On the costs side, one imagines increased scholarships and personnel adjustments. If you
were to add students for instance, what would that do to your personnel costs and overtime,
factoring in the realities and goals of the fringe benefits associated with personnel and also merit
increases.
With the intentional focus on our instructional programming to further improve it, there
would be some costs there. There would be costs involving capital, construction, and operating
and maintenance of new and existing facilities. We also considered that we would take down
some facilities that are past their useful periods for our campus. Other costs include the
assignable square footage that would be covered within each year and the other operating
expenses.
In our financial planning, we wanted to keep at the forefront other considerations, such as
student affordability and the pressures that each one of these variables would put on student
affordability, and our debt capacity as a university.
As Ihave told members of the legislature, we want to make sure that we follow the rule
book. So, we took into account the state statutes and regulations that would apply to these
considerations.
Our basic conclusion is that an aggressive building program is achievable at UK. And
yes, it is dependent on these factors: greater and more intentional philanthropy, innovative
partnerships, smart growth of our student body, continuing investments by the Commonwealth,
and improving efficiencies. We believe with forethought and commitment, we will be able to
achieve our ambitious goals.
In tenns of factors for setting our capital priorities for new space on campus, the first one
is the impact on quality of undergraduate education. We looked carefully at the utilization of our
buildings, the capability they currently have, renovation cost, and so forth. We also looked at
their age and condition because we want to think in tenns of modem leaming for the future. We
considered the availability of funds from all the different sources.
We must also look at the impact that construction would have on revenue generation
altematives through research and development funds, our tuition and fees, and so forth.
Another factor is program growth and entrepreneurship. I found as I visited the campus
that we have many ideas about how we can meet our commitment to students to provide a
quality education working with partners in an imaginative way. So, we want to be able to tap
that creative vein that we have here at UK in planning for our future.
In tenns of our building program, we want to open in fall 2013 a new undergraduate
residence hall that would house 600 students. Its focus would be to contain honors and
innovative leaming programs, so we can add the living and leaming enviromnent that we desire
for our students.
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