Grundy Reporter

Illinois State Senate Committee on the Budget met Oct. 12.

Here are the minutes provided by the committee:

Present: Chair Michael LeRoy, Yulanda Curtis, Durae Fletcher, Marius Junge, Nolan Schneider, Peter Silhan, Garrett Vandermyde, Vicky Gress (ex officio)

Absent: Anustup Basu

Guest: Shelley Campbell, Senior Assistant Dean of Administration, Gies College of Business;

Gina Oleynichak, Director of Budget, and Resource Planning

I. Call To Order

A regular meeting of the Senate Committee on Budget (BG) was called to order at 9:00 am with Chair LeRoy presiding.

II. Approval of Minutes

The minutes of the September 28, 2022, meeting was approved as distributed by roll call vote.

Yes: Curtis, Fletcher, Junge, LeRoy, Schneider, Silhan, Vandermyde

No: None

Abstain: None

III. Public Comment

No requests received.

IV. Chair’s Remarks

Chair LeRoy thanked the guests for attending the meeting.

V. Office of the Provost Update

Gress shared the following:

• A $50 Million Strategic Faculty Hiring Initiative was announced aimed at tenure track faculty. The initiative will be for the next five years or until the money runs out. Colleges will have the ability to make a second hire on already approved searches. If they have identified two outstanding candidates, they can contact the Office of the Provost for approval. They will have a choice of getting non-recurring salary funding on a three- or five-year basis depending on the rank of the faculty member or startup funding.

• Operational excellence initiative is continuing to move forward. Human Resources and Information Technology will be working with Huron Consulting Group.

VI. Old Business

BG.19.01, Senate Committee on the Budget Survey

The committee discussed possibly revising the survey to target Budget Officers.

VII. New Business

BG.23.02, Shelley Campbell, Senior Assistant Dean of Administration, Gies College of Business; Gina Oleynichak, Director of Budget, and Resource Planning, Gies College of Business

Campbell and Oleynichak shared the following information:

Background

Gies College of Business

• 3 Academic Departments

– Accountancy

– Business Administration

– Finance

• Academic Programs

– 8 undergraduate majors

– two minors

– suite of master programs both online and residential

• Unique factors to most other Colleges

– Academic program curriculums are highly integrated

– Undergraduates admitted as undeclared, select major as sophmore

– Market Brand is Gies Business, not individual units/programs

– Robust centralized support services

• Recruiting, Marketing, Graduate Admissions

• Teaching and Learning

• Student Corporate Partnerships & Experiential Learning

• IBC, Disruption Lab, Undergraduate Affairs

– Collaborative effort required to support academic programs

Budgeting Strategy

“Business on Purpose”

Extensive collaborative effort to identify college mission, and define priorities, values, and commitments

Access to education

Excellence in Scholarship and Teaching

Innovation around new ways to do business and to teach Inclusion and Lifelong Engagement

These priorities are communicated frequently and consistently

All resources are distributed in alignment with priorities (dollars, staff, faculty, space, etc.)

Budgeting Strategy

• College budget considers all revenue sources

– IVCB allocation and gift revenues

• High level reports

– Current year college budget

– 5-year forecast

– Wealth Balance Sheet

• IVCB is not implemented at unit level

FY22 Gies Total Operating Budget

Gift/Endowment – 23%

Self-Supporting – 2%

Institutional – 1%

State – 74%

FY22 Current Year Operating Budget $117.7M

Total Operating Budget (including reserves) $178.9M

Tuition Revenue by Type

FY20 (First Year of IVCB) and FY23 (Current Year)

Budget Development Process

Communication is key

• We work closely and frequently with academic program leads.

• Revenue and spending projections are vital in our planning, both short and long term.

We rely on our revenues

• Graduate and Online Tuition Revenues make up almost 57% of our State IVCB

Budget.

• We rely heavily on the accuracy of the enrollment projections provided by our Residential and Online program teams.

• Each Fall we set net revenue targets for the Residential and Online programs for the upcoming year.

• Units are held accountable for meeting their targets.

Collection of proposed spending budgets

UEO’s and Chief administrators participate in the annual strategic planning process which mirrors the campus guidance.

Together with the Department Advisory Committees, they define and propose their unit personnel and operational budget to include:

• Detailed faculty hiring plans

• Personnel is held steady at approved FTE’s taking into consideration any retirements or vacancies that will not be replaced

• Changes in activities from previous year that impact budget

• Review operations to ensure alignment with strategic priorities – share plans to sunset any activities that are no longer aligned

College Budget office synthesizes data to arrive at preliminary baseline college wide budget

Strategic Spend Requests

Units can also propose “Strategic Spend requests” which can be for

• operational needs (shoring up current approved operational activities with staff or operational budget)

• new initiative (new reputation enhancing or revenue generating idea that aligns with strategic priorities)

Leadership team evaluates submissions, seeks additional information from units where needed

Requests are tiered, and implementation costs defined;

Final decision on total investment level is made by Dean Brown

Annual Strategic Spend Request Process

• In the FY23 Annual Budget process, we received 55 Strategic Spend requests totaling $4.5M

• College leadership collectively approved 15 of the requests totaling $2.9M to be offset by ~$650K from 2 requests that were expected to be revenue generating

Final Budgets

• Once finalized units are expected to work within their annual budget and identify ways to modify spending to avoid incurring deficits

• To the extent there are one-off requests mid-year of a critical nature, they are reviewed and decided by Senior College Leadership with input from relevant parties as needed.

• The College sets aside planned budget for approved hiring, providing funding to units once hire is made; Unit always has flexibility to access those dollars for hourly support until hire is made

Collaboration and Transparency

• Collaborative in development process

• Transparency in budget planning process, allocations and hiring approvals across college

• Communicate budget information frequently

• UEOs and chief administrators are aware of the drivers to the campus model and the utility of various fund sources. We work together to apply operational expense to gift funds where possible to minimize our IVCB modified base.

• We communicate successes as shared by us all given collaborative effort required to achieve most of our goals.

Challenges and Successes

Challenges

– Model/strategy encourages innovation, growth – difficult to keep up with structure to support (capacity in faculty, staff, IT, marketing etc.)

– Graduate revenue MOUs with other colleges

– While IVCB is transparent, not simple. Steep learning curve. Succession planning in key roles is critical

Successes

• IVCB in general

– Drivers are clearly known, and helps with decision making and improved financial planning

– Provides campus transparency on investment and shared contribution to the mission

– Emphasizes importance of raising and utilizing gift dollars to support operations

Successes of our budget model

– Ability to focus resources on shared priorities

• Research enterprise

– Provided opportunity to hire faculty (40% growth since FY 16)

– Expanded investment to support research – data sets, lab support, internal research grants, analytics support, fellowships, post docs

• Academic Programming

– Expanded access thru undergraduate scholarship, increased from 2M in 2017 to 4.9M in FY 22

– Ability to invest in new opportunities – Online programs

College Growth

Learner               Faculty              Staff

2015-16: 4186    2015-16: 145    2015-16: 145

2021-22: 9461    2021-22: 202    2021-22: 233

Change + 5275   Change + 57    Change + 88

Future Topics of Discussion

No discussion.

VIII. Adjournment

The meeting was adjourned at 10:00 am.

https://uofi.app.box.com/v/Budget/file/1062005551878