With Ball State University's budget shortfall of $15.25 million comes talk of change.
There's been talk of changes to tuition, salaries and programs, along with energy saving initiatives, benefits reductions and layoffs, but nothing has been decided.
Perhaps the largest concern for students — apart from possible drastic tuition and fee increases — is how they will be affected.
Ball State administrators have not yet specified how they plan to close the money gap by June 2011. Nearly $5 million of the $15.25 million must be taken care of by this June. After June 2011, Ball State must operate with a permanent $7.6 million reduction in state funding to its general operating fund.
President Jo Ann Gora and her cabinet are considering ideas, including those from a special idea submission e-mail address (submissions were accepted through Jan. 29), with initial recommendations to be presented to the Board of Trustees in mid-March.
Repeatedly, administrators have said they want to avoid impacting the education experience of students, as well as prevent negative impacts to the Strategic Plan. As Ball State officials consider ways to meet the shortfall, the university's top academic officer emphasized that there are no plans to eliminate academic programs.
Terry King, provost and vice president for Academic Affairs, said the president has established guiding principles in assessing how to handle the shortfall.
"[Either] you increase revenue, or you make cuts," he said. "But, we are looking at both types of things."
He said on the cutting side, administrators still worry about preserving the quality of the students' experiences; they don't want to do anything to jeopardize the quality of programs across campus.
King said while cutting majors is unlikely, small areas of study are always examined to determine their merit.
"If there was a program to be cut, it would be a program with so few students that it doesn't make sense for us to continue it anyway. And right now, we just don't see that as a viable option," he said. "There may be some restructuring happening; we may eliminate some options within majors, but nothing has been decided yet.
"As these things go through the hopper we'll pull them out and actually analyze them, but right now, I have no proposal for cutting any programs."
Senior social work major and sociology minor Rachel Penticuff said she wants to be assured that the programs are improved upon, rather than just outright cut or changed.
"It'd be killing the programs if you merged it with something else," she said. "They wouldn't be specialized and it'd be a blow to whatever department it happened to. If they were to say, ‘merge sociology and social work,' it would just be ridiculous."
Programs cut across the nation
Cutting and merging of academic programs during tough economic times is not an isolated event at one or two universities eliminating undergraduate majors, graduate degrees or minor options; it's happening across the nation.
The University of Arizona combined its media arts program with its theatre arts program, it announced Jan. 26. The merger will save their College of Fine Arts $300,000; overall, the university has to cut $100 million over the next two years.
On May 16, 35 academic programs were targeted for consolidation or elimination at the University of Idaho, as the school had to cut $11.7 million this year.
Washington State University cut its theater and dance department, the sports-management program, the Department of Community and Rural Sociology and the major in German on May 1.
Many master's and doctorate programs have been discontinued across the country.
In Indiana, seven state-funded universities face budget shortfalls and are being forced to consider numerous options to make up the difference.
Indiana State University announced Jan. 31 it had dealt with their budget shortfall of $10.5 million by eliminating 108 positions, reducing custodial services and having a third-party vendor provide health services to students.
Looking at the smallest and largest departments on campus
According to documents obtained from a public records request, the smallest undergraduate programs at Ball State by enrollment are women's and gender studies, educational studies, geology, physics and astronomy, economics, information systems and operations management, urban planning and sociology.
Women's and gender studies enrollment has dropped from 16 students in 2007 to five in 2009.
Comparatively, the largest undergraduate enrolled programs on campus are interdepartmental College of Business majors, elementary education, telecommunications, physical education, journalism, family and consumer sciences and biology.
Elementary education consistently has enrollment above a thousand students, and telecommunications has seen a jump from 983 in 2007 to 1,039 in 2009. Biology also has grown by about 100 enrolled students, from 694 to 788.
The undergraduate architecture program has seen a slight drop since 2007 in the number of students declaring it as their major.
Michel Mounayar, associate dean of the College of Architecture and Planning, said enrollment is actually stable because the college is selective.
"All the majors are growing in our college. Things are going well in our little world," he said. "We don't know what the impact of the budget cuts will be yet. We have not gotten any information yet related to specifics — we've got the broad lines like everybody else. But I think we will deal with those when they come."
Department chairs don't know what might be cut
Thomas Robertson, chairperson of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, said there was a lot of talk within the department about how it might be affected.
He said that even though the program is small, it's comparable to the College of Science and Humanities, as well as other physics and astronomy programs throughout the nation. The physics and astronomy undergraduate program has dropped from 52 enrolled students in 2007 to 43 in 2009.
"We exist in a small numbers environment," Robertson said. "I think one thing you have to ask yourself when talking about merging departments is ‘What can you save?' You're not going to cut classes, unless you are going to cut programs and people.
"The largest portion of the budget is people and the question is: Do you want to cut people? And can you cut people without cutting the number of classes that you offer?"
Similar to the physics and astronomy program, geology has remained steadily small in regard to enrollment. However, geology has increased from 24 undergraduate degree-seeking students in 2007 to 39 in 2009.
"[Geology is] a small program, but our students are 100 percent employed," Scott Rice-Snow, chair of the Department of Geology, said. "So we feel we've got a good record there."
He said he knew other universities dealing with budget cuts have taken the approach of removing or combining departments, but the department was hoping Ball State's process would help the university become more efficient.
Jayne Beilke, chair of the Department of Educational Studies, a consistently small undergraduate program with a large graduate program, said that campus wide, programs were looking at the numbers of students in classes. However, she said the educational studies department would be hiring a couple of people to replace tenured professors who left.
"There is a lot of concern across the campus obviously for a lot of programs that may be smaller or have very few faculty," she said.
Educational studies is a little different because it serves many programs, she said, which makes it difficult to get a handle on numbers sometimes.
"I think students are facing some tuition increases," Beilke said. "But not as drastically as other institutions are."
Eliminating options or minors could be possible
King said that while Ball State is not looking to cut programs at this point, cutting some options that require specialized courses for very few students may be a possible place to find savings.
"Typically minors are cases where the major exists and those students are taking those courses that already exist and would continue existing even if the minor did not," he said.
At least a quarter of Ball State's majors have options to choose from within that major; 25 majors have more than two options. In some cases, minors have options as well.
Within the biology program, there are nine options. The family and consumer sciences major also has nine options and natural resources and environmental management has six.
Teachers College has one option — library media science — coming to an end after Spring Semester; however, Dean John Jacobson said that program has been discontinued a while ago due to low enrollment, and had been phased out over time.
Jacobson said Teachers College would be monitoring all its programs and any program that didn't meet "adequate enrollment levels" would be considered for cuts.
Charlie Wenner, senior mathematical economics major, said he thinks there are a few majors with options that are pretty similar to each other. However, he said he didn't see a lot of wisdom in cutting options from within majors.
"I don't know if that would actually save a lot of money," he said. "In my opinion, there are better things to cut."
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