Indiana has steadily decreased the amount of funding for Ball State in the past five academic years.
In the 2010-2011 year, 40 percent of Ball State’s budget was funded by the state. This year, state funding is 36 percent. However, the overall budget has grown 2.9 percent this year.
Michael Hicks, professor of economics and business research, said the amount of money that states give to universities is a legislative decision made by a formula maintained by the Indiana Commission of Higher Education. They look at how much money has been spent in past years, how much flexibility universities have in raising tuition and how much money the state has to give.
“If tax revenues are up, that usually means additional money for the state or universities. If tax revenues are down, maybe not,” Hicks said. “It’s not the cost of education that’s going up, it’s that the state is bearing a lower share. So, public schools are going to be more like private universities in the sense that the majority of income is going to come from students and research.”
As a result of the decreases, Ball State has had to make changes to where money comes from to keep tuition low for students. The university gets all of its money from state appropriations, students and tuition, and a small amount of other revenues, including contracts and grants.
Bernard Hannon, associate vice president of business affairs and assistant treasurer, said when many universities lose state funding, they push off those extra costs on the students and raise tuition.
“We’ve tried to be very judicious at Ball State to make sure we’re not replacing every dollar we lose from the state with student dollars,” Hannon said.
Tuition has gone up two percent in the past two years.
“We’ve tried to be very careful about pushing the cost off on students and families, we’re trying to have some fair sharing of the burden,” Hannon said.
But because of this, Hannon said there is less money for the university to do what it needs to do.
“We have less money for immersive learning, less money for faculty, less money for library materials and so on,” he said.
The university sets aside extra money for faculty, since it takes good faculty to teach good students and make their educational experience the best it can be, Hannon said.
He said Ball State only pays for seven professional staff personnel employees for every 10 at other universities.
“So, as we compete for the best faculty members with all the other colleges around the Midwest and the country and the world, we have less money to pay them, so it makes our job much more difficult getting the people we’d like to have here,” Hannon said.
To save money, the university tries to spend less on some expenses, like utilities.
“We have to have light and heat and things, but we don’t want to spend more than we have to,” Hannon said. “Because whether you have a dollar or 90 cents, you’re still lit, you still have heat. And so by trying to eliminate or reduce those administrative expenses, we’ve put money into the educational side of the university.”
