Comprised of faculty, students, staff, administrators and trustees, the ABC is gathering advice from the standing committees — the Committee on Educational Policy, the Committee on Priorities and Resources (CPR) and the Faculty Committee on Admissions and Financial Aid (FCAFA) — and will convene following commencement to decide on its final recommendations to the Board of Trustees.
“It’s not just about a single food item at Valentine. It’s serious at this point,” College President Anthony Marx said at the meeting. “We’re facing a very severe threat to our business model … There’s a good deal of pain before us.”
In the past year, the endowment has suffered a $500 million loss and at last night’s meeting, College Treasurer Peter Shea said that the projected growth of the operating budget is untenable and that cuts must be made. The ABC will ultimately recommend what those cuts should be.
The College has already cut $10 million from next year’s projected budget and said that it must cut $16 million from the projected 2010-2011 budget and $21 million for 2011-2012. To put things in perspective, Marx presented some hypothetical ways to make the $16 million cut could be made. He stressed that his examples would never happen, but that they should serve to guide the conversation and show the magnitude of the cuts that must be made. For example, raising the college tuition to $74,000 or reducing the number of students on financial aid by 400 would both save $16 million, Marx commented.
How these cuts will actually be made, though, is still undecided and last night’s ABC meeting was just one of several such meetings that have taken place over the past week to solicit the opinions of the Amherst community. Though the meetings are open to students, they have thus far been dominated by discussion among the faculty.
With so many issues important to the future of the College discussed at these meetings, Association of Amherst Students Treasurer and member of the ABC Peter Tang ’10 called on students to pay greater attention and attend these meetings. “Our time to make a difference is running out,” said Tang. “If you don’t get in on the conversation now, don’t be surprised that when you come back in September, you find new policies that you had no input in and do not reflect the values that the student body holds. The administration has given us every chance to speak up. We three student members of the ABC can’t possibly do this by ourselves.”
Public Forum Outlines Potential Financial Aid Cuts
Monday night’s FCAFA meeting, in contrast to the ABC meeting, dealt with more concrete budget cut possibilities that could hit financial aid in the coming years.
FCAFA Chair Stanley Rabinowitz opened the meeting by introducing the proposed changes to financial aid and admissions policies and asked for audience input. Director of Financial Aid Joe Paul Case discussed the difficult, but necessary nature of these discussions and inevitable cuts.
“The kinds of issues that interest admissions are frankly, complicated,” Case said. “We’ve agreed, sensitive or not, all issues need to be thought about and discussed. We’re interested in the values and priorities of the College.”
FCAFA proposed five ways of cutting costs, each with different levels of implementation and different projected savings. The first was to replace five to 15 aided international students with those who can pay the full price. Within one year, the substitution of five students would save the College $237,000.
Though this change would probably not affect the academic quality of the College, it would seriously skew the make-up of the international students towards a specific area of the world.
“The majority of our full-paying non-US citizens [would come] from a certain part of the world,” said Parker. “They’re going to be from Asia. Those are the realities. I think we could maintain the quality, but the distribution of students across the continents would change significantly.”
Yet if this were the case, Parker warned that the differences in the Asian school systems would cause the same high schools to send students to the College every year.
“You’d have a bunching of students in those countries by high school,” Parker predicted. “You’d be virtually getting all of your Korean students out of about three or four high schools. At that point, you might say this looks great on paper, but if what we’re trying to do is have students from a lot of different backgrounds, does it make a lot of sense to have a lot of students from the same high schools in Korea?”
Another option, one many faculty expressed concern about, is to stop the College’s traditional policy of protecting first generation, low-income students, a move that would save the College $3,410,000 with full implementation.
“Something we’ve done for a long time that accounts of the socioeconomic diversity of the student body is that we give preference in the academic level to first-generation students,” said Parker. “We could stop doing that. That would profoundly affect the student body. That would bring [it] to what it looked like 15 years ago rather than what it looks like right now.”
A proposal that many professors welcomed is the reinstitution of a loans policy similar to the one Amherst eliminated last year. If each student were to take a $1,000 loan, the College would save $414,000 in a year, and at $3,000 per student, the College would save $1,242,000.
One option that the College is definitely implementing is to increase student earning expectations for the upcoming summer, which will save the College $130,000. Another option FCAFA suggested was tapping into a financial aid reserve fund that was established in the early 1990s to cover possible future deficits , $2 million of which is currently accessible.
In the coming months, FCAFA will present a report to the ABC on how they prioritize these proposed cuts. Rabinowitz emphasized how difficult and painful the budget cuts will be and stressed the importance of input from the entire Amherst community on decisions that will ultimately affect everyone.
“A large part of not only the budget, but [also] a large part of our values have to do with financial aid,” Rabinowitz said. “We’ve had some very frank and honest discussions in the committee but clearly we felt it would be very important to have students, faculty [and] colleagues in the discussion … I’m glad you appreciate how all of these things are painful and one or two may not even do the trick.”
Both of these meetings stressed decisions to come, but comments from professors and students alike stressed the far-reaching consequences cuts have already had and the importance of balancing the urgency of the situation with a caution that will not compromise the values of the College.
For example, Psychology Professor Elizabeth Aries expressed concern that with the expected increase in student enrollment, the larger departments will not have enough faculty members to mentor their majors properly. At the same time, however, she worried that faculty from the smaller departments may be threatened with dramatic cuts.
“We’ve already changed the faculty-student ratio by having fewer [visiting professors] come in and having more students,” said Aries. “Students stack up in certain departments because of the open curriculum. This year we had 22 [students] who wanted to do honors, and we didn’t have enough [faculty] to do it, so we said two to a project, and this is without the increase in students. And then I see my colleagues from smaller departments afraid and threatened with becoming a Five College department.”
Students and faculty can make their voices heard on similar issues at two CPR meetings next week in Converse Hall.