Budget Facts

Highlights

The Short Term Budget Implications of the Covid Pandemic

The “Directive Memo” projects an unduly pessimistic picture of SF State’s financial future, even as it underplays sources of temporary aid to help the university ride out the current dip in state funding and student enrollment. We suspect that we have the means necessary to address the current deficit with resources already allocated to our institution. We say ‘suspect’ because several key questions remain unanswered: how will SFSU use the increased annual state funding announced by Governor Newsom? The CSU Chancellor’s Office funding reserves? The incoming emergency funds from the Federal government? Before permanently restructuring our academic instruction and curriculum, we need to know that all funds allocated to navigate this crisis have been used as intended. We need evidence that there are no other alternatives.

Available resources to meet the temporary effects of the pandemic

The “Portfolio of Imperfect Options” and the Provost’s “Directive Memo” seriously underestimate the resources available to the university to temporary effects of the pandemic. While it’s true that many of these resources are “one-time” funding streams, budgeting that respects our core academic mission can use these monies to shore up educational quality until the pandemic ebbs.

These resources include:

1. Federal monies distributed through various COVID-19 relief acts. The first CARES package - - released in spring 2020 - - gave SF State $14 million in institutional support funds (apart from $14 million in student grant aid). University administration dedicated less than one-third of this money to academic areas, dircecting the bulk of the monies ($9 million) to a self-support auxiliary. The December 2020 CARES act (HEERF 2) directs about $33 million in institutional support funding to SF State. President Biden has proposed a third CARES package that proposes an additional $35 to $40 billion in support for higher education.

2. CSU reserves: In its most recent analysis, November, 2020, the California Legislative Analyst Office reports that the CSU Chancellor’s office currently holds over $400m in reserves. The funds can be distributed at will across the CSU system.

The Question of the “Structural Deficit”

In the Portfolio of Imperfect Solutions and other documents, university administration claims that we are facing a “structural deficit” in our instructional budget. This deficit - - projected at $6.7 million - - is largely attributed to the university’s use of lecturer faculty. Last year’s pandemic-related 10% cut to SF State’s budget exacerbated this deficit.

We are justifiably skeptical of the reality of a “structural deficit” because it rests on a series of pessimistic assumptions about funding and student enrollment:

1. The University Budget Committee reports that “the state is forecasting deficits in future years. This is a threat to the CSU’s funding levels from the State.” In fact, California actually reported a budget surplus of $26 billion for 2020. The State of California ended its 2019-2020 fiscal year with $16 billion in reserves. The proposed new budget (2020-2021) that uses a part of these reserves, and has increased revenue will still leave $11.4 billion in reserves. Governor Newsom’s most recent budget proposal increases funding for CSU by more than $300 million, including a 3% increase ($114 million) to the CSU base budget. SF State will receive an additional $7 million from this increased state funding.

2. Student enrollment at SFSU has taken a hit thanks to the pandemic - - again, like many other U.S. institutions of higher learning. Our drop in enrollment in 2020 is neither much larger nor much smaller than the average enrollment drop across all sectors of higher education. In fact, before the pandemic, our undergraduate enrollments were pretty steady - - ranging from 29, 045 students in Fall 2016 to 28,880 students in Fall 2019 (the last “pre-pandemic” academic year). In light of these trends, we can see that the “COVID-19” enrollment drop in 2020-21 is most likely temporary. There is no evidence that SFSU has been or is beginning a steady decline in student enrollment.

3. The “structural deficit” is an effect of budgeting choices and priorities. An independent audit of SFSU’s budget in 2016 declared that: ““There is no empirical evidence provided for the structural deficit. . . . It is a madeup concept with pessimistically estimated numbers.” And, in 2017, SF State’s outgoing VP of Administration and Finance was lauded for “us[ing] an 'all funds' approach to eliminate a $7.5 million structural deficit." Like a strange, mythical beast, the “structural deficit” seems to rise from the grave every few years before it’s consigned back to oblivion.

4. The Directive Memo assumes a structural deficit, but fails to cost out its ‘cost-saving’ measures. How does this add up to the $6.7 million deficit? More importantly, what if the cuts are too much, unnecessarily damaging the instructional quality of our institution? Increasing class sizes, consolidating sections, eliminating programs, and reducing course offerings all increase teaching workload, and all have a well-known result: they decrease student success and enrollment.

We Need a Budget Centered On Student, Staff and Faculty

Budgets are not a simple accounting exercise, they reflect priorities. They represent the choices we are making about the future of our institution. While we don’t agree with the reasoning in the Directive Memo, we do agree that we need to create a “long-term sustainability” plan for our institution as the Provost claims. For the CFA-SFSU that means re-centering the budget priorities around students, staff and faculty. Administrative appointments and other financial activities and should play a functional, supportive role, secondary to the core educational mission of our university.

The Rise of the Administration

An important and growing budget item - - the growing cost of administration itself - -that is nowhere to be found in the multiple budget slides issued by the administration. Between 2012 and 2018 the number of MPPs at SFSU went up by 66% while in that same period the number of tenure track hires was flat or declined. This was the highest increase in the entire CSU and actually by quite a bit in some cases (Humboldt alone actually decreased the number of MPPs by 10%). Only SLO was close to SFSU with a 63% increase.

Systemwide, the number of managers and administrators has doubled between 1993 when there were 2,181 administrators for the whole CSU to 2018 when there were 4, 281.

The Decline in Tenure Density

The money saved by reducing the budget for managers will us allow to reverse another, very negative trend: the steady decrease over the same period of tenure density entails an increasing reliance on lecturer faculty. These contingent faculty should be the exception rather than the norm in our institution. The CFA-SFSU is committed to working towards the elimination of this exploitation of non-tenured faculty by advocating for more T/T-T hires to fully staff our academic programs and student services and for converting lecturer-faculty lines into T/T-T ones.

The FAQ Admin website claims that “Tenure Density at SF State is among the highest in the system, and will likely remain so.” It is true that our current tenure density (62.1%) is above the systemwide average of 56.3% and that we are ranked 4th in the CSU system. However, let’s look at the data in context: in 2010, we had 760 T-TT and 715 lecturer faculty (1,475 total) that is a tenure density of 69.7%, and in 2020 we have 740 T-TT and 923 lecturer faculty (1,663) we went down to 62.1% (-7%). SFSU matched the average statewide trend of decline in tenure density at about 9%. Other campuses such as Sonoma, San Bernardino, Humboldt, Maritime, Northridge, Channel Islands, Fullerton have lower rates of decline than SFSU. We don’t think SFSU has been exemplary in terms of increasing tenure density, for it is one of the 3 campuses that did not allocate special budget appropriations to reach that goal in the 2018 and 2019 budget cycles.

In 2018, state legislation increased funding to the the CSUs and earmarked $25 million for increased tenure-track hiring. The Chancellor allocated these funds in October 2018, which amounted to $690,000 for SF State. CFA inquiries indicate that SFSU administration allocated this funding to the Graduation Initiative instead - and none to hire new tenure track faculty. This is yet another issue of budget transparency, accountability, and an undermining of educational equity. For the full historical budget analysis including specific CA Legislature language, see CFA's Where Is the Money? page.

Faculty Salaries

The Directive Memo introduces criteria to decide on curriculum based on ‘regional workforce needs’ according to the ‘market analyses’. This aligns neither with the mission statement of the SFSU, nor our belief that public universities exist to serve academic and intellectual growth. We are not merely training the future workforce. Our SFSU mission is instead to “prepare its students to become productive, ethical, active citizens with a global perspective”... “with the unwavering commitment to social justice that is central to the work of the University.”