One of the most complicating elements of planning for your return to campus at some time in the future is to deliver great online and remote learning while being ready to pivot with little notice to the full on-campus experience that the vast majority of our students and faculty desire.
To have this option means we must be prepared to keep campus offices, the library, our career services, our student health center, campus ministry, dining services, and many other offices and services open. In addition, we plan to have one of the most robust COVID-19 testing, daily temperature checking and campus cleaning protocols in the country. All of these will require staffing, resources and money to run.
It is important to remember that tuition pays for only 70% of the costs of a student’s education.
The university receives the remaining 30% through philanthropic support, funding from our endowment, auxiliary services such as room and board, rentals, camps and attendance at events.
To help us prepare for the fall and to keep our campus as safe as possible, we have limited access to our campus from outside visitors. We have stopped renting our facilities to outside groups, and we decided not to rent any of our housing units or facilities for summer camps.
We will continue to implement these same policies for the rest of the academic year.
The negative financial impact of the pandemic on the university for the spring semester alone was in excess of $17 million, and we are projecting that the impact on the current academic year will exceed $40 million.
In addition, our endowment has decreased in value by more than $50 million since the beginning of the current economic downturn. We have no plans to pass these additional expenses on to the students.
We have proactively initiated significant cuts to our budgets and spending while trying to preserve the jobs and health benefits for our employees. Our academic and administrative leadership have voluntarily reduced their own salaries between 5-15%, and all employees had their retirement contributions cut in half for the foreseeable future. Every employee will also forgo any salary increases for this academic year. We are taking aggressive steps to lower costs while also accelerating our fundraising efforts to support both need-based and merit-based financial aid for students.
We are investing in technology in the classrooms to ensure the hybrid model delivers on our commitment to academic excellence. This summer, more than 350 of our faculty enrolled in training courses on delivering the highest-quality educational experience grounded in the Catholic intellectual tradition, regardless of the delivery mode. We have also eliminated a number of fees, including instituting no parking fees for the fall semester.
Finally, we have continued to invest in our campus infrastructure, and will do so for the foreseeable future. This includes the opening of a new Learning Commons on campus in August, which is completely dedicated to offering the latest classroom instruction, and we will also reopen the Copley Library, which was completely redesigned as a 21st century information hub on campus. This next year, we will also renovate Camino, Founders and Sacred Heart Halls, and by next spring, we will break ground on the new Knauss Center for Business Education, which will be open in 2022.
Most importantly, rather than cutting back on our faculty resources during this time, we will maintain the low faculty-to student ratio that is the hallmark of a USD education. We will also be welcoming 11 stellar new faculty to our ranks next month to join what we believe is amongst the best teaching faculty in America.
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