<p>this is directly from an email my son sent me, it may be posted on the NYU website, I didn’t look</p>
<p>Our Universitys recent rise has been extraordinary; from a regional university with troubled finances forced to sell its main campus in the early 1970s, we have roared forward to become the internationally prominent research university we are today.</p>
<p>The 2007-08 academic year will be seen as an especially remarkable year. It will be a year remembered as one of the most productive years of the transformative Partners Program with considerable additional new faculty talent brought to the Square, and it will be a year marking the continuation of our aggressive efforts to improve student life on our campus. But it also will be remembered as the year we advanced our plans to affiliate with Polytechnic University, and the year we announced an agreement to move forward with NYU Abu Dhabi, which may change not just the future of NYU, but the future of higher education. And it will be recalled as the year that significant work was completed on two very important forward-looking plans for the University: NYU Plans Space 2031, and NYU Framework 2031.</p>
<p>The NYU budget is sound. The expected affiliation with Polytechnic University will not affect its financial independence – Polys endowment and tuition funds will continue to serve its campus; NYUs budget will not be used to support Poly. And the financial arrangements for NYU Abu Dhabi are such that its entire development will be accomplished without the use of any financial resources from our Washington Square campus.</p>
<p>However, our in-depth considerations of the Universitys future NYU Plans Space 2031 and Framework 2031 make our financial position clear: although NYU is in a sound financial position, it will be a great challenge to produce the resources we need to sustain the drive for academic excellence that has brought us to this point, to enhance our financial aid program, and to meet our space needs. It is for this reason we undertook the recently announced administrative re-engineering effort, which we expect will provide at least $25 million per year for academic priorities by the 2009-10 academic year, with savings coming from University administration and auxiliary services, not the schools.</p>
<p>Our resource challenges, I am certain, are well understood by everyone in the NYU community. NYUs annual budget, excluding the medical center, is $1.8 billion. Over 60 percent of that budget comes from tuition charges, a far larger percentage than that of most of our peer institutions; only 5 percent of the budget comes from endowment and other investment income, a far smaller percentage than most of our peers. When the most recent national survey of college and university endowments was completed last year, the value of NYUs endowment was $2.2 billion. While this is a large sum it is the 31st largest university endowment nationally it is only meaningfully understood on a per-student basis; on that basis, our endowment ranks 216th. This hard truth that many of the colleges and universities against which we compete to attract faculty and students have endowment resources per student many times larger (5, 10, even 30 times larger than our own) with the attendant financial flexibility
– is a constant in our budgetary deliberations, and it leads to more constrained choices for NYU.</p>
<p><em>Financial Aid</em></p>
<p>A number of our very well endowed peer schools have made newsworthy moves on financial aid, on tuition, or on both, responding to the needs not only of those with low incomes, but even reaching out to the middle class. We are not in a position to match these institutions, much as we might wish that all endowments were created equal. So, we confront a smaller array of choices.</p>
<p>In the 2008 09 academic year, NYU will devote more than $150 million to undergraduate financial aid. However, even with all we spend, we are not among the relative handful of colleges and universities that can meet a students full
need: the gap between what a family can afford to pay and what college costs.</p>
<p>NYUs priority has been to direct the greatest effort at those with the greatest need, and that will continue to be our focus. We can and should be proud of the fact that we have a higher percentage of the nations neediest students than many of our wealthier peers. For next year, we will increase the budget for undergraduate financial aid from the Universitys unrestricted funds by 12 percent. This does not mean that each student will receive a 12 percent increase in his or her individual award. The focus will remain on helping those new and continuing students with the greatest need.</p>
<p>In addition, over the next two years, NYU will end all but a tiny fraction of merit based undergraduate financial aid (limiting it to program building or goals requiring that aid). In recent years, we have steadily reduced merit aid, redirecting our financial aid resources to need-based aid instead; currently, less than 9 percent of our undergraduate aid is based solely on academic merit.</p>
