Campus Message 07.20.17

Dear Faculty and Staff,

Earlier this month, I shared with you the news that a new state budget was approved for the first time in over two years. We remain extremely grateful for the budget we have been provided. While we must manage our remaining fiscal challenges carefully and strategically, we are certainly much better off today than we were a month ago.

We are still in the process of evaluating the full implications of the new budget, however, following are some details we can confirm:

• We have received 2016/2017 funding for the Monetary Award Program (MAP) totaling over $32 million in tuition and fee awards for 8,500 undergraduate students. These grants are extremely important to our neediest students.
• UIC will receive additional state operating support for FY17 approximately equal to our FY15 adjusted funding level. As you recall, last year we had to sequester our collective carry-forward balances to cover the significant deficit caused by the reduced state support in FY16. The FY17 funding will allow us to return approximately 39 percent of the sequestered carryforward funds to the original accounts within the next 2-3 months.
• Due to the funding UIC will receive from the state for FY17 and FY18, we are reducing our originally planned FY18 budget reductions to 3.25 percent from 5 percent.

More details regarding the allocations to each unit will be forthcoming from the office of Budget and Resource Planning.

I want to reiterate the point I made earlier regarding how difficult this period of financial uncertainty has been for our entire community. I want to commend everyone for your tireless commitment to our students and our patients, and for your collective perseverance in these challenging times. Thanks to all of you, our students have been able to receive a high-quality education, our patients have received world-class care and our research has continued to flourish, despite the financial challenges we have been managing. I am grateful to everyone for your support of UIC and I know, thanks to all of you, that UIC is poised to remain on its upward trajectory.

Sincerely,

Michael D. Amiridis
Chancellor