The Board of Governors for the University of Northern British Columbia has approved a $68 million balanced operating budget that will sustain University operations while allowing for strategic investments.

The budget is about $400,000 less than last year, largely due to reduced government grants and static enrolment. For example, UNBC’s provincial government grant for 2013/14 was reduced by about $126,000; it is estimated that for 2014/15, the reduction will be $473,000.

“Despite the fiscal challenges UNBC faces, we were able to work in partnership across the university to balance the budget,” says UNBC Interim President Mark Dale. “We continue to see cost pressures that span our operations and we must find innovative ways to make maximum use of every dollar. Some of the initiatives contained within this budget do just that.”

To balance the budget, the Board of Governors approved a number of actions:

• Developing a new model to deal with savings rising from short-term staff vacancies, allowing the allocation of savings to projects that will help student recruitment and retention initiatives, fund capital equipment replacement, or other projects anticipated to either reduce operating costs or increase revenue.
• Tuition fee increases of 2%.
• Eliminating 10 net FTE faculty and staff positions, many of which are vacant.

About two-thirds of the operating budget for the University is provided by the Government of B.C. Slightly more than 27% comes from tuition fees. Wages and benefits account for about three-quarters of the University’s expenditures.

As a result of the approval of the 2014-15 operating budget, the tuition fee for a full-time undergraduate student will now be $4,912 per year, an increase of about $96 per year.