Daily Debriefing
By Caroline Duffy
Published on Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Cornell University will cut endowment spending by 15 percent as part of an effort to cover its 10-percent budget shortfall, Bloomberg reported Saturday. The university had originally planned to cut spending by 5 percent on its main campus in Ithaca, N.Y. and 8 percent at the medical school campus in New York City in order to compensate for lower numbers of donations, endowment earnings and state funding, but further financial losses required greater budget cuts, Bloomberg reported. The university's endowment was $5.39 billion last June before plummeting 27 percent in the following six months, according to Bloomberg. In addition to budget cuts, the school is raising tuition, increasing the size of the Class of 2013 by 100 students, suspending construction until June 30 and offering buyouts to more than 1,300 non-faculty employees in an effort to reduce costs, Bloomberg reported.
Universities nationwide are renewing their interest in embryonic stem cell research programs after President Barack Obama signed an executive order on Monday that removed limits on federal financing of the research enacted by former President George Bush, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. A portion of the roughly $10 billion of the economic stimulus package allotted for medical research can now be used to support embryonic stem cell research, The Chronicle reported.
The median salary for faculty members at four-year colleges and universities increased by 3.7 percent this year, down from a 4-percent increase last year, according to a study released Monday by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. The study highlighted a discrepancy between the salaries of senior administrators, whose median salary increase stayed constant at 4 percent, and faculty. The study also found greater salary increases for faculty at private colleges than for their counterparts at public universities, Inside Higher Ed reported. The data for the study was collected prior to Oct. 15, 2008, which was before many colleges and universities instituted budget cuts in response to the current economic crisis.