With the announcement last week by the state Board of Economic Advisors of an additional $120 million in cuts to the state budget — bringing the total cuts since June to $328 million from the state’s now-$5.6 billion budget — higher education institutions continue to tighten their belts, with more cuts likely on the way when lawmakers reconvene in January.

“We’re all concerned about more cuts,” says Julie Carullo, director of governmental affairs and special projects for the S.C. Commission on Higher Education. “I know institutions of higher education around the state have all been working to try to look at their academic programs to protect them while managing the reductions.

“Anecdotally, you might see increases in larger classes or larger class loads or not moving forward with projects that might be necessary but have to be put off.”

The last option — deferring new capital improvements — is precisely the one taken by the University of South Carolina, which depends on appropriations from state government to the tune of 16.3 percent of its approximately $1 billion budget.

“One of the major ways we’ve handled the cuts, beginning last year, was that we had been accumulating capital for about three years or so to install a system-wide revamp of our business management data processing system,” says Ted Moore, USC vice president for finance and planning. “So we’ve given that up, and that’s been applied toward budget cuts.

“Relatively speaking, it’s a painful cut because we’re dealing with a computer system that’s more than 30 years old, and in the world of computers that’s generations old. As a result, the antiquated process and systems we have in place means we have to do a tremendous amount of work to make it do what a modern system would do very easily.”

Moore says his office does its best to anticipate budget cuts in an effort to mitigate the impact on the quality of students’ education.

“So far this year we’ve had around a 4 percent cut which, using round numbers, comes to about $6.9 million for the USC system and $4.9 million for the Columbia campus,” Moore says. “With the cuts just announced, it looks like it’s going to be an additional 3 percent, which translates into about $5.7 million more in cuts for the system and $4.1 million more for Columbia.

“Of course, like any institution of higher education we try to manage these early in the year so that we don’t have to come back to our academic units for another mid-year cut. We’ve been prepared for those two cuts totaling about 7 percent and are still within our projections, but if they continue to mount, we’ll have to revisit the idea [of mid-year cuts].”
Carullo says additional cuts are all but certain.

“They’re still cutting for the current year and we’re told to expect more cuts for the 2010-11 budget,” Carullo says. “We’re all hoping things have bottomed out.”

The cuts have been prompted by continued tax revenue shortfalls due to the state’s high unemployment rate (11.7 percent in September, sixth-highest in the country) and a lack of consumer spending.

Fortunately for primary and secondary education funding for this year, provisions included for states to accept federal stimulus money mean that educational institutions cannot be cut deeper than any other state agency.

“As part of accepting the stimulus money, one stipulation was that state’s could not drop funding for K-12 and higher ed below the 2006 level of funding,” Carullo says. “Of course, in South Carolina we’re not anywhere close to being funded as we were in 2006 — we’re at about the 1993 level right now.

“So we had to apply for a waiver, and as part of that waiver, the state had to agree not to cut education spending disproportionately from any other area.”

Still, the cuts, even when anticipated, are not easy for schools to absorb.

“In addition to our central cut over modernizing our data system, we went to the academic units early in the semester and imposed a reduction in their operating budgets that was a little less than 2 percent on average,” Moore says. “The deans weren’t surprised by that. We’ve been coaching them all along, and by design the cuts haven’t had a significant impact on students getting their degrees.

“That’s still job one." 


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