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Introduction

Over the past seven months, the College of Arts and Sciences has been engaged in designing an allocation methodology, or budget model, to define the distribution of college funds among the three divisions of Arts and Humanities, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and the college administration. The campus budget model, based on Net Tuition Revenue (NTR), is currently in its fourth year of operation, and other colleges have implemented its allocation methods. Three years ago, Provost Russell Moore instructed A&S to create its own budget model, and in appointing Interim Dean Daryl Maeda in July 2024, charged him with creating a budget model through a transparent process.

The goals of the budget model design are to ensure that the college’s finances support the college mission, respond to current needs and potential growth and provide predictability for the future.

The design process has featured extensive engagement with the college community, including:

• Three open town halls
• Monthly meetings with the Arts and Sciences Faculty Senate (ASFS) and A&S Leadership Team
• Multiple meetings with ASFS Budget Committee and Staff Advisory Committee
• Weekly meetings since January 2025 with a shared governance group representing ASFS, Staff Advisory Committee and the three divisional councils
• Weekly email updates, all posted to the faculty-staff website
• A webform that has garnered nearly 100 comments and contributions

Budget Model Framework

In December 2024, the four deans agreed on a budget model framework (referred to as Scenario C), in which 1) Net Tuition Revenue from the campus flows to the college, 2) funds for the central college administration and a supplemental fund are taken off the top, with divisions receiving their remaining NTR and 3) supplemental funds are distributed to divisions in a manner that was yet to be determined.

The two off-the-top deductions in the budget framework cover college administration costs and a supplemental fund.

College Administration

College administration is composed of common goods and shared services. The largest common goods unit is the Student Success team, which includes the Academic Advising Center, academic and curricular affairs and recruitment and scholarships. Other common goods include interdisciplinary centers that report to the college and the Research Support Office, as well as two public-facing entities: the Colorado Shakespeare Festival and the Buffalo Bicycle Classic. Shared services include budget and finance, the Financial Service Center, HR, Faculty Success, communications, infrastructure and Access and Community Engagement.

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The administration includes 177 FTE, distributed as shown above, with a budget of $24.8M, (11.05%) of college NTR. Most expenditures in the college administration lie within the student-success organization. Budget-design discussions on the level of support for the administration of the college revealed mixed perspectives on whether it is the right size, should be reduced or increased. Arguments for reduction centered on not seeing the value that the administration adds as proportionate to its costs, while arguments for bolstering were based on desiring greater levels of service from shared service units and appreciating the student success functions of the shared goods. At the Feb. 19 A&S budget open forum, Provost Moore stated that he strongly disfavored reducing the allocation to the college administration, calling 11% “the floor” for funding the college administration and using the phrase “running on fumes” to describe how leanly A&S runs in comparison to other CU ����Vlog�ƽ�� colleges.

In the budget model, NTR generated by units within the college administration is donated to the overall college NTR pool for distribution, rather than being attributed to the college administration. This $5.4M is distributed among the divisions according to their percentage of NTR generation, thus adding $1.2M to AHUM, $3.2M to NSCI, and $1.0M to SSCI.

Supplemental Fund

The college-wide consensus to reserve funds for supplementation represents a departure from a pure NTR model and was implemented to actualize the belief that the value of a liberal arts education cannot be measured purely in NTR terms. Instead, the existence of the supplement affirms and supports areas that are essential but require additional sustenance.

Extensive discussions across the college revealed widespread agreement that the budget model should ensure that the college can deliver on its mission to provide a high-quality liberal arts education for all students. However, feedback on the principles and accompanying metrics that should underlie that high-level goal varied widely. Several major themes emerged as ways to advance a high-quality liberal arts education:

1. Teaching small classes in which faculty can closely guide and mentor students
2. Ensuring that departments can provide the classes their students need to graduate
3. Offering experiential learning and research opportunities to students
4. Preserving curricular diversity
5. Balancing staff and faculty workloads across divisions

Extensive data dating back to 2011 were distributed to the representatives of shared governance groups. These data include staff, faculty, undergraduate and graduate student headcounts; student credit hour production; majors and minors; and instructional expenditures.

No single datapoint can adequately capture the complexities of an enterprise as large and diverse as the College of Arts and Sciences. Indeed, information from the same dataset can be used to support vastly different data stories.

Data for Consideration

Majors

One of the clearest datapoints revolves around large-scale changes in student demand across the divisions of the college. From 2011 to 2023, majors in AHUM decreased from 4,557 to 2,211 (-51.5%), and in SSCI from 4,189 to 3,331 (-20.5%), while majors in NSCI increased from 7,853 to 9,678 (+23.2%).

In 2011, AHUM and SSCI majors composed roughly one-quarter apiece of the total A&S majors, while NSCI majors made up slightly less than half of the total. By contrast, in 2023, AHUM represented 14% of majors, SSCI stood at 22% and NSCI majors made up nearly two-thirds of the college total (64%)

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Student Credit Hours

Undergraduate Student Credit Hour (SCH) production remained more consistent than majors across the divisions but followed the same pattern of increases in NSCI and decreases in AHUM and SSCI.

From 2011 to 2023, SCH production rose by 15.9% in NSCI and fell by 22.4% in AHUM and 17.6% in SSCI. SCH distribution across the college shifted from 35% AHUM, 42% NSCI, 23% SSCI to 29% AHUM, 51% NSCI, 20% SSCI.

