But 4-5% increase in faculty expenditures since 2001 only produces a 60% increase. If the biggest line-item increased by 60%, why did the budget overall increase by 80%? Something else must be growing a lot faster than faculty expenditures!
And why does an 80% increase in expenditures necessarily lead to a tripling of tuition? Shouldn't tuition go up 80% as well? Unless some other source of funding has disappeared?
Nope, the math here is a little different from that.
100 + 5% = 105 + 5% = 112.5 + 5% = 115.7625 + 5% ... = 179.5856326 - which is approximately an 80% increase over 12 years.
As for the tripling of tuition, let's assume that tuition accounted for 30% of the budget at the start of things above. Even if no other funding sources are decreased (which is not the case with public universities, but let's ignore that for now), increasing the cost of tuition by 79.58%, which is the same amount that the overall budget increased, gets us:
30 + 79.58% = 53.874
So if we still have 70% of the original budget covered, and we add it to our newly increased tuition cost, we get:
53.874 + 70 = 123.874
You can see that there's a bit of a deficit here.
All of that having been said, what is going on at UVa is pretty clearly messed up. Regardless of the changes that need to happen in the budget, which I think everyone can agree on, the BOG way overstepped here.
And why does an 80% increase in expenditures necessarily lead to a tripling of tuition? Shouldn't tuition go up 80% as well? Unless some other source of funding has disappeared?