![[University of Waterloo]](/goldbar.gif)
| Yesterday |
Friday, February 20, 2004
|
Editor: Chris Redmond credmond@uwaterloo.ca |
![[Colour words]](http://www.optometry.uwaterloo.ca/~museum/Graphics/illusion08.gif)
'This one
one will cause a short circuit in your brain!" says
a web
page from UW's museum of vision
science and optometry.
"Try to tell the color of each word and not read the word."
|
"Faculties will still receive more money than they did this year," Chakma told the senate finance committee, which got a briefing on the university's complicated and uncertain financial situation. A draft budget is expected to come to a meeting March 10 and be submitted to the board of governors for approval on April 2.
"I think we have learned to live with uncertainties," he said, detailing some of the ones that universities are currently facing. A big one: what does Ontario's four-month-old Liberal government mean by a "two-year tuition fee freeze"? Institutions don't know whether all students' fees will have to stay at current levels for 2004-05 and beyond, and they certainly don't know whether the government will give them any extra funding to make up for the increases they aren't allowed to impose.
"I don't think we'll hear from [the province] before we have to go to the board with our budget," Chakma said. His sketch of UW revenue for the coming year indicates that if there are no fee increases, UW will "lose" slightly less than $9 million. (Total tuition fees this year: $113 million.) He's speculating that the province will provide an "offset" grant of about $3 million to help make up for the freeze, for a "net loss" of almost $6 million.
Some sources of revenue will still increase, especially as enrolment is expected to keep rising. But costs are also going up. "The university's inflation rate is roughly twice the CPI rate," said the provost. He said salaries will go up an average of 5.5 per cent this year (both staff and faculty are getting scale adjustments of 3.3 per cent, plus individual increases in many cases), and benefits costs will go up about 5 per cent. "Ballpark number," said the provost, "our costs every year potentially grow by twelve million dollars."
In addition, he's determined -- and several of the deans, speaking at yesterday's meeting, backed him up -- to allocate some money for new things. A handout listed more than $8 million in "strategic investments", mostly in the faculties. Major items include $2.5 million for 25 new faculty positions, and about the same amount for a "significant" boost to graduate programs.
For the most part, the money for all these new costs will come from a general budget cut, said Chakma. He noted that about a quarter of UW's spending can't really be cut (the university can't do much about its utility bills, for instance, and isn't about to cut spending on materials for the library). If the other 75 per cent of the budget, in departments across campus, is reduced by 2.5 per cent, that should eliminate any deficit for the coming year.
However, the provost added that there's also a possibility of juggling money to some extent, particularly as the provincial government is doing the same thing, delaying some payments from one fiscal year to another. "Probably," he concluded, "we'll settle for a 2 per cent cut across the board."
Academic departments will find the cut less painful because they'll benefit from those "investments", such as the 25 new faculty positions, Chakma reminded the committee. "We have to find some ways of softening the blow on the administrative side."
The committee heard some comments from Alan George, who has been provost himself (1988-93 and 2001) and now has the double position of dean of mathematics and associate provost (information systems and technology). He said that as dean, he favours what's being planned, particularly the allocations for graduate studies: "If we're subjected to a budget cut, and then it comes back with a label on it, that makes an institutional statement that graduate studies are important."
However, George warned, the budget plan "does in effect transfer money from the academic support areas to the faculties. We have to be careful."
Applications are down, which is no surprise in the year following the "double cohort" boom. "We anticipated a 20 to 25 per cent shortfall," Chakma said at yesterday's meeting.
Province-wide and at UW, the drop is somewhat steeper than that. An update on application figures this week from admissions director Peter Burroughs shows the numbers are down about 30 per cent in most categories. "UW has received 21,410 OSS applications to date, which represents a decrease of 10,427 or 32.8%," he says in a memo. (OSS stands for "Ontario secondary schools", the source of a majority of new UW students each fall.)
