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Your Budget and You - Data-driven Planning and Spending, Myth or Reality?. Philip Maynard , Wheeler North, and Michelle Pilati. What we said we’d do. What role should faculty play in their local planning and budget development processes?
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Your Budget and You - Data-driven Planning and Spending, Myth or Reality? Philip Maynard, Wheeler North, and Michelle Pilati
What we said we’d 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?
Authority • Where is it? • #10 of the 10+1 • “processes for institutional planning and budget development” • So, we have the authority/right – now what?
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)
Consider this.. • What would your ideal budget world look like? • What does your budget process look like? • Are faculty appropriately involved in the process?
Nirvana • Planning is fun and dreamy but it really isn’t 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 Academy’s language.
Reality • There will never be enough funding. • Consequently all planning and budgeting is risk-based and is a competitive process.
Reality • Success demands participation. • Planning is what drives that success. • The decisions made are only as good as the processes used to make them.
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. Which comes first on your campus?
Reality • The budget is negotiated from the top down over a three year period. • Therefore all funding is very unpredictable and can’t realistically be considered when planning.
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.
What Should Be • Planning should be tied to evidence. • Such as?
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.
Reality • While there is never enough money, there always seems to be some left over. • Plan for this…
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.”
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;
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 department’s priority ranking of the activity for which the request is being made should be given special, positive, consideration;
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;
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.
The Faculty Role in Planning and Budget • While we can’t control what happens, we can advocate for a process that strives to achieve the ideal. • Questions? Comments?