photo by Sally McCay
Looking ahead after the past year’s economic turbulence, I have high confidence in our University’s position in what will remain a challenging environment. Many peer institutions have frozen hiring, conducted massive lay-offs, issued debt to cover operations, and slashed academic budgets while resorting to mid-year tuition hikes. But at UVM the budgets of the schools and colleges will increase an average of 4 percent in the new academic year; undergraduate financial aid will increase 19 percent (from $52 million to $62 million); and cutsof 6.5 percent to non-academic units have allowed us to make strategic investments in faculty and staff salaries, in tenure-track faculty hires, in library acquisitions (a 5 percent increase), and in graduate assistantships (a 3 percent increase).
Our 6 percent tuition increase—on which we net 3.9 percent after financial aid—appears to be the lowest among public peers in New England and among the lowest nationally. Many publics have double-digit increases—without approaching our high level of
financial aid.
So UVM has continued to advance, though the way forward has been hard, sometimes heart-wrenchingly so. Longstanding programs have been discontinued, jobs have been eliminated, and individuals have been profoundly affected. I recognize how difficult these realities have been for our community. And we still have more hard work to do. Our 2010 budget remains challenging. The budget gap, even after nearly $11 million in cuts, will require us to draw next year on between $5 and $6 million in reserves beyond our operating revenues to cover planned expenditures. Even so—and absent further adverse macroeconomic events—we now expect the budget to be balanced in 2011, a year ahead of the schedule for achieving structural balance presented to the UVM Board of Trustees in fall 2008.
And without question UVM’s advance continued even in this unusually challenging year. Consider that: Our undergraduate applicant pool exceeded records in every category, including academic quality, diversity, and, with more than 22,000 applications, quantity. Next fall’s first-year class will meet our target enrollment with exceptional student quality—including a record thirty-three Green and Gold Scholars, a record twelve National Merit Scholars, and unprecedented diversity.
At the end of April, UVM’s research awards—led by a benchmark-smashing performance in Medicine that stretches back across the last two years—were running $11.6 million ahead of last year’s near-record pace. Across all faculty, UVM is producing more than $100,000 in research awards per faculty member per year, placing us as the only public institution among the top twenty of the seventy American research universities that have 15,000 or fewer students, an objective register of our place among the nation’s premier small research universities.
Faculty and student achievement continues to rise, with major scientific awards and fellowships, including a Presidential Career Award in Science and Engineering, a Sloan Research Fellowship, and, for students, Goldwater, Boren, and Fulbright Scholarships, among many others.
In a variety of rankings UVM continues to shine, including top rankings in the last year for environmental programs and practices, in primary care education for physicians, and in the earning levels of our graduates, among many other external accolades.
Intense effort and keen resourcefulness are essential in order to enhance our increasingly competitive position within what Fareed Zakaria, in his recent book The Post-American World, calls “America’s best industry”—the higher education sector in which competition must inevitably intensify in a period of constrained resources and, in our region, a declining college-age population. To compete on the rapidly changing terrain of today’s world, we must be true to our academic values and mission. And we must also be intent on execution and accountability as we ramp up, creatively and collaboratively, the work of focusing in every domain on quality, with special emphasis on the few areas in which we can without question be among the very best of the best.
Daniel Mark Fogel