Your Budget and You - Data-driven Planning and Spending, Myth or Reality? Philip Maynard, Wheeler North, and Michelle Pilati

What we said we’d do.. What role should faculty play in their local planning and budget development processes? How are budget decisions made on your campus - and how should they be made? What authority permits you to have a voice at the table?

Authority Where is it? #10 of the 10+1 “processes for institutional planning and budget development” So, we have the authority/right – now what?

Resources Senate Papers The Faculty Role in Planning and Budgeting (Fall, 2001) Performance Based Funding: A Faculty Critique and Action Agenda Program Discontinuance: A Faculty Perspective (Spring, 1998)

Consider this.. What would your ideal budget world look like? What does your budget process look like? Are faculty appropriately involved in the process?

Nirvana Planning is fun and dreamy but it really isn’t required in our perfect world. Program review is for those type A folks who just have to know everything about everything. FTES, FTEF, WSCH, and FLEX are not in the Academy’s language.

Reality There will never be enough funding. Consequently all planning and budgeting is risk- based and is a competitive process.

Reality Success demands participation. Planning is what drives that success. The decisions made are only as good as the processes used to make them.

Which comes first on your campus? The budget or the plan? The plan SHOULD come 1st without consideration of fiscal realities – in other words, dream big. BUT – institutional priorities should be clearly established.

Reality The budget is negotiated from the top down over a three year period. Therefore all funding is very unpredictable and can’t realistically be considered when planning.

What Should Be Primary planning must come first. Planning should provide multiple options and all requests should be clearly prioritized. In spite of the State budget planning should be bottom-up – departments/ divisions identifying their needs.

What Should Be Planning should be tied to evidence. Such as?

What Should Be Planning should: –Emphasize what is needed or wanted to facilitate student success. –Involve an objective process of ranking those needs. –Include an objective process for comparing the various program needs within the school/division, college and district.

Reality While there is never enough money, there always seems to be some left over. Plan for this…

The Faculty Role in Planning and Budget Planning should drive budgeting and not vice versa. Dream big – “Planning should always be for the first-rate, even in the face of second- or third- rate budget allocations.”

The Faculty Role in Planning and Budget Each request for resources should be evaluated according to explicit criteria to which all participants in the process have agreed in advance. Planning, coupled with a critical assessment of successes and failures, is a means of taking conscious control of the process of serving students, and enables the emergence and elaboration of best practices;

The Faculty Role in Planning and Budget Planning, in an academic context, should be a bottom-up process, that trusts to the expertise of faculty to determine what is needed to serve students most effectively; Among the criteria for evaluating requests, the requesting department’s priority ranking of the activity for which the request is being made should be given special, positive, consideration;

The Faculty Role in Planning and Budget The evaluation of budget requests must be perceived as fair and impartial in order to encourage the expression of real needs in the planning process;

The Faculty Role in Planning and Budget The bulk of the work of planning and budgeting should be done by small, efficient subcommittees. The workload of planning and budgeting should be distributed among all committees and subcommittees such that each group has a manageable share of the total work to be done.

The Faculty Role in Planning and Budget While we can’t control what happens, we can advocate for a process that strives to achieve the ideal. Questions? Comments?