Tracking College Budgets

“Don’t trust everything works the way it’s supposed to - money in, money out.” - Ryan Gabrielson, Center for Investigative Reporting Fellow.

College budgets are a behemoth hard to understand, but rife with stories, if you know how and where to look, according to Gabrielson and Josh Keller of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Budgets are hard to understand, and most of the stories center on tuition and administrative salaries.
But if you have and understand budgets, you are a better reporter. Keller made the example of UC Berkeley increasing the number of out of state students it admits. A high ranking official said it was to expose California students to the rest of the country, but in reality, it was to help plug a large budget gap. Josh had the budget in front of him, and was able to call the official on the spin.

• Sit with someone who can explain the budget. They want to talk
  
• Go to the Chronicle of Higher Education website for data and information on budgets
• Get on Moody's e-mail list for your university to get reports on their finances
• Get the university and its foundation's 990s for information on salaries and compensation.
• Take an accounting class or two so when you sit down with finance officials they don't have to explain every little thing.
  
• Get audits on the university. File FOI requests if you have to. Schools will try to hide behind FERPA. The SPJ website has information that can help.
  

Ryan gave the example of a fake art program he discovered through audits.
A great story idea is to look into faculty disclosures for work done outside official university duties. In medical schools, these disclosures are pretty wide-spread, because faculty will get paid for lectures, etc.

Foundations are tougher to crack, but they are really important as they provide a lot of fundraising efforts for cash-strapped schools. Get their 990s. University agendas are quietly set by donors.

A lot of universities and colleges have an internal office that does institutional analysis. They are an internal control on the university.


Go to Academic Senate meetings! They are a great source of information. Talk to students, because they are living the policies set by the university. Go to board meetings for community colleges.