<p>For fully-funded graduate students, there will be an increase of $1,000 in the minimum stipend for doctoral students (bringing the minimum stipend to $22,000 in academic year 2008-09) and $500 for masters students (bringing the minimum stipend for them to $16,500). Fully-funded students shall continue to receive financial aid covering 100 percent of their tuition costs. In addition, health insurance which has been enhanced to include increased co-insurance coverage, reduced co-pays for office visits and medications, increased pharmacy maximums, reduced out-of pocket maximums, as well as a no-out-of pocket-cost childbirth option for routine deliveries will continue to be paid for 100 percent by the University.</p>
<p><em>Tuition</em></p>
<p>Each additional dollar of tuition cost is a tax on the resources of our students and their families. The necessary annual growth in tuition is a challenge for many of those paying it, and a challenge to our goal of maintaining an economically diverse student body. As we shape our budget, these realities are very much at the forefront of our thoughts.</p>
<p>But we are a tuition dependent institution. Any initiative requiring financial resources to be achieved in the end will have an impact on tuition, because nearly two-thirds of our resources come from that source. This is true even of expenditures to improve financial aid, true of our efforts to improve student life, true of our efforts to improve academic programs, true of our efforts to increase the size of our faculty, and true of our efforts to address space needs.</p>
<p>For Academic Year 2008-2009, total undergraduate charges (tuition, fees, room and board) will increase by 5.7 percent; tuition alone will increase by 5.9 percent.</p>
<p><em>Faculty, Administrators, and Staff</em></p>
<p>Throughout my more than 25 years here, I have been impressed by the devotion brought to NYU by its outstanding faculty, administrators, and staff. The success and stature that the University today enjoys is a product of their efforts their innovation, their energy, and their dedication and we are grateful for all they do for NYU.</p>
<p>As a research university, faculty are at the heart of our enterprise it is they who lead our great missions of research and education. Last year we funded a special separate pool targeted for faculty who had made long-term, outstanding contributions to the university, approved by the Board of Trustees on a one-time basis. We noted that we would be returning to a single pool; thus, for the coming year, the University has put in place a 3.5 percent merit pool (AMI) for faculty.</p>
<p>Our administrators provide the infrastructure that permits our faculty to pursue their scholarship and that enables teaching and learning to go forward. NYU is a research university, not a business. However, our administrators work hard to ensure that the Universitys operations which support the primacy of the academic enterprise are conducted in a business-like fashion. For administrators, the University has put in place a 3.5 percent merit pool (AMI), and an additional 0.5 percent bonus pool to recognize outstanding effort, particularly as we move forward with achieving additional savings.</p>
<p>The increases for staff who are represented by unions will reflect the contractually agreed upon sums.</p>
<p><em>Conclusion</em></p>
<p>Since becoming president of this great university, I have thought constantly about a basic question: how far into the leading ranks of higher education can a school go without the power of an enormous per-student endowment? Using entrepreneurship, established momentum, determination, boldness, our Greenwich Village location, and the ability to get the most out of every dollar we spend, how far might NYU go? For me, the answer is straightforward: as far as it wishes. Compared to some of our peer institutions, there are limitations on our present, but I do not see any limitations on our future.</p>
<p>It will not be easy real progress seldom is. But getting to where we are today has not been easy, either. Who, looking at this University 30 years ago after it had just sold its main campus, while it was struggling with its budget and its reputation could have imagined this present? Those who came before us worked hard to give us the NYU of which we are today a part. Knowing how far this past 30 years has carried us, we should imagine a future dramatically transformed for those who will occupy this campus when all of us are long gone, and we should work no less hard to ensure that future than our predecessors worked on our behalf.</p>
<p>Our motto, Perstare et Praestare to persist and to excel is not only a description of this community of scholars, but an exhortation. I consider it a great professional and personal privilege to be a member of the NYU community and a part of the outstanding daily effort to make NYU even better.</p>
<p>--------------------- via NYU E-Mail Direct ---------------------</p>