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Meet the University of Nebraska Board of Regents
LINCOLN — Tuition would rise, campuses would face millions in budget cuts and a new scholarship program for the state’s brightest students would grow significantly under the budget that will go before the University of Nebraska’s Board of Regents next week.
The budget plan released Thursday addresses the oft-discussed projected deficit, doing so primarily through a tuition hike of just over 3% this fall and as-yet unspecified spending cuts of $18 million.
Despite the university system’s funding challenges, NU interim President Chris Kabourek said it still needs to continue to invest in strategic priorities aimed at making the university and state more competitive. That includes the new President’s Scholarship program, which is already helping keep more of the state’s top academic performers in Nebraska for college.
The budget plan calls for spending an additional $1.5 million to expand the generous scholarship program to cover 50 new students each year — roughly triple the current number.
“We need to start making investments,” Kabourek said this week. “We’re not going to cut our way to excellence.”
Gold
The University of Nebraska, like many other schools nationally, is facing considerable financial hurdles, including years of fast-rising inflation and a projected demographic drop in the number of students attending college.
That gloomy picture last year led to the university’s projected two-year deficit of $58 million.
Many schools also are facing flat or falling state support, though that’s not true in Nebraska. The university’s state appropriations are set to rise almost 5% in the coming school year to nearly $700 million.
In all, the university’s general fund budget, the part supported by taxpayers and tuition dollars, is projected to rise 4.5% to nearly $1.1 billion. The total university budget, including revenues from things like student housing, athletics, federal funds and research grants, would rise at a similar rate and hit nearly $3.5 billion.
Kabourek
Kabourek said the proposed budget was crafted in conjunction with the regents and Dr. Jeffrey Gold, the University of Nebraska Medical Center chancellor who is set to take over as university president on July 1. By wiping out the deficit, Kabourek said, the budget would leave Gold with a “clean slate” as he leads the university forward.
Here’s a breakdown of the 2024-25 school year budget the regents will vote on during their June 20 meeting in Lincoln:
Tuition would rise an average of 3.4% across the campuses, bringing in an additional $12 million annually. For a full-time student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the change equates to an additional $135 per semester for a 15-credit-hour load. It’s an increase of $120 per semester at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and $105 at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.
Kabourek called the rising tuition “an inflationary increase” that still preserves the university’s affordability.
The state’s neediest students would not be impacted by the tuition hikes. The state’s Nebraska Promise program covers all undergraduate tuition costs for students who are Pell Grant-eligible or whose family income is less than $65,000 annually.
“We don’t consider any tuition increase lightly,” Kabourek said in a budget memo. “But we have big goals for academic excellence, and it’s appropriate for all of us — the university, the state and our students — to chip in to help us get where we want to go.”
The tuition picture at UNL is also brightening due to projected rising enrollment. It appears enrollment on the flagship campus will be up about 1% this year, providing $5 million in new dollars. Enrollments at UNO and UNK appear more stable, Kabourek said.
Kabourek said that does not mean the Nebraska schools won’t one day face the same demographic cliff of reduced enrollments that’s anticipated nationally. Nebraska may just be trailing the national trend, he said.
“All the headwinds we have been talking about in higher education are still there,” he said.
At least 17 students have now signed on to be part of the first cohort of NU President’s Scholars, the program offering free tuition, room and board, books and fees, plus a $5,000 annual stipend, for any enrolling student from Nebraska scoring a perfect 36 on the ACT.
But now the university wants to expand the program to include other top students who score below 36. To do that, the university would allocate $1.5 million to provide 50 President’s Scholarships to freshmen in the 2025-26 school year.
While those students would not show up on campus for more than a year, getting the money on the books at that level now would allow the university to start selling the program to this coming year’s high school seniors, Kabourek said.
By the time the four-year program is fully implemented, with 50 new students enrolling each of the following three years, Nebraska would have 200 scholars in the program, at a total cost of $6 million annually.
Beginning this fall, the university intends to create an application process for students who score a 32, 33, 34 or 35 on the ACT to compete for the scholarship. Students who score a 36 will continue to automatically qualify.
Eventually, Kabourek said, he would like to see the Legislature or donors provide matching dollars so the program could be expanded to reach 100 new students per year.
“These are just the kind of students we want at Nebraska,” Kabourek said. “We have to try to scale this as quickly as we can.”
Gov. Jim Pillen has set a goal of expanding the program to cover all interested students scoring 32 or above, though he has not pledged any state funding to do that.
Among other new initiatives, the budget includes nearly $15 million to open, staff and operate the newly built rural health education center at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.
The budget provides a 3% pool for merit-based pay increases for employees whose pay is not determined by collective bargaining.
The budget also includes $1.5 million for Gold to spend on his own strategic priorities during his first year as president.
The plan calls for $11.5 million in permanent budget cuts that the campuses will need to identify during the upcoming year. Each campus would be allocated a portion of the cut, although those figures are not yet available.
In addition, the campuses will not receive budget adjustments to keep up with inflation, equating to another cut estimated at $6.5 million systemwide.
Like a family living on a fixed income, Kabourek said, the campuses will need to reallocate funds or defer spending to cover the cost of inflation.
Kabourek noted the campuses have already made some $30 million in budget cuts in the past two years, including the elimination of several academic programs in Kearney. Each campus will go through its own process to find the new cuts.
The regents last year challenged university leadership to address the looming budget shortfall while continuing to move the university ahead academically.
As part of meeting that challenge, major structural changes, including merging programs or even entire campuses, remain on the table, Kabourek said. Any such change will require some “uncomfortable conversations” about priorities, structure and program duplication across campuses in coming months, Kabourek said.
In the end, Kabourek said he believes the university can balance the budget while making progress toward its long-term academic goals, including making all the university campuses more competitive academically with their peers in other states.
“That will require us to challenge the status quo,” he said. “We look forward to a transparent, robust dialogue with all Nebraskans about the future of our university.”
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cordes@owh.com, 402-444-1130, twitter.com/henrycordes
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Meet the University of Nebraska Board of Regents
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