United
 
Education is said to be a recession-proof industry, but the fallacy of that belief was evident last week when the SUNY College at New Paltz announced it was implementing a deficit reduction plan of $6 million for the $63.7-million budget for the 2009-10 year. Â
The reductions will force the college to end programs in nursing and to suspend admission for obtaining graduate teaching degrees in key science disciplines, suspending master of science in education and master of arts in teaching programs, beginning this fall in mathematics, chemistry, earth science, French and Spanish.
College officials said that while the programs are invaluable they are under-enrolled and thus have become a luxury the college simply cannot afford.
“These decisions were not made easily,” said college President Steven Poskanzer in a statement. “The severe economic recession has hit New York especially hard, and the recently enacted state budget drives those consequences home to New Paltz in a most direct and painful way. It is distressing that SUNY”™s state-operated campuses have been hit harder than any other segment of New York”™s educational institutions.”
“It is particularly egregious that the new budget fundamentally breached faith with students and their families by sweeping 80 percent of the additional tuition charged,” Poskanzer said.
College spokesman Eric Gullickson acknowledged tough times, but said the pain is not being shared equally. And he said that state cuts have forced the college at New Paltz to reassess what it can afford to do, in maintaining its core identity as a liberal arts college.
“We see there is a statewide, national, and global recession we are in so we understand we have to take our share of the cuts that have happened last fiscal year and this year,” Gullickson said. “But SUNY has taken a disproportionate share of these cuts, including this tuition sweep (into the state”™s general fund) that is unprecedented and pretty amazing.”
He said that when the SUNY trustees voted to increase tuition by $625 annually, administrators assumed the university system would get the funding. Instead, he said the governor and state Legislature voted to take 80 percent of the revenue the tuition increase provided and “sweep” it into the state general fund.
“So families and students who paid this amount are getting whacked,” Gullickson said, paying for education services they are not receiving. Â “Its hard to understand why that is legal, but even more so, why it is ethical.”
The upshot of the budget dilemma harms the college, he said, and the aim of the carefully calibrated cuts is to minimize that harm and put the college in position to ride out the recession and be viable when the economy recovers. But Gullickson warned that further cuts may be imposed and said the college will use the template established in this round of cuts to guide officials making any future reductions in programs, staff or services. Â
The majority of the current recommended cuts,  $3.7 million will come from non-instructional areas; $2.3 million will come from the instructional budget. The college is also proposing to generate about $250,000 annually in new revenue and targets $640,000 for cost-saving measures in non-personnel expenses  such as supplies and contracts. It is also seeking to reduce energy costs by an additional $325,000.
“But you can only generate just so much savings in paper clips and Post-it notes,” Gullickson said. Â Eighty-four percent of the college”™s budget is in personnel, so the college has no choice in cutting costs but to reduce the size of its work force and scale back or eliminate some services, he said. The cuts will mean the loss of approximately 70 positions through retirements, attrition and non-renewals of contracts. ?“We have made some hard choice and there are consequence to these decisions,” Gullickson said. “It has not been easy. But New Paltz has consistently been a liberal arts school and we are in high demand as a liberal arts school. And so that is what we are trying to maintain and protect.”