An email from the UCLA Academic Senate chair circulated on December 17. As blog readers will know, the Senate has previously expressed dissatisfaction because of lack of meaningful budget data for the campus. The relevant part of the email reads:
...Budgetary updates: The Council on Planning and Budget (CPB) has recently received unit-level budget information from last year for the majority of campus units. CPB will conduct analyses to provide advice and participate in budgetary meetings in the new year, which are important steps forward in shared governance. As mentioned in November, I am participating in the Chancellor’s Executive Budget Action Group (EBAG), where currently we are discussing methodology to evaluate budgetary items within a constrained budget...
It sounds good, but here is the problem. When I look for budget data for UCLA, the latest publicly-available figures are for 2023-24.* But we are already almost half way through 2025-26. In a few weeks, the governor will be submitting his proposal for the 2026-27 state budget - including allocations for UC. So what does "unit-level" budget information really mean?
To make sense of budget data, whether for a campus unit, the entire campus, or the entire UC system, you need to know about the past (so you can observe trends), the present (so you know where you are right now), and projections for the future (so you know what is planned to happen). Is that what "unit-level" information entails? Apparently not, since only last year's data are included. What can you do with the information that department X last year had expenditures of Y, when you don't know what came before Y, what Y is now, or what Y is expected to be in the future?
Useful budgetary data must provide past, present, and future. It doesn't seem as though we are there yet.
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