HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - Yale University is taking steps to become as transparent with its budget information as other private universities.
The Ivy League school with a $27 billion endowment compiled a 93-page budget overview for the Yale community earlier this year. That was triple the number of pages in last year’s 28-page overview.
The university’s “Budget Book” published in July was the longest and most comprehensive annual budgetary plan in school history, the Yale Daily News reported Tuesday.
This year’s overview, for example, includes separate tables showing expenses and revenues for undergraduate schools, instead of lumping them together in one table with no individual school breakdown as in last year’s overview. It also has new tables showing the finances of the Peabody Museum, libraries and other operations on campus.
Yale officials said the additional budget information is intended to better explain the university’s spending and revenue and isn’t a response to criticism last year from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Senate, an elected body.
“In recent years, the university budget has been among the most secret of secrets,” the faculty group and its budget committee said in a December report .
The group added that Yale should distribute more detailed information on all units of the university, like Stanford University does.
Yale spokesman Thomas Conroy said in a statement Wednesday that “the university budget is a complicated document of revenues and expenses. The Administration believes adding some more detail to the budget can enhance the understanding of budget issues among faculty, students, and staff and lead to greater engagement by the community in discussions about budget choices.”
The Budget Book shows that Yale’s revenues for the 2017-2018 year will total $3.77 billion, about 5 percent more than last year. About a third of the revenue comes from endowment income, and a quarter comes from medical services, including patient care at Yale-New Haven Hospital. About $364 million, or about 10 percent, comes from net tuition, room and board revenues.
Of the $3.70 billion in net expenses, Yale will spend nearly $2.4 billion, or 64 percent, on salaries and employee benefits. The Budget Book does not include the salaries of individual administrators.
According to Yale’s most recent publicly available tax filings, Chief Investment Officer David Swensen received the highest compensation - more than $5 million in 2014 including base salary, bonuses and deferred compensation. President Peter Salovey made $1.19 million in 2014.
Yale also is handing out $307 million this school year in scholarships and other financial aid, a 9 percent increase over last year.
Yale has about 5,500 undergraduate students, 6,900 graduate and professional students and 4,400 faculty members.
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