By Sharron Hannon
Funding issues that affect enrollment management at the university were the subject of the April 15 breakfast briefing of the Institutional Strategic Planning Advisory Group convened by  Don Eastman, vice president for strategic planning.
Presenters David Clements, director of institutional research and planning, and Robert Bugbee, associate vice president for finance and administration, came armed with pages of charts and statistics that document the complexity of the matter.
With the university expected to grow to 32,500 students by 2002--an enrollment target set by the University System Board of Regents--the institutional strategic plan must deal with where growth should occur.
In previous briefings, the advisory group heard arguments from three deans and the vice president for research about the need to increase graduate enrollment to keep the university in a competitive position with other major research universities. They pointed out, as did Clements and Bugbee, that UGA’s graduate enrollment has been declining as a percentage of total enrollment--dropping below 18 percent in the past two years as undergraduate enrollment grew. Graduate enrollment at other research institutions is typically in the range of 24-26 percent of total enrollment, according to Provost Karen Holbrook.
 Bugbee and Clements added another reason to increase graduate enrollment: the regents’ funding formula, which allocates more money to institutions for for graduate/professional-level courses than lower-level courses. Adopted in 1963, the formula uses numbers of students and level of instruction--lower level (freshmen and sophomores), upper level (juniors and seniors) and graduate/professional level--to determine state funding of the “resident instruction” budget. The state appropriation in fiscal year 1999 accounted for somewhat less than half of UGA’s total institutional budget, with other funds coming from the lottery, internally generated income, and federal, state and private money in the form of contracts, grants and gifts.
The total budget for the university--which besides resident instruction includes capital projects, student activities, and funding for agricultural experiment stations, the veterinary medicine teaching hospital and labs in Athens and Tifton, among other line items--totaled more than $1 billion for the first time in fiscal year 1999.
The regents’ funding formula for resident instruction assigns a value per credit hour, which ranges from $110.37 for lower-level courses in literature and social sciences up to $1,109.74 for graduate/professional-level courses in veterinary medicine. This number, multiplied by the number of credit hours taught, determines the state appropriation. The more students enrolled at the graduate/professional level, the more funding for the institution through the formula.
The funding formula was revised in 1973 and again in 1982, when methods were developed to determine plant operation costs and major renovation and repair (MRR) funding, for example, using other bases than numbers of students and level of instruction. While the replacement values of buildings do not at present reflect their current market value, the regents’ long-range goal is to increase the formula and to stabilize the allocation procedure.
Fringe benefits for faculty, staff and retirees are determined independently and are “becoming a real factor” in the budget, said Bugbee, noting that “life insurance premiums for retirees have doubled recently and will probably increase again next year.”
A plan to combine health insurance with the state merit plan--providing the same coverage for University System faculty and staff as other state employees--provides an opportunity to fund retirement benefits through the Teachers Retirement System (TRS), he said.
A major issue regarding the funding formula is that funding lags behind actual enrollment by two years--but that can be remedied, according to Bugbee. “During the conversion from the quarter to semester system, it may be more feasible to reduce the lag time to one year,” he said.
Bugbee said he would also like to see the regents allow institutions to establish a trust fund or surplus reserve fund so that money not spent by the end of the fiscal year would not lapse. “This would serve to encourage institutional savings and promote wiser spending choices,” he said.
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