Interim Chancellor Robert Easter recently sent out an email to all students, faculty, and staff about the financial situation of the University of Illinois. In it, he points out that we have received only seven percent of our annual appropriation from the State. C’mon Illinois – get your act together!

Dear Students:

As we approach the spring semester I write to inform you of the current
financial situation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

As is the case with all public universities in the state we currently face
a cash crisis. In the current fiscal year that commenced on July 1, 2009,
we have only received 7 percent of our annual appropriation from the
state. As I write this letter the state of Illinois owes the University
more than $436 million of its appropriation. That number increases every
month.

As a response, we have instituted a number of measures on campus to ensure
that we have the necessary resources to get through the semester with an
eye to confronting a similar fiscal shortfall in the next fiscal year. Our
faculty and administrative staff will begin mandatory furloughs in
February. (A furlough is a leave of absence without pay.) We have also
been cutting costs at all levels of the university and we are looking at
ways we can consolidate services to garner even more savings. Finally, we
continue to draw on cash reserves, but these are finite and we can no
longer continue to go down this path.

Please understand that we are doing everything we can to protect our
students – our number one priority – from the impact of these cost-cutting
measures. We believe that each fiscal decision we make must not compromise
the education of this state’s greatest assets, its daughters and sons.

Please share this letter with your parents and family members. Great
public universities such as ours must be preserved and supported to ensure
that Illinois and the nation stay competitive in a global economy.

Thank you for your support,

Robert A. Easter
Chancellor and Provost (Interim)

As college students, we’re notorious for doing a poor job at tracking our finances. Credit card companies know this, which explains why we there is so much credit card marketing directed at us.

Quicken Online is now free. This is a great way to track your finances for busy college students. Simply sign up for an account, type in your online account details, and Quicken Online will automatically compile and categorize your transactions. You can also get reports on how much you are spending per category, how much you are spending per payee, and what is your in/out cash flows.

It’s a great service – easy to setup and easy to use. I’d highly recommend it, especially if you don’t currently track your finances.

Today the Chicago Tribune reports that College-aid officials ‘hear outcry’ – Administrators move to distance selves from sweetheart deals.

So has college aid really been this corrupt? The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators has published a new code of conduct and has set up rules for its conferences – where this week more than 12,000 college aid officials will be attending.

The changes led to a tame atmosphere in the conference’s exhibit hall, with lenders handing out pens, Post-it notes and Slinkys instead of raffling off thousands of dollars in scholarships and restaurant gift certificates to college officials who submitted business cards.

How has this kind of behavior been accepted for this long? Obviously there are huge conflicts of interest here. I have no clue how these college aid administrators were allowed to accept these kinds of bribes. This is simply preposterous. I’m glad it is over.