A budget transformation update from advisory committee co-chairs

Dear colleagues,

We write to you today with an update on the university’s Budget Transformation initiative, as much work has taken place since our universitywide update early last month.

Every opportunity we get — including this update today — we want to re-center on why this effort is essential to our institutional mission and vision. Six core financial objectives continue to drive the work of our budget governance committees:

• Our people: Creating a mechanism for sustainable and competitive market-aligned pay.
• Student affordability: Continuing to balance tuition costs with strong financial packages — and a quantifiable and unmistakable return on investment for our students.
• Strategic alignment: Powering our shared Next-Gen K-State goals and vision.
• Infrastructure investment: Supporting, curating and sustaining mission-advancing facilities and vision-enabling technologies.
• Operational excellence: Driving efficiency and operational improvements that reduce barriers and help our people work smarter, not harder.
• Financial stability: Designing and enabling a flexible budget system built to weather financial pressures, supporting institutional resilience.

Questions we've heard

As this initiative advances, we continue to hear many thoughtful questions about the Budget Transformation process, underscoring how deep the university community’s engagement is in this process. Common emerging themes include your interest in enrollment projections and how they are impacting the work of our governance committees, how our levers will advance research at the institution, and continued interest in the compensation study.

To that end, you can expect the questions from the Winter Faculty Senate Open Forum to be posted and answered by early next week on the archived event page (eID/password required). Please understand that these answers represent a point in time. Additionally, while our governance committees conduct their work, many of the answers to your questions are pending the finalization of committee recommendations — we want to be transparent about that. Ongoing communication efforts, including the upcoming Spring Faculty Senate Open Forum, will continue to be the best venue to obtain real-time answers and progress updates.

Progress to date

Over the last month, the Advisory Budget Committee has been focused on fiscal year 2027 budget allocation-dependent factors, with sub-committees weeding through the details and pulling together recommendations for specific budget levers. Later this week, the Executive Budget Committee will hear recommendations regarding:

• The 90/10 incremental budget/performance pool — including proposed performance metrics and an implementation approach that would allow revenue centers a transition year to monitor and adjust practices based on metric performance. Please note that this recommendation has been crafted based on discovery within our governance framework and feedback we have heard through our engagement across the institution.
• The proposed mechanics for the 1.1% annual budget reduction over three years. As a reminder, this budget reduction is the lever we will pull to support faculty, staff and graduate student compensation, guided by the university’s compensation study.

Additional sub-committee proposals will move forward at future Executive Budget Committee meetings, including a proposal for the GU cash pullback plan, institutional support fee, and an in-progress proposal for how K-State Salina, K-State Olathe, the College of Veterinary Medicine, Staley School of Leadership, K-State Extension and Ag Research can best integrate with our new budget practices given their combination of unique funding lines and operational practices.

We also want to take a moment to note that we heard your requests for broader department head participation in this process and have since added such expertise to subsequent sub-committees formed since the February open forum. Thank you for raising your voices and for this valuable feedback; we’ll continue to bear this in mind as additional sub-committees are formed.

What to expect next

Once proposals are presented to the Executive Budget Committee — and if approved as presented — please note that the Budget Office will re-validate assumptions and calculations before outcomes are communicated broadly.

Additionally, to ensure our academic deans and their budget fiscal officers can anticipate and prepare for allocations in May — and as another step in the validation process — the Budget Office will hold budget planning workshops with deans, administrative leaders and their budget fiscal officers over the next several weeks.

Speaking of re-validating assumptions, we continue to closely monitor the university’s overall enrollment projections and key legislative outcomes — and you can expect to hear more about how those are aligning with our planning efforts at the Spring Faculty Senate Open Forum in Salina, and streamed online, on April 15, in addition to a deep dive into the compensation study and career architecture development initiative.

Continued engagement and communication

We want you to know that we deeply value the university community’s engagement in this process. Through our continued regular conversations with deans and administrators, department heads through our visits to First Tuesday Roundtables, engagement with Faculty Senate leadership and their participation in the budget governance process, the Student Governing Association and the addition of a representative on the Advisory Budget Council, and past and planned open forums, we continue to hear your thoughtful perspectives.

We are listening, and we value what you are sharing. Please know that the budget governance committees are carefully balancing your perspectives with the financial pressures and core objectives necessitating this work.

It’s important to acknowledge that the path to transformation can often look and feel nonlinear. As co-chairs of the Advisory Budget Committee, we want you to know that we are doing all we can to communicate the facts as clearly and transparently as possible, so the university community can navigate this path together.

There is still work ahead of us — but it is the K-State way to come together and tackle challenges head-on, even when the work is difficult. And that is exactly what we will do to ensure we can continue delivering teaching, research and service for the good of our state, nation and world.

Go ‘Cats!

Jesse Perez Mendez
Provost and executive vice president

Ethan Erickson
Vice president for administration and finance