Your Budget and You - Data-driven Planning and Spending, Myth or Reality?

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Your Budget and You - Data-driven Planning and
Spending, Myth or Reality?

• Philip Maynard, Wheeler North, and Michelle Pilati

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What we said wed do..

• What role should faculty play in their local
  planning and budget development processes?
• How are budget decisions made on your campus -
  and how should they be made?
• What authority permits you to have a voice at the
  table?

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Authority

• Where is it?
• 10 of the 101
• processes for institutional planning and budget
  development
• So, we have the authority/right now what?

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Resources

• Senate Papers
• The Faculty Role in Planning and Budgeting (Fall,
  2001)
• Performance Based Funding A Faculty Critique and
  Action Agenda
• Program Discontinuance A Faculty Perspective
  (Spring, 1998)

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Consider this..

• What would your ideal budget world look like?
• What does your budget process look like?
• Are faculty appropriately involved in the process?

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Nirvana

• Planning is fun and dreamy but it really isnt
  required in our perfect world.
• Program review is for those type A folks who just
  have to know everything about everything.
• FTES, FTEF, WSCH, and FLEX are not in the
  Academys language.

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Reality

• There will never be enough funding.
• Consequently all planning and budgeting is
  risk-based and is a competitive process.

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Reality

• Success demands participation.
• Planning is what drives that success.
• The decisions made are only as good as the
  processes used to make them.

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Which comes first on your campus?

• The budget or the plan?
• The plan SHOULD come 1st without consideration of
  fiscal realities in other words, dream big.
• BUT institutional priorities should be clearly
  established.

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Reality

• The budget is negotiated from the top down over a
  three year period.
• Therefore all funding is very unpredictable and
  cant realistically be considered when planning.

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What Should Be

• Primary planning must come first.
• Planning should provide multiple options and all
  requests should be clearly prioritized.
• In spite of the State budget planning should be
  bottom-up departments/ divisions identifying
  their needs.

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What Should Be

• Planning should be tied to evidence.
• Such as?

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What Should Be

• Planning should
• Emphasize what is needed or wanted to facilitate
  student success.
• Involve an objective process of ranking those
  needs.
• Include an objective process for comparing the
  various program needs within the school/division,
  college and district.

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Reality

• While there is never enough money, there always
  seems to be some left over.
• Plan for this

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The Faculty Role in Planning and Budget

• Planning should drive budgeting and not vice
  versa.
• Dream big Planning should always be for the
  first-rate, even in the face of second- or
  third-rate budget allocations.

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The Faculty Role in Planning and Budget

• Each request for resources should be evaluated
  according to explicit criteria to which all
  participants in the process have agreed in
  advance.
• Planning, coupled with a critical assessment of
  successes and failures, is a means of taking
  conscious control of the process of serving
  students, and enables the emergence and
  elaboration of best practices

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The Faculty Role in Planning and Budget

• Planning, in an academic context, should be a
  bottom-up process, that trusts to the expertise
  of faculty to determine what is needed to serve
  students most effectively
• Among the criteria for evaluating requests, the
  requesting departments priority ranking of the
  activity for which the request is being made
  should be given special, positive, consideration

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The Faculty Role in Planning and Budget

• The evaluation of budget requests must be
  perceived as fair and impartial in order to
  encourage the expression of real needs in the
  planning process

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The Faculty Role in Planning and Budget

• The bulk of the work of planning and budgeting
  should be done by small, efficient subcommittees.
  
• The workload of planning and budgeting should be
  distributed among all committees and
  subcommittees such that each group has a
  manageable share of the total work to be done.

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The Faculty Role in Planning and Budget

• While we cant control what happens, we can
  advocate for a process that strives to achieve
  the ideal.
• Questions? Comments?