Chancellor works hard; so do the rest

Lately, there's been a lot of chatter on campus regarding what many students usually regard as a pretty dull topic: our budget.

CU-Boulder just announced that they'll need to hike their in-state tuition by a whopping 15.7 percent next year.

The main reason for the jump is simple: Funding for higher education from the state government has been on a steady decline.

Since individual income taxes account for 65 percent of our state's budget, the Great Recession creates a double-whammy: Less income tax goes to the state because there's less money going around across the board.

Last year, UCCS tuition went up by about 7 percent, one of the lowest of all four-year public universities in the state. Although figures haven't been officially released for the next academic year, several vice-chancellors indicated they expect that 7 percent figure again this year ‒ less than half the jump at Boulder.

This amazing fact is a real credit to our skilled administrators who have endeavored to reduce our costs and increase enrollment while raising other, more non-traditional sources of revenue. The huge increase in conferences and weddings over the past several years is a great example of our entrepreneurship: Why let our conference rooms and dormitories sit empty over the summer when we could be making money off of them?

But even just a 7 percent increase is 7 percent more than we'd like, and with tuition going up year-after-year with no end in sight, is it only a matter of time before our public universities become private ones?

Part of last year's increase went to fund a special salary pool voted in place by the CU Regents to give professional staff and faculty members up to 3 percent raises based on their performance reviews, as well as one-time bonuses for classified staff members.

This was a great idea because salaries had been frozen for years to help cut costs while we waited to crawl out of the recession.

Most everyone agrees that a small raise right now is a "good thing." The controversy lies in the raises that were given to our top administrators ‒ particularly the chancellors and vice-chancellors. In most cases, their salaries went up way more than 3 percent.

Chancellor Pam Shockley-Zalabak, for example, saw her salary jump by $24,878 or 10 percent.

"I've got to pay for good people," CU President Bruce Benson told the Boulder Daily Camera last month.

This is absolutely true ‒ but if Benson truthfully agreed with that statement, why were the chancellors' raises so disproportionately larger than the rest of their employees?

During a time when many students our age are sympathetic to the Occupy Wall Street movements and are appalled by growing income disparities, we think the CU system has taken a pretty bold risk here.

We're not trying to argue that Chancellor Shockley-Zalabak didn't deserve her $24,878 raise. She's a shrewd, hard-working, accomplished leader at this campus, and someone that we can all really look up to. But there are many other hard-working, accomplished people on this campus who deserve to share in her credit for helping this campus to grow and thrive as much as it has.

In the next couple of months, our Board of Regents will be asked to raise tuition at all four CU campuses again, and they'll be asked to approve another salary pool to fund raises. It is our hope that the Board will look a little more closely at the budgets and study their full implications before casting their votes.