Impact of Potential Additional Budget Reductions

University of Wisconsin Oshkosh *

·        Impact on UW Oshkosh from the Governor’s Budget is a $2.6 million GPR cut biennially.

Ø     Agreed to keep students in the classroom by minimizing the impact on instruction.

·        The Joint Finance and Senate version result in an additional $2.7 million reduction for UW Oshkosh.

Ø     The 2005-06 impact is approximately an additional $1.4 million cut in GPR.  Additionally, up to $500,000 of tuition revenue would be lost due to enrollment losses.

Ø     80% or $1.5 million of the reduction will impact instruction directly.

Ø     Students have been enrolled and faculty/teaching academic staff are under contract:  very little can be done for the Fall semester.

Ø     The impact of cutting $1.5 million from the instruction budget in the Spring semester is a loss of 6,600 seats in the classroom, which is equivalent to serving 1400 fewer FTE or a 15% drop in Spring enrollment.

Ø     A reduction of 6,600 seats would be accomplished primarily by freezing new Spring enrollments, including transfers from 2 year colleges. It would impact all of our 11,000 students by increasing class size and by decreasing the average credit load per student.

Ø     Layoff notices, where possible, would have to be issued to approximately 60 teaching staff for the Spring semester alone.

Ø     The 2005-06 impact would continue into 2006-07 namely through decreased enrollments and through increased time to degree, cost to students, and debt load upon graduation.

*Assumes no return of the $34 million Senate budget reduction.