TUCSON, Ariz. (13 News) – A few weeks into classes and a few months into the fiscal year, the University of Arizona said it’s slashed its budget deficit by about two-thirds.
A letter posted to the university’s budget website explains what actions have worked.
New president Dr. Suresh Garimella arrives next month and with a multi-billion-dollar budget, he’ll have a $65 million hole to fill.
But the letter that the university posted online is an effort to show the school is keeping its community in the loop.
Students remember how the $177 million deficit the school faced last year presented a real-world problem that needed to be solved.
“As an accounting student, it was obviously a big deal for us in our classes. We talked about it and everything,” said Zack Paterick, a graduate student.
“I think it was pretty shocking. As a student, you don’t exactly know what’s going on behind the scenes,” said Ella Wolters, a senior in management information systems.
“Transparency matters to really share the information across the campus and highlight the progress that we’ve made to focus on reducing the deficit,” said Mitch Zak, spokesperson for the University of Arizona.
Zak explained the reason for a new letter, which lines out the school’s deficit-reducing measures.
“Obviously, we’ve made a really big dent in the deficit but our work is not done and so our efforts to work collaboratively as a university community will continue,” Zak said.
Original efforts included asking each department to present across-the-board cuts, if necessary. But Zak explained the reductions ultimately focused on administrative costs and avoided academics.
“Fortunately, it’s not come to that. We’ve made a lot of changes, from centralizing our human resources and our IT to changing our account procedures that have really allowed us to, again, minimize the impact to academics and still achieve 64% reduction in our deficit,” Zak said.
Students seemed to agree cuts avoided their classrooms.
“I work for Arizona Athletics so things have been different there with budget cuts because I work more on the administrative side so I see those but on the classroom, no,” Wolters said.
“Education seems the same, the quality of the professors is still great, so as far as getting the deficit down, it’s a good thing that they’ve done it without really affecting the students too much,” Paterick said.
The university attributes an increase in revenue to its larger freshman class size, and it hopes to be in a surplus in two years.
Read the letter HERE.
Be sure to subscribe to the 13 News YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@13newskold
Copyright 2024 13 News. All rights reserved.
Source link : http://www.bing.com/news/apiclick.aspx?ref=FexRss&aid=&tid=66dac61397354c59a41a4323827ca6c4&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.kold.com%2F2024%2F09%2F06%2Funiversity-arizona-making-dent-financial-crisis%2F&c=4787725636685588782&mkt=en-us
Author :
Publish date : 2024-09-05 21:12:00
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.
