Research, financial aid face reduced funding
It’s been nearly a month since sequestration went into effect, but USC still isn’t quite sure how it will be affected by the automatic federal budget cuts.
The slate of across-the-board cuts established by the 2011 Budget Control Act are worth $85 billion this year and went into effect March 1, and USC isn’t expecting them to go away.
“(There is) no real hope, no great hope that sequestration will be solved imminently,” USC President Harris Pastides said.
Now, weeks later, USC is starting to piece together how it will be felt throughout the university system, which receives hundreds of millions of federal dollars each year.
But for the most part, officials say they still aren’t sure.
Research
In the near future, the biggest impact may be felt by researchers.
Vice President for Research Prakash Nagarkatti told trustees last week that USC expects to lose 8.4 percent, or $12.08 million, of its federal research money this year.
Federal agencies provided nearly 60 percent of the $238.3 million of grants USC won in the 2012 fiscal year.
Those cuts will come in different shapes from different agencies.
The National Institutes of Health, USC’s second-largest research funding source, is cutting grants it’s already awarded by 7 to 8 percent, said Steven Beckham, USC’s director of federal relations. The National Science Foundation, the third-largest, is keeping grants intact but isn’t giving out any more.
How the cuts will shape up should be more clear in the next few weeks, Nagarkatti said, but that money won’t be matched by USC.
“We have made it clear that the university cannot pick up the research costs of the people who are doing externally funded research,” Provost Michael Amiridis said.
Those are changes that could affect individual researchers more than USC at large.
USC pays its faculty for nine months of the year and expects them to find grant funding to work over the summer.
If they can’t — or if that money runs dry — Nagarkatti said it could effectively be a pay cut for researchers.
Sandra Kelly, the chairwoman of faculty senate, knows that challenge well.
When a five-year NIH grant she won after arriving at USC wasn’t renewed in time, she spent a summer struggling to make ends meet, she said.
“It is also very demoralizing for faculty who have a passion for their research,” Kelly said. “It costs money to do research, and if they don’t have the money, they can’t do the research.”
And, she said, funding cuts could force researchers to slim their laboratory staff, and once they do, they might find it “almost impossible” to get that talent back.
USC has focused on interdisciplinary, locally relevant research questions in recent years in an effort stay competitive while grant money grows tight, and it has some money to help researchers pay bills while they wait for their funding to be renewed, Nagarkatti said. The university offers up to $15,000 per grant per faculty member in so-called “bridge funds.”
“Other than that, we really can’t do much,” Nagarkatti said.
Financial aid
Last week, USC President Harris Pastides went to Washington to lobby South Carolina’s Congressional delegation.
His focus, he told trustees last week: to keep funding for federal student loans intact.
Students throughout the USC system receive about $318 million in federal financial aid each year, Beckham said, including work study, Pell grants, loans and Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants.
Some of that money is safe this year.
Pastides told trustees last week that Pell grants are exempt from automatic cuts this year, and students have already received loans for this year.
But work study and SEOG funds could be cut this year, Beckham said.
According to a White House analysis, about 830 fewer students in South Carolina will get financial aid under sequestration, and 270 would lose their work-study jobs.
Next year, the loan program will be up for cuts, Pastides said, and after this year, Pell grants aren’t safe, so that program could be shrunk, too, according to Beckham.
“That’s ominous for us,” Beckham said.
Just how the financial aid picture will shake out isn’t clear yet, but Beckham said he thought South Carolina’s Congressional delegation held higher education funding as a priority.
Still, he said, a number of tough questions don’t yet have answers, and the government has a number of competing needs to reconcile as it wrestles with sequestration and a mounting debt.
“There’s still a lot of dust yet to settle,” Beckham said.