President Jane Close Conoley announced that the university is making departments and colleges throughout the university aware of unspent scholarship money at the Academic Senate meeting on Thursday.
“Apparently, there are $8 million available that have not been spent,” English Professor Norbert Schürer said in an email sent to College of Liberal Arts faculty.
The university is building a centralized platform for applying to scholarships that will facilitate student access to scholarship money, Conoley said.
“We hope…we’ll get to the point of a single application [for scholarships],” Conoley said.
The $8 million are split into two categories, according to Conoley; half of the money is for programs and faculty endowments and the other half is for student scholarships.
When asked why he believes the money has not been used, Schürer said, “Departments are not on top of it.”
Schürer, who works with scholarship administration within the Department of English, noted that the accumulation of the money is due to three main factors: first, departments either do not know about the money or do not know how to organize themselves to disburse this money; second, the accumulated money is “lots of money in small amounts;” and third, donor specifications limit the number of students that can be awarded some scholarships.
Elaborating on the second factor that he presented, Schürer said that departments would much rather let an amount of money accumulate, so that they can award a scholarship that is more substantial and beneficial to the student.
In response as to why this money has accumulated, Conoley brought up the DECLARE Campaign. DECLARE is a comprehensive fundraising effort at California State University, Long Beach. According to the DECLARE Campaign webpage, CSULB has managed to raise $227,600,000 and counting.
“Our DECLARE campaign has been increasingly successful at raising money,” Conoley said.
More money is coming into the university than is being pushed out, which is contributing to the money accumulation, Conoley said.
“We’ve either encumbered…or we’ve actually given out about $3.2 million,” Conoley said in regards to what is being done to disburse the accumulated money.
Schürer said that there are two things he thinks would help quicken the process of administering scholarships. First, he said required credits per semester should be lowered for professors so that they can have time to work on rolling out scholarship funds and, second, there should be a stronger emphasis on faculty service; one of the three categories by which professors are evaluated. Faculty service, which encompasses scholarship administration, is often swept aside, according to Schürer, and that adds on to why scholarship money isn’t being distributed.
“This is nobody’s…evil intentions,” Schürer said to assure students who may be upset. “It’s not like professors get the money.”
Conoley contested Schürer’s first idea, saying that professors are already given three credits worth of time to work on their service, such as working on scholarships. She said that it is difficult to keep lowering required credits because “classes have to be taught.”
Schürer said that students would be right to be upset that scholarship money is not being awarded to them, but they have to understand that it is no one’s fault. He said that he hopes that the accumulated money will be distributed within five to 10 years.
Conoley suggested that students to visit the Center for Scholarship Information.
“I think they will be pleasantly surprised that…we’re much better organized than in previous years,” Conoley said.
Both Conoley and Schürer assured students and faculty that this is something that is being worked on; it will just take a lot of work.