Dean Patrick J. Monahan on Securing Osgoode’s Future

Dean Patrick J. Monahan on Securing Osgoode’s Future

Dean Patrick J. Monahan on Securing Osgoode’s Future

Dear Members of the Community

Over the past few months the Law School has faced a number of difficult and challenging decisions. I expect that many members of the broader community may have heard second or third hand about these developments, and I wanted to take the opportunity to report directly to you so that you have the facts first-hand.

When I became Dean last summer, one of the more important immediate challenges I faced was the need to balance our budget. Over the past three or four years, the Law School had been running a deficit, which had been financed by the central York administration through an agreement with Dean Hogg. Due to a variety of factors, by the end of the last academic year the budget deficit had grown to be much larger than what had originally been anticipated and agreed: the factors that produced this unfortunate result included dwindling government funding, budget cuts resulting from decreased government transfers, decreased revenue from our Professional Development Program following the general downturn in the economy post 9/11, and certain best-case assumptions that had been used to formulate our budget but that simply did not materialize.

So the first task at hand was to balance the budget. Following extensive consultations with students, faculty and staff, in January and early February of this year we succeeded in developing a plan to reduce our expenditures by $780,000 annually, thereby eliminating the operating deficit and producing a budget surplus in the fiscal year commencing in May 2005. This was a difficult exercise since it involved closing a number of non-academic staff positions, but it was clearly necessary. The debt that has been accumulated over the past few years is an internal liability to the central York administration and we will be working with them to manage that debt appropriately on a going forward basis.

Of course, building a great law school involves more than just balancing the books. We also need to ensure that we have the resources necessary to enhance our academic program. Once we had completed the budget reduction exercise, I commenced a second round of community consultations aimed at determining how best to secure the additional resources that we will need to build a strong, dynamic and accessible law school in the future.

In particular, we explored the possibility of increasing the first-year class size versus increasing tuition in order to obtain more funding. I came to the conclusion that increasing the size of the LLB class would damage our reputation and would be short-sighted and ultimately counter-productive, since it would signal that we were prepared to lower our admission standards – and increase our student-faculty ratio – for the sake of increased revenues.

Instead, I am recommending to the Vice President Academic that we increase tuition by $1,500 in the 2006-07 academic year, bringing tuition to $13,500 in that year, and an additional $1,500 in 2007-08, bringing tuition to $15,000 in that year. (I do not propose any tuition increase in either 2004-05 or 2005-06 from our current level of $12,000.) We will use the tuition increase to invest in our LLB program, including more professors and library resources. This does not mean that tuition will not move higher in the future; it does mean that annualized increases of the kind set forth here (where all existing students as well as new students are uniformly affected) will be held to a maximum 15 per cent per year.

At the same time, I am proposing that 45 per cent of this additional tuition revenue be set aside to provide bursaries to our students. This is 50 per cent more than what is required under provincial law and 50 per cent more than what the other Ontario law schools are providing in this regard. This is also a significant increase from our current set-aside which is 38 per cent. I believe that this will counter any negative effects that rising tuition may have on accessibility. It is worth noting that we already have an extensive financial aid program, that reduces the effective or net tuition costs (after bursaries are factored in) for many of our students. For example, 25 per cent of our students are already paying only an effective tuition rate of $4,000, which is the same amount students paid in 1997. A further 25% of the class receives significant bursary support. The additional tuition reinvestment that I am now proposing means that we will be able to do even more for our students in financial need.

In addition to these various steps which we are taking internally to address the matter, I will be engaging in dialogue, together with our student representatives, with various levels of government to discuss our concerns regarding the impacts of decreased government funding and transfers.

How will these revised tuition rates at Osgoode compare with those at other Ontario law schools? Fees at most of the other Ontario law schools range up to $16,000 annually. So even with the tuition increases that I have proposed, which will not come into effect until the 2006-08 period, the fees will still be $1,000 less than that of our closest competitors.

The decisions that we have made in recent months have been difficult, but necessary. I am confident that we have laid the foundation for a stronger, more dynamic and still accessible Osgoode Hall Law School of which we can all be proud.

Yours very truly,

Patrick J. Monahan
Dean
March 8, 2004