While the UO faces financial challenges as it continues to operate with very low state support, it does not face a shortfall in the current budget year, university officials write in a guest viewpoint article in The Register-Guard.

The article, by Vice President for Finance and Administration Jamie Moffitt and Provost Scott Coltrane, points out that the budget for 2016-17 is balanced. An earlier story in the newspaper had suggested the university faced a shortfall this year.

But Moffitt and Coltrane note that keeping the budget balanced in future years will require difficult choices, given the expected large increases in public employee pension costs and increasing personnel costs tied to labor agreements and additional academic hiring. The UO has begun reducing administrative expenses to bolster academic funding, but state disinvestment in higher education remains a major concern.

“The biggest unknown in the 2017-18 budget is state funding,” Moffitt and Coltrane write. “While we appreciate the substantial support we received from the governor and the Legislature last year, Oregon’s funding for higher education is among the lowest in the country on a per-student basis and funding for the UO is among the lowest in the state.”

To read the entire article, see “UO faces higher costs, but ‘shortfall’ is misnomer” in the Aug. 23 issue of The Register-Guard.