IMPT: Budget and External Review Updates for Student Affairs

May 3, 2017

Dear Colleagues,

With finals around the corner and a school year ending, it a time for both winding down the semester and also looking toward the new year. The Student Affairs leadership is using this time to continue to implement our priorities: rebuilding trust and improving morale with staff; maintaining our student advocacy and support; and establishing financial stability for our Division.

We have important compensation and budget updates to share with you.

As a reminder, we have an FAQ document located here. You can surface questions via our anonymous formhere or you can contact the Vice Chancellor’s immediate office at vcsa@berkeley.edu. You can also talk with your Cabinet representative. Find out who your representative is here.

Compensation and Classification

As part of rebuilding trust and morale, we will be assessing our compensation and classification practices to ensure equity and fairness throughout the division, as recommended by the External Review. This multi-step process has already begun, and will continue for about a year. First we will conduct a classification review of every job description within Student Affairs to see if there are any mismatches between classification and duties. For individuals, this may mean a reclassification, either up or down.

Following the classification review, there will be a compensation review. Given limited resources, this phase may take time, but we are committed to ensuing that compensation is equitable and reflects classification.

Staff from across the division and at different levels of classification will have the opportunity to participate in the review process and we encourage you to do so. If you are interested, please speak with your supervisor and sign up at tinyurl.com/SACompClass.

Budget Update

This year, fiscal year 2016–17, the Division of Student Affairs will end the year mostly as expected. Thank you to everyone for implementing this past year’s efforts and closely monitoring your budgets.

For next year, fiscal year 2017–18, we have a $9.1 million budget improvement target which we will resolve through a mixture of increasing revenue and reducing costs.

Our new revenue includes the Lower Sproul Fee, which helps support the ASUC Student Union, and $2.14M in net revenue from Housing and Dining. Both of these will help support the many services and programs that directly benefit students.

To reduce our costs, we will suspend or delay refilling many vacant positions. While we will still refill certain positions, our position control efforts over the past year helped create strategic vacancies that we will leverage. Since we will be working with fewer staff, we will need to think about what we can do differently, stop, or reduce, while still maintaining critical services for students.

We are also reducing our costs by capturing savings from plans already underway. For example, Student Affairs IT (SAIT) is planning to undergo changes related to the Student Information System. This action would happen regardless of our financial situation as it is a result of a change in the way we work.

As a result of planned actions and existing vacancies, we are able to resolve the majority of our improvement target. We will also look to implement other changes that will have a smaller impact on our staff. For example, Business Operations has identified $200K in savings across the Division in terms of right sizing the number of phones, fax lines, and printers and streamlining our ordering of equipment and supplies. We are also looking at an optional curtailment which can help reduce both direct and indirect costs. We are still working to finalize those details and will share more.

For the remaining amount of our cost savings, we are waiting for confirmation on one item before making our final decisions. We hope to have more information soon.

Our budget submission (also called a budget narrative) is due to the Campus Budget Office on May 5; we will be meeting with the Chancellor-designate in late May; and should have a final budget in place in mid-June. Our exact budget plans may change based on our meeting with the Chancellor-designate. We will continue to keep you informed as we know more.

Thank you for your continued work on behalf of students, and we wish you a good rest of the spring semester.

Sincerely,

Steve Sutton, Joseph Greenwell, Amy Jarich, Tom Lowry, Susan Roach, David Surratt, and Ellen Topp
Division of Student Affairs

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