"Provincially," says Burroughs, "the decrease in OSS applications is 32.2%." Each would-be student submits an average of about 5 applications. Total OSS applicants across Ontario are 71,771 this year, down 29.6 per cent from last year.
There isn't a figure for how many of those 71,771 applicants included at least one UW program in their lists. But UW does carefully track the number of who listed a Waterloo program as first choice. That number -- "of possible concern", says Burroughs -- is down by 34.6 per cent from last year, "compared to the provincial average of 29.6%."
Across the province, university officials are pointing out that last year's record numbers were a one-time anomaly, with this year's application figures up a bit from the level of two years ago. UW isn't supposed to announce application figures for other individual universities. But Queen's University says it's received 43 per cent fewer applications this year than last year. Queen's stresses that its applications "are on track, and are comparable to those of 2002".
Burroughs says applications to various UW programs are down by between 25 and 42 per cent from last year.
UW has also had 4,945 "non-OSS" applications -- from students in other provinces or countries, and people currently not in school. That's a 10.5 per cent jump from last year, and is expected to include some Ontario graduates who finished high school last year but didn't try for university admission because of the double cohort crowds.
A sizeable drop in applicants would be cause for concern for several interconnected reasons:
![[Armstrong]](/images/2004/0220armstrong.gif)
A UW faculty member is taking a leave of absence in hopes of playing in the
Canadian Football League. The Calgary Stampeders
announced
yesterday
that they have signed Matt Armstrong (left), formerly a star with UW's
Warriors, now associate director of the software engineering program and
a faculty member in computer science and electrical and computer engineering.
Armstrong was a two-time captain of the Warriors, a four-time OUA
all-star, and a 1991 All-Canadian.
Said a Stampeders official: "We
feel that Matt Armstrong certainly has the capability of making our
club stronger. We are giving him the opportunity to make this football
team in the capacity of being both a punter and a kicker." He told
software engineering classes earlier this week that he'd be on leave
starting at the end of the winter term.
Just last week, Armstrong received the Coaches' Award as the football Warriors held a banquet to present honours from the 2003 season. Armstrong -- who was playing while completing his third UW degree -- "was instrumental in coordinating many off-the-field initiatives for the Warriors", a citation says. Also honoured were John Sullivan as most valuable player, Dan Shock as lineman of the year, and Trevor Derrick as rookie of the year.
The winter term exam schedule is now available on the web, the registrar's office says. . . . The first job posting of the "continuous phase", for students looking for spring term co-op jobs, will go up by noon today. . . . The faculty of mathematics will hold two open house sessions about graduate studies on Saturday. . . .
An "Instrumentation and Control User Group" will hold its first meeting today, with a presentation on LabVIEW by applied math graduate student Ben Zimmer, as well as information about other software. The session starts at 10 a.m. in Carl Pollock Hall room 1346. RSVPs go to campbell@ist.
A funeral service is scheduled for this afternoon -- if the Nova Scotia blizzard allows -- for Russel Legge, who retired in 1996 after a long career on the faculty of St. Paul's United College. Legge was acting principal of St. Paul's for five months in 1994, and was named an Honorary Member of the University by UW in 1997. He died Tuesday at his home in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. Memorial donations to a number of causes are invited, including the Russel Legge Bursary at St. Paul's, set up at the time of his retirement.
The annual Hagey Bonspiel is set for tomorrow at the Ayr Curling Club. . . . Power will be shut off from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. tomorrow in the Student Life Centre and the Health Services building (operations of the SLC are expected to continue as usual). . . . The city of Waterloo is planning a symposium titled "After the Double Cohort: Student-Community Relations" on March 4 and 5. . . .
Sports this weekend: Women's hockey tonight against Windsor and tomorrow against Western, both games 7:30 p.m. at the Icefield. Curling, the OUA championships all weekend, hosted by UW at the Westmount Golf and Country Club. Track and field, today in a Toronto invitational meet. Indoor hockey, tomorrow at Toronto. And basketball, both men's and women's teams, at Western tomorrow afternoon.
CAR