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Faculty Ratios

Whether calculating the SCH-to-faculty ratio using Tenure-Tenure Track (TTT) only or TTT and Teaching Professors (TP) together, the same rough patterns emerge. SCH per faculty increased in NSCI and decreased in SSCI. For AHUM, SCH per TTT has increased, while SCH per TTT+TP remained relatively constant.

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Major Ratios

When evaluation the Majors-to-Faculty ratio, the same patterns pertain regardless of whether calculating the ratio for TTT or TTT+TP. In both cases, majors per faculty fell in AHUM (due to the significant drop in number of majors) and also decreased in SSCI, though to a less dramatic extent. Meanwhile, majors per faculty increased in NSCI.

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Staff Ratios

Faculty-to-Staff and Majors-to-Staff ratios can serve as rough—though far from perfect—approximations of workload, because staff must support both faculty and students. Long-term patterns in the number of faculty whom staff support on a per capita basis are difficult to ascertain due to fluctuations in the data and differences when defining faculty as TTT or TTT+TP. However, the data are presented below.

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In contrast to the messiness of the Faculty-to-Staff ratios, the pattern in Majors-to-Staff ratios is more apparent. Over time, staff in AHUM and SSCI are supporting fewer majors per capita, though SSCI staff continue to support the largest number of majors in any division, while NSCI staff are supporting a relatively constant number of majors per capita.

Instructional Expenditures

Faculty cost per SCH has fallen across all three divisions (with expenditures adjusted for inflation to 2021 dollars), though not evenly. Both AHUM and NSCI costs fell by around 10%, while SSCI costs were reduced by 6.3%.

Faculty Cost per SCH

Table 1

Discussion

As the data above show, there are many ways to conceive of the college budget and how it should be allocated. Recall the college feedback on principles that should underlie the budget (page 2).

The foundational principle that the budget should ensure that the college can deliver a high-quality liberal arts education to all students leads to the conclusion that divisions must have resources to teach their students in pedagogically effective ways. Some suggested measures of pedagogical soundness include students’ access to the classes they need to graduate, small classes and research and experiential learning opportunities.

• Ensuring that students have the classes they need to graduate points toward metrics such as Majors-to-Faculty ratio and SCH-to-Faculty ratios, because divisions with high ratios will be more stretched to provide enough classes.
• Creating the conditions under which students can take small classes cuts two ways. One argument would be to take steps to reduce Majors-to-Faculty and SCH-to-Faculty in divisions with high ratios, so that faculty could teach smaller classes. This would have the effect of raising those same ratios in other divisions. Conversely, the opposite argument would be to keep Majors-to-Faculty and SCH-to-Faculty low in divisions with low ratios to allow them to continue to offer small classes. The effect of doing so would be to lock divisions with high ratios into conditions that require them to continue teaching large classes. The fairest solution would be to devote resources in ways that support bringing those ratios into more even balance across divisions.
• Decreasing Major-to-Faculty and SCH-to-Faculty ratios in divisions would enable faculty to provide more research and experiential learning opportunities.

The principle of preserving curricular diversity requires maintaining levels of current funding to prevent programs from having to be combined or discontinued. To enact this principle, funding should not be reduced in any division. Conversely, balancing staff and faculty workloads across divisions requires attending to metrics including Faculty-to-Staff, Majors-to-Faculty and SCH-to-Faculty ratios and shifting funds to enable closing divisional gaps.

All of the conditions above cannot be satisfied simultaneously. Instead, the budget model must manage the tensions inherent among the stated principles to the best extent possible.

The following table lists four possible ways of approaching the distribution of NTR among the divisions. These heuristics are not actual proposals or recommendations but instead are created to invite comparisons.

Heuristics for Distributing NTR (based on FY25 budget)*

Table 2

(*) Percentages in this table represent each division’s share of the total college NTR after college administration is deducted. In the FY2025 budget, that figure is $199,400,283.

These heuristics generate divergent budgets for all three divisions, but especially so for AHUM because of the stark contrast between AHUM’s proportion of total college majors vs. proportion of total college SCH. They illustrate the point that no single metric can adequately drive the budget model without severely impacting operations. Instead, the budget model must respond directionally to changes in the college over the past decade and a half, current conditions and recent trends.

Recall that majors and SCH declined in AHUM and SSCI and increased in NSCI since 2011 (Figs. 3 and 5). However, these trends flattened out after 2021 (post-COVID), which provides a glimmer of hope that conditions may be stabilizing.

Implementation

The budget model will be implemented for FY26 with a check-in scheduled�� in the third year. To ensure that budgetary changes unfold at a rate that allows for strategic thought and design within all divisions, temporary funds will be used over a six-year period to buffer decreases to any division.

• Divisions whose share of the budget is increased by the model will receive their new, larger allocation in year one.
• Divisions whose share of the budget is decreased by the model will receive their new, reduced allocation in year one. However, the college will buffer* the decrease by providing temporary funds that ramp down linearly over six years according to the following schedule:

Table 3

*The size of the buffer for each division will be calculated in dollars as the difference between the division’s FY25 actual budget minus the division’s FY25 budget model allocation.

The deans will monitor the budgets of all divisions throughout the implementation process and will correct course if necessary. In the third year, they will assess how well the budget is fulfilling its purposes.

In addition, the college commits to collaborating with divisions on initiatives that promote interdisciplinary work or show great promise to increase revenues.

Conclusion

The data outlined in this document underscore the fact that there is no one perfect way to complete the allocation task and that a purely algorithmic system can’t incorporate the college’s core principles or reflect our best judgment. Any allocation system will be a set of tradeoffs, but we have worked to forge an informed compromise that aims to reflect demographic changes in the past decade and anticipated changes in the coming one.