Public and community colleges to ask for $40M
State public universities and community colleges, which do not include the University of Massachusetts, are preparing to ask Gov. Charlie Baker for roughly $40 million in additional funding in next year's state budget, a boost in spending that would dwarf the increases of this year.
Separately, the Department of Higher Education is also poised to seek a 2 percent increase, or $2.6 million, in the fiscal 2018 budget to support the agency's "Big Three" plan to increase access to college, improve completion rates and close achievement gaps.
"The demand for assistance to low and moderate income students has increased while the cost of attending college has risen," the budget request proposal states.
The department's strategy to make college more affordable includes a preliminary request for $1.1 million in additional funding for financial aid, representing a 1 percent increase.
As Baker begins assembling a fiscal 2018 budget proposal due in late January, agencies across state government are preparing budget requests. Budget officials do not yet know how much additional revenue might be available for spending in the new year that begins in July, but in this year's budget the governor's team has been tracking slow-growing revenues and spending pressures from areas like MassHealth that created an early $294 million hole.
A fiscal affairs subcommittee of the Board of Higher Education plans to meet Tuesday in Boston to review and vote on the fiscal 2018 budget recommendations. The full board meets Dec. 6 to ratify the report before it will be referred to Education Secretary Jim Peyser.
According to a copy of the budget request, the Board of Higher Education is also expected to request an additional $450,000 for a dual-enrollment program that allows Massachusetts high school students to take free or reduced-cost college-level courses and earn credit toward their high school and college diplomas, and a $1.5 million increase for the performance incentive fund.
The Performance Incentive Fund, created to improve degree production and meet the needs of the workforce, was funded at $2.75 million this budget cycle, which was down from $7.5 million in fiscal 2014. The department plans to ask for $4.25 million in next year's budget, according to the draft recommendation.
Not counting UMass, the state's higher education system includes nine state universities and 15 community colleges.
The draft budget recommendations call for $20 million in additional spending on university campuses in fiscal 2018 and $20 million for community colleges. Those increases include carried-over collective bargaining costs that weren't fully funded in fiscal 2017 and the inclusion of funding through the performance-based formula for public higher education institutions that had been carried on the department's books.
The formula funding included in the recommendation is double what the universities and community colleges are receiving in fiscal 2017.
The boost for the universities would amount to an 8.1 percent increase over fiscal 2017 when they saw a more modest 1 percent increase in their collective budgets, according to the draft recommendation.
The board is also expected to recommend a 7 percent, or $20 million increase, for community colleges after they saw their total available funding increase by just 2 percent in fiscal 2017.
The campus requests total $37.4 million to finance unfunded collective bargaining costs for fiscal 2017 and the estimated cost in fiscal 2018.
"The full funding of collective bargaining costs for both the state universities and community colleges is critical to maintaining affordability for our students and is not a component of the additional investment requested to be allocated through the respective performance-based funding formulas," the budget report states.
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