Bard’s budget reveals a campus in flux:
An examination of where the money goes
By J.p. Lawrence
The campaign escalates every year as snow begins to fall. From stone-walled offices in Annandale-on-Hudson slouch endless phone calls, emails, letters and cards, all asking for one thing: money.
Those letters come from the offices of Sasha Boak-Kelly, Director of the Annual Fund at Bard College. Each year, Boak-Kelly says she is given two numbers of great importance to her and the rest of the Office of Program Development: a projection of how much it will cost to run the college, and the amount of money they’ll need to raise to keep the doors open.
For other colleges, these annual drives are luxuries, ambitious but not essential, like mushroom gravy on a sirloin steak. But here at Bard, Boak-Kelly says she knows that if her office doesn’t reach its annual fundraising quota, bad, bad things will happen to the college’s ability to hire teachers, attract students and buy books.
Jane Brien, Director of Alumni Affairs and Boak-Kelly’s peer, says the difficulty lies in a poor understanding of how money is spent, allotted and distributed at Bard. It’s hard, Brien says, to persuade people to fork over cash when those people ask how a college can cry poverty as it opens campuses in Kyrgyzstan, Russia and the West Bank, and as tuition, room and board climbs to $55,592 a year. “People think Bard must have tons of money,” Brien says, “but it just doesn’t work like that.”
In another office on campus, a group of students sit with Bard administrators in a private afternoon meeting. Armed with a stack of financial papers and a list of questions, Dan Gettinger and other students of the Bard Student Union voice their desire to be included in the college’s finances. The topics at hand: students do not know where their money goes, there is have no easy way to learn, and students – especially if they are unfamiliar with the area – cannot participate in the finances of the college.
“There should be a more formal and more regular method of communicating financial issues,” Gettinger, a junior, says, explaining that every year, Jim Brudvig, Vice President for Administration, conducts a presentation to faculty and staff about future projects, buildings and investments. “Students don’t get that same presentation, and yet we’re the ones fronting a lot of the bill.”
While he acknowledges that much of Bard’s financial information is available to students, Gettinger says Student Union wants more dialogue between students and the administration. He says he feels that the students, as the largest group on campus, ought to be involved in financial decision, and that students can’t do that if they don’t know how Bard’s finances work.
Inside the Levy Economics Institute, the man who knows how Bard’s finances work bristles when he hears what students believe about Bard’s money. Dmitri Papadimitriou, once vice-chairman for a Congressional committee on the trade deficit, has held Bard’s purse strings as Executive Vice President and Provost of Bard for three decades, during which Bard transitioned from a tiny, penniless art school to a global ideological empire.
A popular misconception on Bard is that the new projects and buildings take money away from students, but Papadimitriou stresses that funds for capital projects draw from an entirely different pool of money: the endowment, and only a part of the endowment at that. As of September 30th, Bard’s piggybank sat at $241 million. Unknown to many students, however, is that of that sum, only $22.59 million is allotted to them, with the rest given to special projects.
“They are restricted for the Levy Institute; they are restricted for the Fisher Center; it’s restricted for graduate programs in the city of New York and others,” Papadimitriou says. “When people donate to the endowment for the Levy Institute, that cannot be given to students. They go wherever the donor wants them to go.”
Student tuition, he says, goes into another fund: the annual budget. If the endowment is Bard’s piggybank, the annual budget is Bard’s wallet, used to pay for the college’s year-to-year expenses. This year, Bard cost $120 million to run, a sum influenced most, Papadimitriou says, by Bard’s high levels of financial aid, its cadre of highly paid teachers, and its lower-than-average endowment fund.
In addition, the annual budget needs to be balanced every year, explains Taun Toay, Executive Assistant to the Executive Vice President. The problem, Toay says, is that tuition doesn’t even come close to paying off the expenses. In fact, even with one of the highest tuition rates in the world, Bard’s tuition and fees cover only 80% of its annual budget.
How this is possible at a school with a tuition rate of $42,476 plus fees per student lies in the fact that most students pay absolutely nowhere near that much. Among all students at Bard, 68% last year got aid, with the average aid package totaling $38,530 from all sources, according to numbers in U.S. News and World Today and confirmed by the Bard Financial Aid Office. Subtract the average aid package from the listed price and the actual collected tuition drops dramatically, Toay says, adding that the true cost of teaching a Bard student crested last year at $51,161, meaning even a student receiving no aid received an $8685 discount.
Toay, an ’05 Bard alum and former Fulbright Scholar, says giving massive aid packages allows the college to recruit talented students, regardless of economic situation. That freedom, however, comes at a price: financial aid packages, according to Bard’s Board of Trustees Financial Report, comprise 29%, or $29 million, of the college’s annual budget.
Much of the rest of the annual budget goes to teachers. Bard spent $27,453,308, or 27% of the annual budget, on undergraduate instruction last year. Bringing big-time teachers to a small, rural college costs money, Toay says, but it’s necessary to have the best possible faculty and lowest possible student-to-teacher ratio.
The downside of devoting two-thirds of the annual budget to financial aid and teachers is that only 17% of the budget last year was left over for funding things like administration, student services, academic resources, athletics and recreation, the library, the computer labs and councilors. It’s a percentage Toay deems “obviously insufficient,” but the longer-term issue is that Bard is constrained by its relatively small endowment.
Other liberal art schools, because of their many years of alumni donations to the endowment, often draw millions a year through interest and investments. That money then helps pay for the annual budget. But because Bard has such a small endowment, Bard only received $2 million in interest last year. “$241 million is nothing to sneeze at, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to larger institutions that don’t run all these programs,” Toay says. “So when we carve out the pieces related to this institution, we effectively have no endowment.”
It would be great if donors gave to the undergraduate fund instead of to restricted funds, Toay says, but the hard part is convincing them to put their name on beds and toilets. “Believe me,” Toay said. “If I knew, I’d be in development.”
In Bard’s Office of Program Development, the race is on. The end of the year is the most hectic. November is the month of the annual phone-a-thon, and soon, cards from Bard President Leon Botstein will begin arriving in alumni mailboxes.
In addition to these annual fundraising drives, the college is in the midst of a comprehensive fundraising campaign. The great hope for this campaign is that raising $350 million solely dedicated to the undergraduate college will bring the school’s endowment to a level comparable to those other top liberal arts schools. That would bring the college to the point where Bard could pay the annual budget with interest and investments off the endowment, rather than from frantic calls to friends with money.
“If they can raise $350 million for the endowment, that would spit out $17 million a year, which is basically our annual fund goal every year,” Boak-Kelly says. “If we raise that, that would change things, because we wouldn’t be so worried about raising the cost and that income cap every year.”
With a stronger endowment, many involved with the campaign say the college will be able to enter an era of greater financial strength. Student Union, on their part, hopes this era will have a greater student voice in the financial process. The first step, Gettinger says, is dialogue, then education, and then participation. So far, administration has agreed to a future projects presentation for students as well as a sit-down with students every semester to explain how Bard’s finances work.
“From our perspective I want more student voice on campus,” Gettinger says, “so when big decisions are being made about the budget, we have an educated student body who can participate in the process.”
Gettinger adds this process will be win-win for everyone in involved. Students get to know where their money goes, and students who feel involved in the affairs of their school will have a greater sense of community. Then, when the seasons turn and those students become alumni, Gettinger argues, perhaps they will be more likely to write a check when those letters come calling for that one universal constant: money.