Budget task force focusing on fiscal priorities

The Budget Planning Task Force (BPTF), which is advising the chancellor on responses to the ongoing financial crisis, has reorganized to focus on three key areas: cost savings, entrepreneurial activities, and financial aid and fees.

Task force chair John McCarthy, Linguistics, said the three subcommittees reflect fiscal priorities previously identified by Chancellor Robert C. Holub.

McCarthy said the Cost Savings Subcommittee, chaired by Robert Pollin, Economics, is charged with discussing plans for reducing expenses. The Entrepreneurial Activities Subcommittee, chaired by W. Richards Adrion, Computer Science, and Joseph Goldstein, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, is reviewing the campus’s initiatives to increase revenue through online courses, five-year B.S./M.S. programs and other related activities. The Financial Aid and Fees Subcommittee, chaired by Carol Barr, Isenberg School of Management, and Julie Hayes, Languages, Literatures and Cultures, is studying the campus’s financial aid formula and the possibility of differential fees for certain programs.

The chairs of the subcommittees constitute the BPTF’s Steering Committee, which sets the task force’s agenda. Also on the steering committee are McCarthy, Faculty Senate secretary Ernest May, Music and Dance, and Randall Phillis, Biology, the president of the Massachusetts Society of Professors.

Now in its second of year of operation, the BPTF includes representatives of the faculty, staff and student government.

McCarthy said many of the BPTF’s previous recommendations have been or are now being implemented, including:

• A substantial fee increase coupled with changes in financial aid formulas to protect the poorest students from this increase and to mitigate its effects on middle-income students.

• Increased out-of-state enrollment, with measures to improve the yield on admissions offers to out-of-state applicants.

• More online courses offered through Continuing and Professional Education, with a better incentive structure for units providing these courses.

• Improvements in recovery of indirect costs on grants.

• A more effective development program.

• Reductions in capital expenditures, maintenance and administrative costs.

November 12, 2009.

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