The Referendum C checks are in the mail, but deans at the state’s biggest business schools aren’t exactly waiting by the mailbox for their arrival.
“The amount of state funding we receive is so minimal that the only impact
we expect (from Ref. C funding) is that there won’t be further cuts,” said Dennis Ahlburg, dean of the University of Colorado at Boulder Leeds School Business. “There will be benefit to the campus as a whole, but any
trickle down will dry up before it reaches us.”
Funds from the referendum, which will dedicate up to $3.7 billion in tax
refunds to higher education, transportation and health care, are expected to
be allocated first to the programs with the greatest need. “There are two
parts of campus, those dependent on funding and those that are exporters of
dollars,” Ahlburg said. “Business schools are typically one of the cash cows
on campus.”
With only 5.3 percent of CU’s funding coming from the state, income is
primarily generated from tuition. “Our undergraduate class is about twice
the size of our competitors and our funding is about half to a quarter of
that of schools in our aspiration set,” the business school dean said. “Yet
we’re a flagship school and we’re expected to provide a world-class
education.”
Ahlburg arrived in Boulder about a year ago and said he was shocked by what
he found. Classes were overbooked just like airplane flights: with the hope
that not everybody would show up. “We just couldn’t make any more cuts;
there were more students than seats,” he said. “After seeing the situation I
saw two options: build more room or shut the school down.”
