NC State University

Last week, the Office of State Budget and Management (OSBM) indicated that additional expenditure restrictions are necessary to ensure a balanced state budget at the end of the fiscal year on June 30. At the direction of Governor Beverly Perdue, OSBM issued mandatory spending restrictions for appropriated funds in hiring, other employee related increases, purchases of goods/materials/services, and travel for the rest of the 2009 fiscal year.  All state agencies, including the university, are subject to these restrictions that in effect “freeze” expenditures.

For the fiscal year that begins July 1, we continue to work through the academic and administrative plans for five percent budget cuts at NC State.  These unit plans were sent to our Budget Office in March.  Our next step is to find another two percent in cross-functional contingency reductions, moving toward a total seven percent budget reduction strategy.  We expect to have full details of our 5 percent budget reduction plan within the next two to three weeks.

We are holding to our established budget principle of protecting classroom activity.  Producing well-prepared graduates is our reason for existence.  So, while we have held classroom and laboratory capacity cuts to about 1 percent, non-academic units have taken as much as seven percent reductions.

Based on our 5 percent reduction plan for fiscal year 2010, we expect to eliminate up to 300 jobs, of which half are unfilled positions.  Of the 36 employees who thus far have been included in Reduction in Force actions, we are providing human resources support in their job search and have placed three of those employees in other state jobs.

While we have created a plan for taking budget reductions, I would like to reiterate that our budget principles influence how NC State manages the budget dollars available to us – not just how we apply reductions to our budget.  Our budget principles parallel the agenda established by UNC President Erskine Bowles’ PACE initiative, through which the UNC system trimmed about $32 million from the non-academic side of operations.

Over the last several years, because of budget realities, we have taken the approach of using available state dollars to build a cadre of career path, non-tenure track teaching faculty.  The number of tenured and tenure track faculty has remained relatively steady over this period of time.  Compared to data from our peer institutions, we appear to fall in the middle ranks in terms of the percentage of faculty who are tenured/tenure track.  We also have added academic advisers.  These additions have helped us meet NC State’s increasing enrollment by maintaining reasonable student-to-faculty ratios in teaching.  These steps have allowed tenured and tenure track faculty to best focus their time on teaching, research and outreach activities.  Our budget plan also has helped us meet increasing student demand for learning experiences outside the classroom – service learning and international experiences, for example.

Students continue to graduate in record numbers ready to hit the ground running as productive members of society and successful professionals.  We have taken the approach of reducing the budget in such a way that we position the university to rebound quickly when better budgetary times return.

We are committed to focusing on our core mission.  We continue to welcome your input and I encourage you to provide your suggestions and ideas on our Budget News web site http://www.ncsu.edu/budget/.