Budget Conversations
2025 – 2026 Budget Conversations
Fall 2025: In person questions of the questions that were asked and answers given.
1. On one of the slides, Cam said the numbers had changed from what was submitted to the board, why?
A: We had to submit the slides last week, worked to reduce the deficit over the weekend. Docket is posted tomorrow.
2. UO/OSU lowering admission standards taking more students – how can we stop that?
A: OSU isn’t. We’re getting the same market share of students, there’s just less students. That is our biggest obstacle.
3. E-enrollment – net positive for OSU, and in recent years we seem to be going away from that, has there been any thought in changing that approach?
A: Balance. OSU is investing millions of dollars into their infrastructure, tuition is different. Be strategic/intentional, it’s not going to be about growth. About getting our students to graduate in four years.
4. Have we thought about selling WOU:Salem, moving grad to Monmouth, and saving on operating expenses?
A: We’ve thought about it, there’d be costs to move the programs here too. We’ve built a state of the art OT facility in Salem.
4b. Sunk cost fallacy — the expenses of utilities/upkeep/etc do those outweigh the revenues? And if we could keep the students and move it from Salem to Monmouth, would we not be able to use those funds for thing here on Monmouth campus?
We’re doing an analysis. We know how much it costs to run Salem, we don’t know how much it would cost for those same programs to run here.
5. What would cost savings be to drop down a sports division and what is being done to control spending in athletics?
A: We have ~125 football students, w/ ~4K credit hours. We are working on a detailed answer.
6. Will the 5% cut from the state put us in retrenchment? At what point do we need to make reductions to staff/faculty/programs?
A: See the slides. We’ll communicate as soon as we know.
7. With legality of, can we go to the state and lobby during work time? Can we go there as WOU employees, or just general citizens?
A: Evan/General Counsel will do a detailed training. Short answer is yes/it depends.
8. Where can we find information about the lobbying sessions?
A: Evan is working on communicating out.
9. How do we maximize our campus resource services during summer time to help make revenues?
A: We’re trying to build up conferences, we do a fair amount. We try to bring folks to campus during the academic year too.
10. When Welcome Center was first remodeled, the idea was to do that – what was the decision to move away from that?
A: One stop shop for Business, Financial Aid, Registrars was a greater need.
11. Does WOU proactively plan for wage increases to ensure its employees salaries are keeping pace with inflation?
A: Yes, last year we did a salary equity study for unclassified, and moved about 20 employees pay. Faculty/classified are unions – contractual. We budget for it.
12. What is being done to look at how our funding streams are interconnected? For example how much is general fund propping up Auxiliaries?
A: We’re working on an analysis. Some auxiliaries help support E&G, we do a lot of moving money around between our funds back and forth, and we’re doing an analysis on that to try and reduce the inefficiencies.
13. This 5% cut from the state that we’re looking into, what’s the likelihood of this happening, and what does the timeline look like for this moving forward?
A: Governor has requested all state agencies to do answer what a 5% cut would look like. We’re competing against K-12. We’ve provided a proposal of the impact to the HECC. Some state legislators were not aware we had been asked to do this, lobbying has informed them. They’re gonna meet in February.
Fall 2025 Budget Town Hall – WUC Pacific Room, October 29th 3-5:30pm
