Due to statewide budget cuts, the Academic Advancement Program will be forced to make an estimated 5 to 10 percent cut in funding, which will impact students utilizing both the tutoring and counseling programs offered by the organization.
“Tutoring, as well as counseling are large programs, with large budgets. Tutoring had to look at where in their budget they could cut, and where it would have the least impact on students,” said Charles Alexander, director of the AAP.
The Academic Advancement Program offers tutoring for over 450 classes in three disciplines: English and humanities, social science, and math and science. To accommodate the cuts, the program will be hiring fewer tutors, which will decrease the number of available tutoring sessions for each class as well as tutoring sessions for classes that are not in high demand.
To counteract this, the number of slots for students to enroll in for each session will be increased, creating larger tutoring groups, said Donald Wasson, director of tutorials.
“We’re keeping courses in all areas; we aren’t eliminating whole disciplines. It tends to be smaller classes that will be dropped and larger lecture classes that will not be dropped.
“Because of the sheer number of students, it’s going to drop our ability to tutor smaller courses,” Wasson said.
In addition to the cuts AAP is facing as a whole, the tutorial program is also facing the problem of exceeding their own department’s budget, which may increase cuts within the program and lead to even larger tutoring groups.
“As a tutor, we feel we can do a better job with a group session with four to six students. That’s optimal because you can get the interaction between students.
“When it increases to 10 and 20 students, it becomes a discussion section, and you feel yourself copying down notes. This is something that people don’t take into account,” said Jeison Recinos, the chemistry tutorial supervisor.
On top of the cuts within the tutoring program, AAP is taking cuts in administration and decreasing the number of counselors available to students.
Smaller, developing programs will not be affected, and neither will the salaries of the program’s employees.
Scholarships are also protected because they are not part of the operating budget and are actually increasing due to donations and fundraising.
Alexander said that it’s not possible to shift money to decrease the impact of the cuts on students in the tutorial program because not enough funds are available.
“Hopefully students will come to understand the need for this and that it’s totally out of our control because if we had control we would not be cutting anything. We’d be trying to improve things. We’re trying to start programs like HIGH AIMS, a pilot program for students pursuing a health profession, and this is still going to happen, despite cuts. Some of this will still continue to happen, but not to the same degree if we had full funding,” he said.
He added that the university gets money back each year depending on its profits, and there is still a possibility the tutorial program can get some money back. The changes for next year are still being discussed, and nothing will be certain until AAP finalizes the budget in June or July.
“We want to make AAP … a family where you can really identify with tutors, and I feel that, starting next year, it’s going to change. I’m hoping it won’t, but it’s definitely going to change,” Recinos said.