Prioritizing compensation: CSU's budget calls for 4% tuition hike, 5% raise for employees

While faculty, staff and graduate student workers were gathering Thursday outside Lory Student Center to rally for better pay without increasing tuition, Colorado State University administrators were justifying their plans to do just that at a nearby meeting of its governing board.

A formal vote and likely approval of CSU’s proposed $1.44 billion budget for the 2023-24 school year won’t come until the CSU System Board or Governors next meeting June 7-9 at the Spur campus in Denver.

But the 4% tuition hike for undergraduate students and 3% hike for graduate students isn’t likely to change before that vote, nor is the plan for a 5% increase in compensation for the university’s administrative professionals and faculty, tenured and nontenured.

That matches the expected 5% increase from the Colorado General Assembly for state classified employees, including those who work at CSU in a variety of roles.

The University of Colorado’s Board of Regents recently approved a budget for its main campus in Boulder earlier this month with a 4% increase in tuition for incoming students to help fund a 5% raise in compensation. CU has fixed-rate tuition, guaranteeing undergraduate students the same rate for four years.

“CSU has an almost $1.5 billion budget, and you should be able to find ways to pay our faculty and staff well without raising tuition or pitting faculty against students, essentially,” faculty member Mary Van Buren told the Board of Governors during public comment Thursday morning at the start of its two-day meeting at the C. Wayne McIlwraith Translational Medicine Institute on the campus of the university’s veterinary teaching hospital.

Van Buren and others later spoke at the rally, organized by the CSU chapter of the American Union of University Professors, of which she is president, along with the Graduate Workers Organizing Cooperative and Colorado Workers for Innovative and New Solutions.

About 120 people, many holding signs demanding better pay, were on hand to listen to fellow employees discuss some of the hardships they face, from high housing costs to rates of inflation that have been consistently higher than their annual pay increases.

There are ways other than tuition increases to come up with additional money to increase compensation, CSU System Chancellor Tony Frank explained to the board. But each has significant pitfalls and would require the governing board to either make across-the-board cuts to the budgets of each of its individual units or to get involved in discussing line-item operational budgets within its various colleges and other units.

Individual units often reallocate the resources within their budgets, Frank said. And some units chose to put more money toward employee compensation within their own departments last year to supplement the across-the-board increases in the overall budget, said Brendan Hanlon, vice president for operations and chief financial officer for the Fort Collins campus.

“That’s a more operational realignment of resources to meet the needs of the day and probably not so much a strategic activity for the Board of Governors,” Frank said.

More: CSU community asks: Why do pay raises have to come from tuition increases? Tony Frank answers

The CSU-Fort Collins tuition increases are $396 a year for in-state undergraduate students, $1,194 for out-of-state undergraduates, $325 a year for in-state graduate students and $797 a year for out-of-state graduate students.

Those increases are projected to bring in an additional $24.5 million that will cover most of the additional $27.5 million budgeted for faculty and staff compensation. It’s the largest item on the incremental budget — an increase from the previous year — at $39.9 million, CSU-Fort Collins President Amy Parsons told the board.

Additional money is also being budgeted to raise the minimum pay for all administrative professionals and faculty to $50,000 and to eliminate student fees for graduate student workers.

“This is a budget that prioritizes compensation,” Parsons said.

Parsons also pointed out that financial aid is being increased to ensure that the university’s lowest-income students will not be impacted by the tuition increase.

Parsons says CSU to test alternative budgeting method

Parsons, who took office Feb. 1, brought in a consultant last month to discuss alternative models to the incremental budgeting CSU now uses and said she and others responsible for budget construction on the Fort Collins campus plan to select the best alternative and test it out next year alongside its incremental budget for 2024-25. That will allow the university’s administration and Board of Governors to compare the two side-by-side and decide which model to use moving forward, she said.

“Restructuring the budget sounds really good; I hope it works out for our workers and our students,” assistant professor of music John Pippen said at the rally. “But we also, I think, need a bigger fundamental shift in how we think about funding public institutions in our state.”

Some graduate student workers, who receive monthly stipends as low as $1,796, told the Coloradoan that besides holding second jobs, many of their colleagues are making regular visits to the food bank and selling blood plasma to cover living expenses.

More: CSU students fight proposed tuition increase, citing concerns about diversity, retention

Bee Leung, a doctoral student in atmospheric science, told the board that the minimum stipend is more than $1,000 per month below what the Colorado Center on Law and Policy considers the minimum income requirement for a single adult living in Larimer County. Leung and other international students like her cannot take second jobs in the United States under terms of their student visas.

“It’s not acceptable,” she said. “There is no reason why I, or any other graduate worker who are doing good work for this university, who are doing a lot of teaching work and a lot of research work that make this university excellent, should be struggling to pay our rent or buy our groceries, especially when we’re in a building like this.”

Construction costs of the McIlwraith Translational Medicine Institute, completed in 2019, were paid primarily through private donations of more than $65 million.

John Kitchens, a nontenure-track faculty member, said he and his colleagues, who teach more than two-thirds of the required classes for undergraduate students, deserve “a sustainable wage."

“It’s not just grad students; it’s faculty,” he said. “Many of us work second jobs during the school year to get by. We suffer food insecurity, transportation insecurity. No, I’m not going to starve to death, but every fourth week of the month, I am starving. … I’m taking part in intermittent fasting not because it’s a fad but because every fourth week of the month I’m broke, so I eat one meal a day.”

Board chair Kim Jordan assured the workers that the board heard and understood their concerns and thanked them for sharing them.

Frank later did so, as well, while reminding the board that budget construction requires balancing the university’s resources with its priorities.

“If it were available to us as a balanced budget, no one would want to increase tuition, and we’d like to give cost-of-living plus merit-based (pay) increases,” Frank said. “We don’t say that very often, probably not as often as we ought to.

“That’s common ground; there’s no argument about that. So when you hear people say, 'We wish tuition would be held lower, we wish compensation was higher,' that’s a wish that’s shared across, as far as I know, everybody who’s involved with our budget processes on our campuses within our system. …

“We see it from a global institutional perspective. The individuals we heard from this morning are very much feeling that frustration, and they have a passion that they want to express around that, and that’s real. There are people from this environment that, despite all the data and despite everything, and despite our common ground, are hurting.”

Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, some sports and other topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com, twitter.com/KellyLyell or facebook.com/KellyLyell.news. 

This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: CSU's 2023-24 budget calls for 4% tuition hike, 5% raise for employees