The UConn Board of Trustees passed the University’s $1. 03 billion budget for fiscal year 2012 during its Sept. 28 meeting, which is approximately the same as UConn’s fiscal year 2011 budget.

The University had to close a budget gap of more than $45 million, following a cut to UConn’s state appropriation as Connecticut grappled with record budget deficits. In fiscal year 2011, UConn’s state appropriation was $329 million; it is $284 million for fiscal year 2012.

In order to close this deficit, the University was forced to make wide-ranging budget cuts, according to Chief Financial Officer Richard Gray.

“The budget plan for Storrs and the regional campuses presented a real challenge,” said Gray. “We had to take some pretty pervasive actions to close our deficit.”

Gray noted that nearly all state agencies saw their budgets reduced this year, and that UConn “had to be a part of the solution” while minimizing the effect cuts would have on students. Cuts included:

• $7 million from Plant Renewal and Equipment
• $7.5 million from non-academic support services
• $10.2 million from Student Affairs
• $3.6 million from Athletics
• $4.0 million in technology funding
• $7.4 million in academic support
• $5.1 million from the general university budget

The University was able to gain $10 million from fund balances around the University, and a modest 2.5 percent increase in tuition created $8.8 million.

Gray also noted that the University instituted stringent hiring restrictions to keep personnel costs down.

Both Gray and UConn President Susan Herbst identified the University’s chief priority as being the expansion of the faculty, both to ensure that an adequate number of classes are offered and to enhance the University’s research portfolio. UConn’s full-time faculty count has increased only slightly in the last six years, while enrollment has grown.

In light of that, Gray said that the statistics that “keep me up at night” are UConn’s student-faculty ratio, which is expected to be 18-to-one in 2011 – the student-faculty ratio goal in UConn’s academic plan is 15-to-one – and the statistic on class size at UConn, which shows larger class sizes.

Gray said that both numbers were moving “in the wrong direction” and that the problem “is something we absolutely need to focus on on a go-forward basis – and we will.”