The University of Idaho will use a one-time windfall to absorb a high-profile, $2 million budget cut.
And that means students and staff shouldn’t feel the effects of the cut, passed at the end of the 2025 legislative session.
“We don’t want it to affect the student experience at all,” Kim Salisbury, the U of I’s senior associate vice president for finance and planning, told Idaho Education News Wednesday. “We don’t want it to affect retention. We don’t want it to affect (the) graduation rate.”
The Legislature imposed $2 million budget cuts against the U of I and Boise State University — with some disgruntled lawmakers saying they wanted to send a message over diversity, equity and inclusion programs. The state’s other colleges and universities were spared budget cuts.
The two cuts represent a small fraction of the universities’ budgets — Boise State has a $289.8 million budget this year, and the U of I’s budget is $196.4 million. And the cuts are one-time in nature — which means the Legislature could fully restore funding next year, while the universities find temporary budget fixes this year.
The U of I is banking on savings on health care claims. The university pays a series of “consolidated fringe rates” to help cover benefit costs for staff, faculty, temporary help and students. But claims have come in lower than expected in recent years, so that should give the U of I room to pay lower rates for faculty and staff next year, Salisbury said.
This rate reduction was in the works before the Legislature cut the universities’ budgets, and the U of I had been hoping to put this savings into a rainy-day fund.
“This is a rainy day,” Salisbury said.
Boise State will absorb its $2 million from budget reserves, a move that will cut into the university’s strategic investments, spokeswoman Sherry Squires said this week.
The U of I and Boise State budget cuts are just one of several moving parts in the higher education budgets. And some of these items will help offset the cuts.
The four-year schools will share about $3.4 million from an “operational capacity enhancement” line item. All four schools will use their share of the money for staff salaries and benefits.
Boise State will receive close to $1.2 million, and U of I will receive $996,000. Idaho State University and Lewis-Clark State College — untouched by the late-session budget cuts — will receive $908,000 and $288,000, respectively.
Another budget line item — known as “enrollment workload adjustment” — came in as a mixed bag.
Idaho State will receive $988,000 from this line item and Boise State will receive $196,000, and both universities will use the money to cover personnel costs tied to growth.
The EWA line item uses a complicated formula to measure growth, or the lack of growth, which means that some schools wind up taking budget hits. Lewis-Clark and U of I will lose $102,500 and about $58,000, respectively.
