What will YSU do when the bills start coming in?

Everyone appears to be happy that professors and support personnel were on the job this week for the opening of classes at Youngstown State University, with students, employees, administrators and trustees all expressing their relief.
But the unspoken truth is that the wage and fringe benefit agreements that were reached in an effort to avoid a delay in opening the semester come at an economic price that the university is not in a position to afford.
The university has not yet released specific figures on the cost of the new contracts with the 380-member faculty union or the 400 members of the Association of Classified Employees.
To arrive at a rough estimate of what these contracts will add to the cost of running the university, consider this. The faculty contract called for increases of 3 percent, 3.5 percent and 3.5 percent over its three-year life. That means for every $100 in salary paid to professors under the old contract, the university will have to pay $103 in year one, $106.60 in year two and $110.31 in year three.
For classified personnel, the figures for every $100 spent under the old contract will be $103, $106.09 and $109.54 in the first, second and third years of the new contract.
Many other university employees are already slated to receive similar raises and those who are working under a separate contract that expires next year are sure to demand the same.
It adds up quickly
Given a faculty and staff payroll of nearly $65 million this fiscal year, the university is going to have to come up with an additional $6.5 million to pay just the increases by the third year of the contract. That works out to about $500 for each student, just in the final year of the contract.
Where does the administration intend to find the money to pay the additional cost it has assumed for the next three years?
We don't know, but we do know this: Not one penny should come from the pockets of the students or their parents.
This should have been the time that the university stood up and said, "no." Every time one of the union negotiators started talking about what was "fair" for the professors or the support staff, the university should have responded by asking what was fair to the students.
Unfortunately the university was in a weak position to take that high road, because it had already given its administrators salary packages that equaled or exceed those being demanded by the unions. Still, fiscal responsibility has to begin somewhere. It should have begun -- belated as it may have been -- with these negotiations.
Too many public employees and their negotiators act as if the public purse is bottomless. No matter how tight the times, they have come to believe that only the taxpayers or tuition-paying students should sacrifice -- never them.
Time to cut
The university is now facing a looming shortfall. There are only a few ways to fill the gap. One would be to get more money from the state, but that is not going to happen. The other would be to increase tuition yet again, which would not only be immoral, it would be counterproductive in the long run because every time tuition is raised another hundred dollars, the university prices itself out of the market for some students.
Those who suggest that the health insurance co-pays that were agreed to will save the university any large amount are kidding themselves. The co-pays are minuscule -- a worker making $40,000 will pay $600 toward a health care plan that is already costing the university $13,000 a year. The co-pay is likely to be eaten up by annual increases in the premium. In recent years, health insurance costs to employers have been increasing at a pace far above the overall inflation rate.
The only realistic and fair way to save the millions of dollars that the university has committed itself to pay in raises is to make personnel cuts. Slightly larger classes mean fewer professors. Fewer assistants will mean that administrators and professors will have to pick up some of the routine office work. Fewer professional maintenance workers may mean a less pristine campus, or may mean that there will be more part-time jobs for students.
The employees made unreasonable demands. University trustees and administrators, who were obviously unwilling to suffer the pain of a strike, chose the easy way out. Those who benefited most from the university's generosity should bear the cost of balancing the budget over the next three years -- not the students, their parents or the taxpayers.