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Dustin LindenSmith ([personal profile] iamom) wrote2010-04-07 08:52 am
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2010 Nova Scotia Provincial Budget update

Holy crap. In the provincial NDP's first real budget, check out what they did to universities. From Page 7.2 of this supplementary budget doc:

EDUCATION - ASSISTANCE TO UNIVERSITIES

Grants to Universities ($ Thousands)

2009-2010 Estimate: 455,802
2009-2010 Forecast: 449,647
2010-2011 Estimate: 60,643
        
Page 7.3 outlines the details. Most of those cuts go to Operating; and Non-Space, Alterations, and Renovations.

Wowwww. It's a nearly 87% cut to university funding. $389M.

I'm totally shocked by this. I don't understand how exactly that level of cut could be considered sustainable, or even remotely feasible, to universities. I thought it was a typo or something when I first read it. How on Earth can they justify this? How can the universities possibly react to such deep cuts?

Edit: No proper context was provided for this in the budget documentation, but a friend of mine who's a VP at a local university told me that this is a shell game sort of budgeting, in that the operational grants for this year were simply disbursed earlier in the previous fiscal year, so there's not really a cut that severe to universities, it's just a way to take a few hundred million off the books in this current new budget.