At an employee council meeting Tuesday, New Mexico State University Officials said that challenges facing NMSU are rising costs, declining enrollment numbers, and less federal dollars for research.
The university released findings of a report commissioned to take a look at staffing levels and examine the university’s mission and strategic plan to see if they are aligned.
The $618,905 study conducted by Deloitte consultants said that rather than being overstaffed, New Mexico State University is poorly organized. NMSU Chancellor, Garrey Carruthers says that the university is a high fixed-cost university so there are many things that need to be addressed.
“We have lots of buildings, lots of personnel, many of them tenured that you just can’t release; and as a consequence we have to restructure this university to recognize what’s going to happen in New Mexico in the 21st Century,” says Carruthers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCX55y9VGN4&feature=youtu.be
Standard and Poor’s recently announced that NMSU ‘s long term rating was downgraded from an AA to an AA minus. The university has seen declining enrollment numbers over the last few years. However, NMSU Chancellor Garrey Carruthers says that the freshman enrollment this year is up. He says the university has been more aggressive in recruiting this year.
“We did more advertising then we did in the past. We’ve never featured advertising and we did it targeted in areas like high schools in Albuquerque that we liked. They’re students tended to be well prepared. We’ve changed our strategy dramatically to promoting New Mexico State University and having more recruiters out in the field,” says Carruthers.
The Deloitte report selected five key opportunities that it said could save NMSU $53 million. Those opportunities are reviewing policies and producers to standardize span of control for management, procurement, and address the administrative assistant staff ratio, and also centralizing IT service and finance delivery.
NMSU has tasked teams to address these suggestions over the next several years.
More information: http://staffingstudy.nmsu.edu/