Near-Term Work Agenda for the President’s University Budget Task Force
The basic mission of the University of Baltimore is to educate the students who enroll in this institution. From a budget point of view that means we must commit to the expenditures and generate the revenues that are needed to perform that task.
The charge of the President’s Budget Task Force requires us to:
- Determine budget priorities, most especially the appropriate balance between academic and administrative costs at UBalt.
- Determine whether our decision-making process is clear and that final decisions are shared across the institution.
- Determine whether we have an open, clear, and transparent budget data set that enables adequate opportunity for all UBalt stakeholders to analyze and comment on past and prospective UBalt budgets.
- How much of the UBalt budget are we devoting to “instruction” now and over time? Instruction is the principal means by which UBalt educates its students.
- Do we have a sustainable fiscal path (in terms of both revenues and expenditures) to educate all the different categories of students without creating fiscal disruptions within the institution? This means that we must assess the relative revenues (i.e. from tuition) that current and projected student enrollments bring in as well as the instructional expenses that must be brought to bear on each of these student categories.
- Do we have an agreed upon budget data set, with the appropriate integrity, transparency, and accessibility, that will enable us to answer these aforementioned budget questions? This means potentially developing a new set of data from trusted sources that will help answer these and other significant budget questions that may be presented to the President’s Budget Task Force.
We are pleased to report that we are finishing construction of a budget data set that will help the UBalt community answer the critical budget questions that have been noted. As this budget data set is finalized, we are confident that it will give UBalt budget decision-makers the tools with which to analyze past, current, and future budget submissions to ensure UBalt budget stability over time.