Committee on university budget divides north, south

Thursday, Oct. 28, 1999 | 10:33 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- The feud between UNLV and the University of Nevada, Reno, over state financing is still burning, and students may be asked to bear a greater share of the costs of higher education in the future.

The Committee to Study the Funding of Higher Education, created by the 1999 Legislature, held its first meeting Wednesday and was cautioned by its chairman Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio, R-Reno, to avoid a "tug of war" between the two schools.

But Southern Nevada representatives on the committee quickly presented their case that UNLV has been shortchanged by the state financing formula.

Larry Eardley, budget director for the University and Community College System of Nevada, told the committee that UNLV receives $3,500 to $5,000 less per new instructor in the state budget than the Reno counterpart.

Regent Steve Sisolak of Las Vegas, who has led the drive to end the disparity, said this means UNLV cannot attract the quality faculty available to UNR.

Eardley said the system recommended this be remedied, but Gov. Kenny Guinn and the 1999 Legislature did not agree.

UNLV President Carol Harter said after the meeting her school gets $5,000 less from the state to replace or hire a new position than UNR. "An illustration is say we get $500,000 for 10 new positions. UNR gets $550,000 for 10 positions. But we pay the same thing on the market place and that means we can fill only nine position.

"So in the next budget cycle they have 10 positions at $55,000 and we have nine positions at $55,000. Our budget can never catch up with theirs," she said. "We are only asking for the full funding for new positions."

Raggio said however the problem was created at UNLV in its shifting of money inside its budget. For instance, he said the Legislature in the past gave UNLV the same amount of money as Reno for faculty. But UNLV decided to use the money in other ways.

He said a "hue and cry" results but "We (the Legislature) didn't create that." But still the school tries to "whipsaw" the Legislature into providing more money.

Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas, said UNLV, when it had to return money to the state during the economic downturn in the early 1990s, gave up the money for merit pay raises for faculty. Now the school is being punished continually for that decision, said Titus, a UNLV faculty member.

"This continues to multiply and get worse," she said.

Don Snyder, president of the UNLV Foundation, said the school was "at a disadvantage in going after the same quality of faculty," because of the difference in state financing.

State funding of the university system is based partly on the average salary of faculty. When student growth at UNLV was higher than anticipated, the school hired extra faculty at lower pay to staff the added classrooms.

This pushed the average salary down at UNLV, resulting in a lower appropriation from the state per faculty member.

On the topic of student fees, Raggio, in his opening remarks, noted that an independent study put tuition in Nevada at 47th lowest in the nation. The fee is $1,466 per full time equivalent student. California is lowest at $1,001 and Vermont is highest at $8,283.

"The students are getting a good bargain," Raggio said. "The tuition has been very low. This may be something we have to look at."

Tom Anderes, interim chancellor, said the philosophy has been to keep student fees "as inexpensive as possible." He said he hoped the committee would look at this. He added, "The state has done an excellent job of financing" the system.

At the start of the session, Raggio said the committee was not created to get more state money for the university. The university system has received between 18-20 percent of the state budget in the last 10 years.

And the committee, he said, was not established to propose any new taxes to support the system. It was formed to look at the formula that supports higher education in Nevada to see that there's a fair distribution of money.

When the disparity issue was raised late last year and earlier this year, the regents hired MGT of America, a consulting firm from Tallahassee, Fla. In its report, MGT found UNLV was being shortchanged $534 per student per year compared to UNR.

That represented an annual difference of $7.6 million. The Legislature allocated $3.7 million for the two years to make a start in reducing the disparity.

The MGT calculation was based on comparing the two Nevada universities with other schools in their rankings in the United States.

But Brian Burke, a fiscal analyst with the Legislative Counsel Bureau, told the commission he found several problems in examining the MGT report. He said that, using MGT figures, the net disparity between UNLV and UNR, is $2.7 million a year, not $7.6 million. And the disparity per student is $218, not $534.

Burke's analysis compares UNLV and UNR alone and doesn't include other universities. He also said the MGT study also suggested UNLV be brought up to the highest level of funding.

Nevada provides a net appropriation of $6,346 per full-time student, the seventh highest in the nation. But when you add in the tuition, the total appropriation is $7,812, or 22nd in the nation.

The 12-member committee has decided to hire a consultant to help with its study. It has $136,000 left in its $150,000 budget for this purpose.

Anderes also suggested the committee focus on the growing cost of technology and research for the schools.