By ALEX AGUEROS
Reporter
(WARRENSBURG, Mo., digitalBURG) — Central Missouri’s department budgets may be tweaked as part of the installation of a Strategic Resource Allocation Model, as discussed by the UCM Faculty Senate during the fall 2015 semester.

Central Missouri’s rising enrollment trend prompted the model’s installation.

“Indeed with the growth measures we’re engaged in, we want to ensure our students continue to receive a quality education,” Provost and Chief Learning Officer Deborah Curtis said in a video on UCM’s website for the SRAM.

While the SRAM has been discussed in abstract, practically, it works as a filter on the university’s income, sorting money to departments based on institutional strategic goals. These goals include points outlined under student success, growth with quality, sustainability and efficiency.

Stephen Price, senator for the UCM College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, said that while the model impacts the entire campus, students are less likely to see a tangible difference.

“It’s a new way of doing business for the university as far as allocation of money,” he said. “Students will probably not know the difference. If anything, they will look around and say ‘Oh, cool. We have nice things.”’

“The idea is to put money back into the hands of the departments.”

Introducing the SRAM has been in progress since Oct. 2014, when project team leaders met with rpkGROUP, a strategic consulting service, to launch the model and present an overview of it.

A theme of the project’s launch is positive momentum in UCM’s favor. In a memo from February 2015, President Chuck Ambrose said the SRAM is necessary to keep up with the University’s growth.

“Throughout the 2014-2015 academic year, positive momentum continues to build as the University undertakes key initiatives to better serve our students and create a successful learning environment,” the memo read. “Our collective commitment to students has led to many positive outcomes, including a strong enrollment growth of 6.9 percent (one year), 15 percent (three year), and 19.6 percent (five year); and an average tuition increase of only 1.48 percent over the past six years. In order to remain on this path, we must continue to develop and successfully implement UCM’s Strategic Resource Allocation Model. As you are aware, considerable time and effort continues to be assigned to building the SRAM foundation ensuring that it will benefit the entire University and our students.”

The SRAM’s purpose is to reallocate money in a way that more accurately reflects a department’s enrollment and needs. Money would go straight to a department and a “tax” would essentially help fund more practical costs.

Price described the SRAM’s new process of revenue allocation and budget management.

“You pay tuition,” he said. “In the past, that tuition has always gone up to a centralized budget. Then, trickled, trickled, trickled, trickled and a department had a fixed budget. So, even if we went from 50 students to 300 students, our budget would increase just slightly. Hopefully, the ideal of the new model is that, if our enrollment increases or our number of major’s increases, there’s some measurements that are going to be tied to how much money we’ll allocate. But hopefully the money will start at the department … and, basically, there will be overhead.”