Faced with massive budget shortfall, colleges forced to make large cuts next year - Noah Hurowitz, USM Free Press

The University of Southern Maine’s three major colleges have three weeks to come up with about $1 million each in budget cuts for fiscal year 2013 as a result of a budget shortfall of over $5 million. USM President Selma Botman and Provost and Vice-President for Academic Affairs John Wright delivered the news to faculty of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences on Friday in the Wishcamper Center. Following a decade of declining enrollment in which the the student body shrunk by 18 percent, USM is facing a $5.1 million budget shortfall for FY13, which begins in July. And, according to Botman, that $5.1 million, which must be trimmed from the university’s FY13 base budget, will not be coming back in the foreseeable future. “Unless we retain our students at a much more vigorous rate, unless we recruit more students, that money is not coming back,” she said. “And we are modeling FY14 to be an even weaker economy than FY13.”