Regents Want Computers Everywhere, Money from Nowhere

The South Dakota Board of Regents has approved its budget proposal for next year. They're asking the Legislature for an 11% bigger slurp at the trough.

The budget proposal includes another shot at persuading the Legislature to let the Regents spend $3.8 million a year to turn every campus into a big wireless hotspot. In the modern world of mobile computing, being able to access the Internet from anywhere on campus makes perfect sense. Going wireless can also free up space currently dedicated to fixed computer labs for other uses (as is happening with a "computer lounge" here at DSU). But let's make sure the Regents don't include a Tablet PC mandate with their wireless plan. We love wireless, but we also love being able to buy our own computers (and keep them!) for half the price of the bloated leases of Gateway equipment that the Regents force on DSU undergrads.

The Regents want us to get Internet from thin air; they also have a way to make money appear from thin air. The Regents want to inject another $11 million into the budget by shifting payday one day forward. Move payday from the end of the month to the beginning of the next month, and the final payday of the fiscal year, June 30, disappears from this year's budget and moves to next year's, giving the Regents and extra $11 million to play with.

Now that sounds like a free lunch for the Regents, and that sounds fishy. $11 million dollars doesn't come out of nowhere; someone's pockets have to get picked. Regents exec Tad Perry says there could be some impact on retirement fund calculations and promises to work that out. But before we even get there, we're asking 5,500+ FTEs (see SDBOR Factbook 2008, p. 40 -- PDF alert!) to wait an extra day for their paychecks. I'm not sure exactly how you calculate the lost utility there: If I divide my current Regental salary by 365, that day's wait is worth $87, and the Regents will make me wait that extra day every month for the remainder of my employment. Over a year, that's a thousand bucks worth of utility lost.

Even if you don't buy that calculation—a day's wait isn't that big a deal— the Regents' money scheme sounds like the old hacker bank robbery trick where you break into the bank's computer and transfer a fraction of a penny from everyone else's account to yours: it's not a big deal to each individual, but it's still theft. Let's keep our funding honest and not base our universities' fiscal sustainability on bookkeeping tricks.