Burdette talks tuition at Student Government Association Meeting
About 54 percent of the university’s total revenue from 2009-10 came from tuition, David Burdette told student leaders Monday.
During the Student Government Association meeting, the vice president of Finance and Administrative Services lectured students and answered questions about how CMU is funded.
Burdette said Central Michigan University is a $400 million a year enterprise with 2,200 employees, making it the second largest employer in Isabella County after the Soaring Eagle Casino and Resort.
“Where did the money come from?” Burdette asked. “Most of it comes from you.”
He showed the students two pie charts, one representing CMU’s total revenue for 2009-10 and the other showing its total expenditures.
In addition to the 54 percent, the first chart showed 20 percent of CMU’s revenue last year came from state appropriations and 26 percent from other sources.
Brittany Mouzourakis, a Garden City senior and SGA president, said she appreciated how candid Burdette was with the questions.
“I thought he was very entertaining and informative,” she said.
Michigan is a high-tuition and high-financial-aid state, Burdette said, and CMU wants to increase the amount of need-based financial aid.
He said when five freshmen leave CMU, the university loses $100,000. He also said a family moves out of Michigan every 12 minutes.
“You can see how every student is important,” Burdette said.
There are many reasons people come to CMU, he said, including the fact that the school had a great football team and the College of Medicine.
“There’s a fallacy that we’ll let anybody in,” Burdette said. “We won’t let anybody in.”
Mouzourakis said SGA plans on bringing many more administrators to speak at its meetings.
One student asked about the university’s PrintQ system and why they are limited to so few pages.
“I know that in previous years, there was a lot more paper being used than they could afford,” Burdette said.
Another student asked if the CMU Promise program would be reinstated and Burdette answered it would not be.
He told students jobs are being created on campus and are looking to be filled, and to head over to Student Services if they need one.
At the end of the meeting, a group of students gave a presentation on disability awareness. They showed a Fox News video about a man who claimed he was not allowed to fly on an airplane because he was too disabled.
Saginaw junior John Ketchum said people should be open to more things than just race when talking about diversity.
“A lot of times people only think of multicultural issues when they think of diversity,” he said. “Diversity is anything different than how you are.”
