades; $985,665 for FAMU-FSU College of Engineering Building III; and $5.6M for the Gore Education Complex's remodeling.
Tuition price hurting FAMU students
SUS budget cuts: $211M
So the leg takes $13M and then gives us a phony $4.4M in monopoly money? That's definitely Florida politics at its best!
ReplyDeleteReally, the country may have gotten CHANGE but, Florida is still in dire need of CHANGE.
ReplyDelete