You are the Student Services manager at a small community college located near a large university in the urban center of your city. As you near the end of the spring semester, your president informs the college faculty and staff that the local university is responding to the recent state budget cuts by significantly increasing its tuition and capping the number of new students it will admit this coming fall. The president believes that this situation will result in many more students coming to your college, requiring more class sections of most introductory courses. She convenes a group of faculty and staff to work on the issue, and asks you to participate.
At your task force’s first meeting, you come up with the following options for addressing this problem, and need to provide the president with an estimate of the cost-effectiveness of each option. What are the types of costs that would be required to implement each?
- Begin offering introductory courses via distance learning, which your college has never done
- Add more sections of introductory courses, taught by adjunct faculty, and locate them in leased temporary classroom “trailers” situated on the college’s parking lots, reducing the amount of parking available to students and staff
- Negotiate a shared-facility agreement with the nearby university to use classrooms in the evenings and on weekends when they are not in use by university classes
- Increase class sizes in introductory courses from 20 to 30
Barr, M. J., & McClellan, G. S. (2018). Budgets and financial management in higher education (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
- Chapter 6, “Problems and Pitfalls in Budget Management”
Focus on the advice offered to managers on how to deal with common challenges faced in fiscal management. - Chapter 7, “Managing Budget Fluctuations”
Focus on departmental and institutional approaches to budget reductions and strategies for reducing costs.
Copyright 2009 by Chronicle of Higher Education. Reprinted by permission of Chronicle of Higher Education via the Copyright Clearance Center.
Focus on principles that college and university administrators should keep in mind when approaching budgeting and management during tough economic times.
www.deltacostproject.org/sites/default/files/produ…Focus on what the predominant ways of thinking about financial management have tended to be and how those “myths” should be reconsidered.
REQUIRED MEDIA
“Managing Budget Fluctuations” This interactive piece presents several scenarios that capture real-world examples of financial decisions that often confront department managers.
Focus on how your response to each scenario compares with the responses from John Palmucci and Larry Goldstein.
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