STARKVILLE – The good news is that during fiscal year 2011, Mississippi State University received private gifts and pledges totaling more than $80.3 million. That made 2011 the most successful giving year in the university’s 133-year history, showing a 23 percent increase over last year’s $65.1 million in private gifts.
A significant portion of that $80.3 million came in private gifts and pledges to the MSU athletic program in the form of a school-record $37 million-plus to athletics through the Bulldog Club and the Bulldog Foundation. That, in turn, benefits the university’s academic programs as well. The university’s StatePride program — the initiative for student scholarships and faculty support begun by MSU President Mark Keenum when he took the reins leading the university — is the joint effort between the MSU Foundation and the MSU Athletics program to provide funds for new scholarships for talented students and financial awards for meritorious faculty universitywide.
The MSU administration is touting the private giving numbers across the board, and in this economy such successes should be highlighted. There are similar efforts at the University of Mississippi, the University of Southern Mississippi and Jackson State University — as well as at the state’s other four institutions of higher learning.
The bad news? MSU and the rest of Mississippi’s higher education community, will need every dollar they can get.
In the past, universities have been reticent to publicize their successes in raising private dollars. The reason is simple. In some circles in the Legislature, such news has been used as an excuse to even further reduce the percentage of state funding for higher education. It’s much the same phenomenon as what happened in Florida, Georgia and Tennessee when those states enacted lotteries that purported to be for the benefit of education. What was the result? Efforts to drop general fund support for education in those states.
In Mississippi, the general decline in the economy and efforts by lawmakers to tighten budgets across the board resulted in substantial higher education cuts. At MSU, state appropriations for campus operations for FY2012, which began July 1, are 14 percent lower than the original state appropriation for FY2010. A closer look reveals that the FY2010 appropriation, including budgeted units and special funds, totaled $184.7 million while the FY2012 appropriation was $164.9 million, or a decrease of 10.7 percent.
Similar cuts afflicted the rest of the state universities. The troubling part of that budget reality is that the cuts are coming at a time of increased enrollment as students head back to universities to get new skills in the new economy after the prolonged recession.
Keenum, while ecstatic over the university’s private giving successes, said in explaining the generosity of MSU friends and alumni: “Mississippi State’s enrollment has surged to record numbers, and these private gifts are a response to the university’s vision of producing more college graduates to meet the increasing demands in our state.”
But one shudders to think what would happen without the influx of private dollars. With the percentage of state support for public universities in Mississippi decreasing while tuition and fees increase almost annually for students, private dollars are vital for all Mississippi institutions of higher learning.
Mississippi universities have for decades been the beneficiaries of hundreds of millions in federal research dollars through congressionally directed spending. With the current political climate, that source of higher education funding is likewise endangered.
Private dollars help Mississippi public universities remain competitive and keep more of the state’s best students in state. Those dollars also help reward and retain the best and brightest faculty members.
• Sid Salter is journalist-in-residence at Mississippi State University. Contact him at ssalter@library.msstate.edu.
