CWU is home to multiple Colleges each with their own programs and achievements. However, not every college receives equal funding. For example the College of Arts & Humanities received a total budget of $14 million for the 2024 financial year, whereas the College of the Sciences had an allocated budget of $23 million. Staff, enrollment and history all play a role in these budgets, but each carries a different amount of weight.
According to Joel Klucking, CWU’s Senior VP Finance & Administration, there are several components that go into planning a college’s yearly budget. “The key factors are how many students [in the program],” Klucking said. “How many student credit hours we expect that college to teach, how many tenured faculty we have, how many students they can teach, and then we calculate how many non tenured faculty are needed, and that creates the budget for faculty.”
However the largest factor by far is faculty, according to Klucking. “Wages and benefits are 92% of the total cost,” Klucking said. “So when you talk about the college budget, it’s mostly people. Faculty and staff.”
It isn’t as simple as picking one thing to be the deciding factor for a college’s budget because every factor affects the others. To a certain extent enrollment in a college or specific department is going to determine that college’s funding, but even with fewer students a college may receive more funding to pay for tenured staff or cost of materials that another college does not have. At the same time, the number of staff in any given department is directly affected by the number of enrolled students.
The College of the Sciences had the highest budget per student with its budget averaging out to $8,735 per student. Following that was the College of Arts and Humanities with $7,968 per student, the College of Business with $7,567 per student and lastly the College of Education with only $6,982 per student.
Under the banner of their respective colleges, department funding can be handled in a number of different ways. “At my level, I’m just giving money to the colleges,” Klucking said. “The four colleges probably operate slightly differently depending on who the dean is. We, in about February… calculate how many students we think are going to show up in the fall. We calculate… how many faculty will be needed, based on some teaching assumptions, and then in February, we decide the college budget. It’s then up to the dean, associate dean, the department head, faculty probably also have input. In some cases, they’re probably coming up from the other perspective saying ‘Here’s what I need to to get my teaching done this year.’ And so those two things have to be reconciled. So for the difference between what they need and what we can provide they then have to make choices.”
According to Klucking, the current funding model differs from those used at CWU in the past, particularly on how it views colleges as more than just a means for profit. “Under the old model, the RCM ABB model, that was one of the big problems,” Klucking said. “That’s what led to the competition, because that particular model sort of forced us to look at programs as profitable or not profitable, and that’s just not that’s not productive. Because we are… a comprehensive institution. You have to have a whole bunch of different programs to make us who we are. And so when you start looking at profitable ones versus non profitable ones, you’re losing sight of what we’re actually here for, right? So in total, the university has to make their budget work.”
