i try to keep my mouth shut about the inner workings of the school on this Board. It just isn’t productive to talk about why decisions are made without complete information and all points of view. nor is any conversation productive when the responders don’t understand or take the time to learn the basics of university finance and simple things like the formula used to calculate what can be allocated and spent unrestricted from the net proceeds on the earnings of the endowment.
That’s before we even start talking about bond finance, the advisability of using outside bond counsel and other high risk policy decisions we’ve made in the past.
But we’ve had a lot of questions about university finances and the future of TU, so I thought I would share a few documents. They are publicly available documents through the FY 16 school year. For the most part, it shows TU’s debts, the use of lines of credit for operating expenses from unusual sources, such as the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the amount TU was using in a line of credit from BOK to keep pace with costs of expansion and still meet operating demands. They borrowed somewhere between $25 and the limit of $50 million to keep the lights on or pay down debt at higher interest rates. We can’t see why or what the money went to.
It’s worth noting a few things. First, these numbers are from an outside vendor, but they rely on the representations of the school and it was a rosy time for TU. Things have changed substantially as more debts have come due, but you can get a snapshot of how much debt TU had to retire or refinance and how that’s effecting short and long term planning as full pay student retention numbers have plummeted.
TU had to evolve and make these investments in infrastructure. Despite the thinly veiled “I told you so” greed of the faculty dissent crowd who either wanted the money spent on them or on projects that helped them or that they could take credit for in the lounge, TU would be in significantly worse shape than what it is now without the programs and amenities that the bond funds were used for to improve the residential experience of the school. Today’s kids are spoiled and today’s parents don’t write TU sized checks without the immediate payoff of a nice gym, student union, new dorms and apartments, etc.
What is troubling is what remains unanswered from some of these documents, such as the bonds used to partially redo the stadium, the refinance of those bonds at unfavorable rates and making them student tuition revenue dependent and other questionable decisions that indicate a level of spending money to make money financial stress around 2010 when we were dropping cash on TG.
There’s plenty on the web that will explain what I mean if you want to go find it. I don’t have the time or interest to go through a decade of financials and give you a forensic critique on decision making. Again, because I’m not on the board or on campus working everyday. I simply don’t have a full picture. My sense is that these documents don’t have a full picture either as we enter 2019.
https://pp-990-audits.s3.amazonaws.com/9976220161.pdf?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAI7C6X5GT42DHYZIA/20181015/us-east-1/s3/aws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20181015T153645Z&X-Amz-Expires=1800&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Signature=a6663bb49ec26f33fcb5048c07142f98bb8922c1c344e7947e5a8e94136f142b
That’s before we even start talking about bond finance, the advisability of using outside bond counsel and other high risk policy decisions we’ve made in the past.
But we’ve had a lot of questions about university finances and the future of TU, so I thought I would share a few documents. They are publicly available documents through the FY 16 school year. For the most part, it shows TU’s debts, the use of lines of credit for operating expenses from unusual sources, such as the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the amount TU was using in a line of credit from BOK to keep pace with costs of expansion and still meet operating demands. They borrowed somewhere between $25 and the limit of $50 million to keep the lights on or pay down debt at higher interest rates. We can’t see why or what the money went to.
It’s worth noting a few things. First, these numbers are from an outside vendor, but they rely on the representations of the school and it was a rosy time for TU. Things have changed substantially as more debts have come due, but you can get a snapshot of how much debt TU had to retire or refinance and how that’s effecting short and long term planning as full pay student retention numbers have plummeted.
TU had to evolve and make these investments in infrastructure. Despite the thinly veiled “I told you so” greed of the faculty dissent crowd who either wanted the money spent on them or on projects that helped them or that they could take credit for in the lounge, TU would be in significantly worse shape than what it is now without the programs and amenities that the bond funds were used for to improve the residential experience of the school. Today’s kids are spoiled and today’s parents don’t write TU sized checks without the immediate payoff of a nice gym, student union, new dorms and apartments, etc.
What is troubling is what remains unanswered from some of these documents, such as the bonds used to partially redo the stadium, the refinance of those bonds at unfavorable rates and making them student tuition revenue dependent and other questionable decisions that indicate a level of spending money to make money financial stress around 2010 when we were dropping cash on TG.
There’s plenty on the web that will explain what I mean if you want to go find it. I don’t have the time or interest to go through a decade of financials and give you a forensic critique on decision making. Again, because I’m not on the board or on campus working everyday. I simply don’t have a full picture. My sense is that these documents don’t have a full picture either as we enter 2019.
https://pp-990-audits.s3.amazonaws.com/9976220161.pdf?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAI7C6X5GT42DHYZIA/20181015/us-east-1/s3/aws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20181015T153645Z&X-Amz-Expires=1800&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Signature=a6663bb49ec26f33fcb5048c07142f98bb8922c1c344e7947e5a8e94136f142b