This year’s midterm election results at the national level could mean changes in funding for New York State and Geneseo.
President Christopher Dahl said he has concerns about sources of additional funding for the college, specifically noting the importance of earmarks, research grants and Pell Grants.
House Republicans have stated clearly their intentions to impose a moratorium on earmarks, and plan to enact such a policy once they assume control of the House of Representatives in January. “This doesn’t bode well for the future of earmarks,” Dahl said.
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell recently stated his support of a moratorium on earmark spending in the Senate. Geneseo has benefitted from earmarks in the past, most recently with Representative Chris Lee’s appropriation of $500,000 last year for a new magnetic resonance spectrometer in the Integrated Science Center.
Additionally, the Republicans have stated their intention to bring federal discretionary spending back to 2008 levels. This would mean cuts of more than $100 billion, some of which could significantly reduce federal spending on education and research.
Discretionary spending funds federal organizations like the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy. These and other organizations provide Geneseo with funding for research projects.
According to Anne Baldwin, director of sponsored research for Geneseo, the college received $1.1 million during the 2008-2009 school year and $1.3 million for the 2009-2010 school year through these grants.
The grants pay for various supplies and equipment used in research facilities by science departments. Some of the grants come through other universities such as the University of Rochester, where a grant by the Department of Energy for its Laboratory for Laser Energetics funds research conducted by Geneseo’s physics department.
According to an article on Bloomberg, however, there may not be cause for alarm as Republicans in Congress have been unclear about where cuts to discretionary spending would be made.
“I think there’ll still be research funding. I’m not lying awake worrying about that,” said George Briggs, chair of the biology department at Geneseo.
According to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, cuts to education threatened by Congressional Republicans in the past have turned out to be less severe than originally feared.
The third element of concern for Geneseo’s funding concerns Pell Grants; the budget for the Pell Grant program has fallen $5.7 billion short for the 2011 fiscal year. Dahl said the shortfall is a result of multiple factors: a struggling economy, a drop in average household income that leads more students to qualify for the grants and a general increase in college enrollment coming from students seeking employment opportunities.
According to the American Association of Community Colleges, students could face a cut of as much as $845 to their grants if the funding is not replaced.