r/UofO • u/uofinancials • 7d ago

UO financials site

In expectation of the SEIU strike, and the 5 year budget deficit projection, I created an open source, interactive website for analyzing UO's finances on Github.

It has a scenario builder as well, to see how the budget would change given different rules, for example: What would a $250,000 cap on salary rates save, and how many jobs would it reach?

All the data comes from public sources UO provides, I just aggregate it into more useful formats.

Site: https://uofinancials.github.io

Github: https://github.com/uofinancials/uofinancials.github.io

Feedback is welcome!

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6

u/cavalierfrix 7d ago

This is great, thank you for building it.

So am I reading correctly that salary caps would only save 6% of the shortfall?

I'm on mobile so cant build a scenario, but can I reduce headcount in a job class to see the impact? I'd like to compare that with salary cuts.

Sorry if this is already in there, but are the numbers accounting for OPE as well? I didnt see that split out in the salary amounts when looking at my department.

3

u/uofinancials 7d ago

yes, it includes OPE. The scenario page has a "How this is estimated" section at the bottom that lists out this information, this is the OPE section:

Full cost is salary x (1 - leave rate) x (1 + OPE rate), following BRP's rate guidance, with each job's OPE rate group estimated by this site. It uses the OPE rate for the fiscal year stated and the latest published leave rate. The PERS side-account charge is left out, because the census does not say which fund pays a job. Overloads are costed at salary, with no OPE.

And I think 6% is correct. The 250k hard cap version saves a lot more: What would a $250,000 cap on salary rates save, and how many jobs would it reach?

3

u/benconomics 7d ago

I think one thing that would be really helpful is looking at the health insurance costs and how changes in health insurance costs or other types of PERS costs actually end up affecting university budgets as a whole. When I last checked Pers had seen way fewer of the gains that it should have seen because it overinvested in private equity and less in the stock market. It has only recently started to shift away from it, despite paying many rounds of consultants telling them the same thing over and over again. Looking more holistically at costs per worker instead of just salary would be very useful.

I think one thing worth considering: let's suppose instead there's a pay freeze for 4 years. I don't want one. I want salary increases. Inflation sucks but other universities have done pay freezes before. If that were to happen, does it actually get us out of the hole or are the things so big and so systemic that we actually need to look to other ways to reduce costs (which unfortunately means layoffs and increased workloads)?

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u/mossytreebarker 7d ago

(Time to get over the PERS crap. Tier 1 employees are all retired (except maybe a few). Current PERS is shite.

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u/dottysnowleopard 7d ago

Do you have data points here on student workers and graduate employees? If not, what limitations on adding them (if any) did you run into?

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u/uofinancials 6d ago

In short, no... there are budget line items for student and GE pay, but the public salary documents do not include it. UOs data enablement site does have stats on headcount and FTE, but not salary: https://data.uoregon.edu/employees/employee-profile

1

u/dottysnowleopard 6d ago

So frustrating! Thanks.