Time to Tell the North Dakota Board of Higher Education to Take an Hike!
Big spenders when it’s not their money!
This budget request represents a 25 percent increase in base funding over the system’s 2007-2009 state appropriation. The funding provides for two years’ worth of 7 percent average salary hikes for faculty and staff and a 4-percent annual cap on tuition hikes at UND and the state’s other four-year universities.
Remember now, this is asking, not getting. What they need to be told is that the greedier they get the more strings the legislature will attach to their funding.
In an earlier post I pointed out how the last legislature gave the higher education system a catch up increase in funding. You may remember that post had a committee of the Higher Education Board asking for 53% more money. From today’s story there isn’t any evidence that they aren’t asking that in total. The 25% is in base funding, it’s likely they’ll be asking for a whole lot of other goodies besides.
Why do we subsidize higher education? Is it to help the administration, faculty and staff live better? No, it’s to help the students. Well I hate to tell you that recent management of the higher education has jacked up tuition higher than they needed to benefiting the administration, faculty and staff.
What’s happened since the legislature increased funding so much? Tuition for University of North Dakota students went up. The salary of the president of the two flagship universities were essentially doubled to #300,000 a year and the school foundations found millions of dollars to build new mansions for their presidents to live in.
I need to mention that this same Board of Higher Education ignored their own criteria in hiring the new UND President.
This Board of Higher Education is out of control.
