By SUSAN JONES
The state funding bill for Pitt and the other state-related universities finally passed the House and Senate on Nov. 15, but it keeps the amount Pitt, Penn State and Temple will get at the same level they’ve received since 2019.
“We are grateful that lawmakers have chosen to preserve the University of Pittsburgh’s partnership with the state and the in-state tuition discount for our students and families,” Pitt said in a statement. “We appreciate the support of our state leaders and our incredible University community, partners and advocates. As we look ahead to next year’s budget process, we are eager to work with legislators, the administration, and partners at the other state-related universities to find a more sustainable way to fund higher education and serve our students.”
The Senate voted 45-5 to pass the funding bill for the state-related schools. The House voted 149-54 to approve the final bill, and sent it to the governor to sign. In the House, all Democrats voted for the bill, along with 47 Republicans. All lawmakers who represent areas with Pitt campuses voted for the bill, except Republican Eric Nelson, whose district includes Pitt–Greensburg.
In his February budget address, Gov. Josh Shapiro, who signed the funding bill on Nov. 16, had asked for a 7 percent increase for the state-related schools. The bill signed this week will keep Pitt’s share from the state at $151.5 million in general support, plus $3.35 million for rural education outreach. The state-related schools have said repeatedly that all the money they get from the state is used to reduce tuition for in-state students, which at Pitt equals about $16,000 a year per student.
In reality, Pitt, Penn State and Temple will receive less than they did for fiscal year 2022-23. After the legislature passed flat funding for the universities last year, a deal negotiated between then-Gov. Tom Wolf and legislative leadership on the distribution of federal funds from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 brought an extra $30 million to the state-related universities. For Pitt that meant an extra $7.57 million that was distributed as one-time grants to more than 20,000 in-state undergraduate and graduate students across all five campuses — about $350 per student.
Pitt’s Board of Trustees decided in July to go ahead and approve a budget for 2023-24, even though funding from the state was still uncertain. Hari Sastry, Pitt’s chief financial officer, said this week that despite the appropriation falling well short of what the governor had requested, “We are not changing tuition rates for students or salaries for faculty and staff. We will need to manage this shortfall through a broad range of initiatives including streamlining operations, sharing services, emphasizing sustainability and improving productivity through system enhancements.”
The legislature this year did approve an increase of about $3 million each for the other, much smaller state-related schools, Lincoln University, and Penn College of Technology. A group of students from Lincoln, the nation’s first degree-granting historically black college or university, marched 66 miles over three days earlier this month — from campus in Oxford, Pa., to Harrisburg — to demand lawmakers pass the funding bill.
The bill the House sent to the Senate at the beginning of November included the full 7 percent increase requested by Shapiro, but with the proviso that the schools “develop and implement” a tuition freeze for the 2024-25 academic school year. All the schools said that wasn’t feasible. The final bill does not include the tuition freeze language.
“We would love to freeze tuition every year. But we also have increases in costs, and sometimes tuition is part of what we do to resolve that,” Chancellor Joan Gabel said at the Nov. 9 Senate Council meeting. If Pitt had agreed to what the House bill proposed, “we would have a $20 million deficit, give or take, and that's a lot.”
Penn State had earlier said a tuition freeze for next year would effectively result in a $54 million cut.
Pitt has already said in its state budget request for 2024-25, which was submitted in September, that it wants to “partner with our legislators to freeze in-state tuition for 2024-25.” But to do that, the University said it would need a 9.25 percent increase (around $15 million) over the $162.3 million the governor originally proposed for this year.
“Lawmakers always have a lot of competing priorities, but we’re hopeful the legislature will increase its investment in our students, and we look forward to continuing those conversations with the General Assembly as we look at next year,” Pitt said in a statement.
An ongoing issue
Throughout the last 20 years, the state appropriation has become a much smaller portion of the University’s overall budget. In 2003, the appropriation was 13 percent of Pitt’s operating revenue, Sastry said, and for 2023, it is less than 7 percent.
The legislative stalemates and subsequent funding delays, which happened last year too, will become an issue if it continues over time, Gabel said at the Nov. 9 Senate Council meeting. She said this year’s delay has required Sastry “to make decisions, postponing things that we might do otherwise.”
“But because we are strong, we can have those kinds of delays without going into crisis, unlike some of our colleague institutions,” she added. “So we don't have a deficit. We just don't have the ability to do everything we want to do.”
Surprisingly, the nearly five-month delay is not the longest the state-related schools have had to wait for state funding. In 2016, it was nine months into the fiscal year before lawmakers passed the overall state budget, along with the higher education non-preferred appropriation bill.
This year, the governor signed a partial budget bill in August, which released money for public schools, county human services agencies and other programs that rely on state tax dollars. But money for several other programs was delayed until the General Assembly passed fiscal code bills to authorize spending.
The higher education non-preferred appropriation requires a two-thirds majority for approval. Efforts to pass the funding in June in the closely divided House — 102 Democrats and 101 Republicans, at that time — failed to reach the two-thirds threshold. Currently, the House is split evenly again, after Rep. John Galloway (D-Bucks County) stepped down after winning a district court judge seat in the November election.
In October, House Democrats shifted the $643 million the governor requested for the four schools into a grant program in legislation that, they said, required only a simple majority vote. They passed the legislation by 115-88 and sent it to the Republican-controlled Senate, where it went nowhere. Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward (R-Westmoreland), whose district includes Pitt–Greensburg, said in mid-October that the grant program raised constitutional questions.
Transparency bill
The governor this week also signed a bill that would expand what information the state-related universities are required to provide to the state. The Senate unanimously approved the bill, and Rep. Greg Vitali (D-Delaware County) was the only no vote in the House.
Pitt and the other schools have long supported increased transparency. Many items listed in the bill — such as audited financial statements, revenue and expenditures for the year, mean and median salaries by academic rank, and number of employees by academic rank or job classification — are already available on Pitt websites or in the annual Pitt Fact Book.
One of the few items the new law requires that is not already available is the salaries of the top 200 highest-paid employees and faculty salaries reported as a range. Currently, the universities must submit the salaries of all officers and directors on IRS 990 forms (along with a host of other financial information), and the salaries of the top-paid 25 employees who are not on the officers and directors list to the state.
Pitt’s government relations office launched a website last month that compiles all information and reports the University provides to local, state and federal authorities, including Right-to-Know Law disclosures, audited financial reports and annual security reports, along with other information that the University makes publicly available.
The new law also would require reporting contracts of more than $5,000, even though the state-required Stairs Report already includes all purchases of goods and services over $1,000, along with data comparing tuition revenue and other expenses to the previous year. The law also asks the universities to provide annual information on faculty costs and workload, which is already required through the Snyder Report.
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
Have a story idea or news to share? Share it with the University Times.