Can't budget

[ZippyRulz]

https://www.the-daily-record.com/story/news/local/2024/10/22/kent-state-university-ends-fiscal-year-2024-with-9-9-million-deficit/75775385007/

 

Enrollment to level off, Kent campus 'overbuilt' ... who'da thunk it?

 

Edited October 22, 2024 by ZippyRulz

[UA1996MAENG]

On 10/22/2024 at 2:54 PM, ZippyRulz said:

https://www.the-daily-record.com/story/news/local/2024/10/22/kent-state-university-ends-fiscal-year-2024-with-9-9-million-deficit/75775385007/

 

Enrollment to level off, Kent campus 'overbuilt' ... who'da thunk it?

 

KSU enrollment was up this fall, and has been pretty good overall (the all-campus decline is a larger issue that affects many of our public universities). What is our (UA) debt, almost 400 million? (operating deficits and infrastructure investment). Overall, I'm on the side of all of our public universities, except Ohio State, which neither needs nor solicits my support, though I was a graduate student there as well. Kent and Akron both did not get the development and operating support in the 1970s and 1980s when they really needed it. In the current circumstances, KSU and Akron (and 100s of others across the country) are trying to compete with enormous, historically well funded land-grant universities like Ohio State and Michigan and Penn State.  Our "mid-majors" can't compete with very powerful athletics marketing and infrastructure that was put in place a century ago, so they tried and are trying to compete by offering more academic programs and better on-campus facilities (half of UA’s campus and the new engineering building at KSU come to mind).  I can't condemn Kent or UA (Proenza, mostly) for making the effort to expand and improve these universities.  

[ZZZips]

2 hours ago, UA1996MAENG said:

KSU enrollment was up this fall, and has been pretty good overall (the all-campus decline is a larger issue that affects many of our public universities). What is our (UA) debt, almost 400 million? (operating deficits and infrastructure investment). Overall, I'm on the side of all of our public universities, except Ohio State, which neither needs nor solicits my support, though I was a graduate student there as well. Kent and Akron both did not get the development and operating support in the 1970s and 1980s when they really needed it. In the current circumstances, KSU and Akron (and 100s of others across the country) are trying to compete with enormous, historically well funded land-grant universities like Ohio State and Michigan and Penn State.  Our "mid-majors" can't compete with very powerful athletics marketing and infrastructure that was put in place a century ago, so they tried and are trying to compete by offering more academic programs and better on-campus facilities (half of UA’s campus and the new engineering building at KSU come to mind).  I can't condemn Kent or UA (Proenza, mostly) for making the effort to expand and improve these universities.  

Not disagreeing with your overall argument but Michigan is not land grant university. 

[UA1996MAENG]

7 minutes ago, ZZZips said:

Not disagreeing with your overall argument but Michigan is not land grant university. 

Not techncally, but it is the flagship university in the state, which is de facto protection from the circumstances that the "regular folk" experience.

[Hilltopper]

4 hours ago, UA1996MAENG said:

KSU enrollment was up this fall, and has been pretty good overall (the all-campus decline is a larger issue that affects many of our public universities). What is our (UA) debt, almost 400 million? (operating deficits and infrastructure investment). Overall, I'm on the side of all of our public universities, except Ohio State, which neither needs nor solicits my support, though I was a graduate student there as well. Kent and Akron both did not get the development and operating support in the 1970s and 1980s when they really needed it. In the current circumstances, KSU and Akron (and 100s of others across the country) are trying to compete with enormous, historically well funded land-grant universities like Ohio State and Michigan and Penn State.  Our "mid-majors" can't compete with very powerful athletics marketing and infrastructure that was put in place a century ago, so they tried and are trying to compete by offering more academic programs and better on-campus facilities (half of UA’s campus and the new engineering building at KSU come to mind).  I can't condemn Kent or UA (Proenza, mostly) for making the effort to expand and improve these universities.  

Everything was fine with athletics at the mid majors until the injection of big sums of money generated by cable TV. Then it became an arms race they had no chance of winning. Once the folks down on the farm were able to watch top notch competition for free on TV, why would they continue to support the local college? NIL and free agency will be the final nail in the coffin for the MAC and their ilk getting any notoriety on a national level. All that's going on right now in football is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I can hear the band playing.

[UA1996MAENG]

21 minutes ago, Hilltopper said:

Everything was fine with athletics at the mid majors until the injection of big sums of money generated by cable TV. Then it became an arms race they had no chance of winning. Once the folks down on the farm were able to watch top notch competition for free on TV, why would they continue to support the local college? NIL and free agency will be the final nail in the coffin for the MAC and their ilk getting any notoriety on a national level. All that's going on right now in football is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I can hear the band playing.

Yes, exactly.  I simply do not see where the money will come from that would be sufficent just to "exist". With the Power4 moving toward a model in which they play more and more conference games (certainly a requirement of ESPN and the other media entities), each MAC athletic department will see a loss of 2, 3 million or more dollars a year.  I'm not sure where they make that loss up. 

[zip-O-matic]

On 12/6/2024 at 11:58 AM, ZZZips said:

Not disagreeing with your overall argument but Michigan is not land grant university. 

 

Michigan and Indiana are unique in this part of the country in that the states split the traditional Arts & Sciences flagship from the Land Grant University with both schools becoming prominent, though there's a clear hierarchy in Michigan.  Other states (Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota) combined the two roles into a single university.  California did the same thing, and it surprises some people that Berkeley is a land grant university.