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Vol. 129 NO. 3
October 17, 2024
By the students, for the students
Behind the budgets:
A Q&A with Chief Financial Officer
Joel Klucking
Photo by Trent Meacham, Graphic by Z Morris
Brandon Mattesich Staff Reporter
Q&A edited for length and clarity. Q: How have recent budget cuts affected the colleges and departments across campus? A: I think that every, every single function on campus is affected by the lack of resources because of the enrollment plan. Historically, as a state agency, this is when we would give our employees a cost of living agreement, a cost of living adjustment, you know, 2 or 3% across the board raise. The legislature would fund it because they own the people, they own the buildings. In 2017 they stopped doing that, and they only funded half. So we had to come up with the other half of the cost of living adjustment through tuition increases. Well, that is very different for Central than it is for the University of Washington, that has half their population from out
of state, and the tuition is significantly higher. For us, that 2 or 3% increase in tuition is not enough to cover the 50% [that was cut] and so what that’s done over time is created a significant budget gap for us. When we talk about Central having a structural deficit, it was created by that fund split. Q: I have heard from a few sources that the school used to fund its colleges based on enrollment, meaning the more students a college had the more funding it got. The issue became that there was a competitive quality to it, wherein a professor might try to scout students from other programs to increase funding for their own. At a basic level, is this how the school used to operate? Is this how it still operates? A: [It was] called RCM, Responsibility Center Management, 2018 to 2022. It was replaced by Values Based Budgeting. When we implemented RCM it was our last President’s big thing, and we did it for four years. When we assessed it after four years, I myself and the provost walked to every single academic department and got lots of feedback. There were themes, number one competition. Why in the world would one department try to steal a student away from
Enrollment Headcount Over The Years 12,500 10,758
10,187 9,227
10,000 Enrollment Headcount
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n an interview with The Observer, Joel Klucking, CWU’s Chief Financial Officer, discussed plans for the university’s monetary future as well as how they are dealing with its complicated past. From the relatively new “Values-Based Budgeting” model of funding, to the school’s ongoing struggles with waning enrollment, Klucking laid out CWU’s plans for the financial future of the university.
Graphs by Brandon Mattesich, data from CWU public dashboards
8,418
7,967
7,500
5,000
2,500
0 2019
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another department, or create a gen-ed program that put a writing class in places where they hadn’t historically been? There are a lot of bad things that happened during that time. It wasn’t as bad as I think it’s been described but it was bad enough that we created something much better. So [RCM] could’ve been very good for the colleges, if they were growing and if they were growing faster than the other colleges, they would get a bigger chunk of revenue, right? But it doesn’t feel very good when you say you get all the money but we’re going to take off the overhead first. So me, the president, all of the accounting, human resources, we’re gonna pay for
2021
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those first. And then [the faculty] get what’s left over? Well, they’re the faculty. They’re the reason that we’re all here. I mean, students are why we’re here, but the faculty are the next best reason that we’re here. And so that was just really a hard thing to say. Now, the idea, the theory of Responsibility Center Management, is that the pie grows and everybody does better. At a small school like this, that really wasn’t happening right away.
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