TRENTON — To iron out key issues in Gov. Jon S. Corzine’s fiscal year 2010 budget proposal announced in March and to address the rise in number students but lack of funding available to accommodate them, the Assembly Budget Committee met yesterday in the State House Annex in Trenton.
The 2 p.m. hearing included several presidents of New Jersey’s public higher education institutions, Higher Education Commission Executive Director Jane Oates for the Committee’s Hearing on Higher Education, University President Richard L. McCormick and the assemblymen and women.
“This fiscal year 2008, our colleges awarded 68,130 degrees, and I have to tell you this year it’s going to be more,” Oates said. “We’ve enrolled 253,961 full-time students this academic year and 155,619 part-time students.”
McCormick said the 2009 high school graduating class is the largest in the nation’s history, so it is no surprise that the University is going to see its largest enrollment ever next fall.
“We received 40,000 applications, admitted 23,000 and except to enroll 7,400 — so many that we’re going to have difficulty housing them on campus, but we’re determined to provide them with all the educational opportunities they need,” he said.
McCormick said there also would not be an increase of state-funded employees to match the rise in students, as these workers have declined by 4 percent throughout the past four years.
But Oates and the other presidents on the panel made it clear to the assemblymen and women that they do not foresee implementing Corzine’s proposal of university state worker furloughs to mitigate the loss in salaries.
“We understand the dangerous positions that the colleges are in,” she said. “Almost all the presidents have been very open and understanding; they’re giving raises and still hiring, so they’re in a better economic state than we are, because we’re certainly not hiring and giving any raises,” she said.
McCormick said for research institutions like the University, furloughs would be fruitless as many of the University’s employees rely on state funding for projects.
“So furloughing them would have us merely returning the money to the federal government,” he said.
Certain campuses and operations cannot be closed because of a need for more classrooms and experiments in progress cannot simply be stopped, McCormick said.
Furloughs would not work because state universities are not run like state agencies, said Montclair State University President Susan Cole.
“When we admit students to the university; we’re essentially promising them that they’ll be able to get a quality education at this institution,” she said. “We can’t lay off the history department.”
Cole said the government has given the universities authority to give civil service employees furloughs, but she said she could not understand doing this.
“It would be highly inequitable,” she said.
Since furloughs would not be used to generate more money, tuition has steadily risen a lot throughout the years and state funding is at its lowest in 12 years, the committee members wondered what the universities are doing to prevent a large tuition increase next year.
“One extremely important alternative is using [resources] as efficiently and as effectively as one can, with the powers that we have,” McCormick said.
For example, the University’s skill in energy research helps it save money, he said.
“In the area of energy, we’re assembling a solar farm that is going to be on our Livingston campus,” McCormick said.
It will be the largest campus solar farm in the nation and will generate 10 percent of the New Brunswick campus’ energy, he said.
McCormick said the University does not want to raise tuition by more than $1,100 due to the economy, but the exact increase cannot be determined until the legislature presents the final budget.
The federal government’s State Fiscal Stabilization Fund only requires states allocate more money to K-12 schools, Cole said. In New Jersey, no money has been given from the fund to public institutions of higher education, but other states have.
Oates said the Commission on Higher Education is still awaiting guidance from the federal government as to where to allocate the money.
McCormick said this federal stimulus money would not only support the federal financial aid programs such as Pell Grants but also research.
“This research comes in areas that … are absolutely critical to economic development and to finding solutions to significant human problems,” he said.
The Assembly Budget Committee will review the information and statistics provided by the panel to compose the final fiscal year 2010 budget by the end of June.
McCormick opposes furloughing workers at assembly hearing
Published: Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Updated: Tuesday, April 28, 2009
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