Dakota Beacon

Last week, the story of NDSU's massive tuition increase continued as NDSU President Dean Bresciani went on talk radio to say that quote: "NDSU has been steadily starved to death." (Audio here.)

As we've documented over the last few weeks, the North Dakota University System is out of control.  It does seem that President Bresciani is completely unwilling to recognize that NDSU's problems are self inflicted.

In 2010 NDSU issued over $15 million worth of tuition waivers.  Since NDSU collected $71 million from tuition, these tuition waivers represent 21% of total collections. 

With President Bresciani complaining that NDSU is not funded at the same level as UND, it is important to note that UND's tuition waivers total just over $8 million, or 11% of the $74 million in actual tuition collected there - nearly half the waivers that NDSU offers.  (More details on waivers can be found here.)

Just like with property tax exemptions, when some people don't pay their full share everyone else who does pay has to pick up the slack.  It could be argued that those who pay the full tuition price were already paying 21% more than their fair share even before the 8.8% tuition increase.

These facts raise an important question:  does NDSU President Dean Bresciani even care what the facts of the situation are?

President Bresciani has repeated talked about how they have cut all they could.

However, according to reports, in the last year NDSU has added 26 new programs while cutting two programs.  In contrast, UND has added 34 programs but cut 16 as well.

It seems that UND has done a better job of prioritizing what it wants to do, while NDSU is trying to be all things to all people, while being very generous with handing our tuition waivers - and then complaining they can't fund what they want to do.

Further bringing NDSU's budget behavior into question is the fact that as Governor Dalrymple says there simply were not any specific requests for "additional funding" from NDSU.

"When the budget requests came in to us last fall, there was no additional request for NDSU in what they proposed to us," Dalrymple explained.

 "There was no special request in front of the [legislative] committees to add funds specifically for NDSU...It wasn't presented."

It seems that the root problem was that NDSU genuinely lacked proper budget planning, and decided to put that deficiency on the backs of students.  

The legislature and the Governor should be insisting that the Board of Higher Education impose budget oversight at NDSU, clearly they are not prepared to manage their own finances.  

Dustin Gawrylow, Executive Director

North Dakota Taxpayers' Association

Office: (701) 751-2530