A $1.5 billion financial plan for the state-operated system was approved by the Board of Trustees Executive Committee at a meeting in Buffalo on July 22. The plan filled a $46.7 million operating budget gap through:

• $22.7 million in saving from administrative efficiencies and flexibility, academic program productivity, and a retirement incentive, and

• $24 million in savings through a 3 percent reduction in the operating expenses of the three SUNY teaching hospitals in Brooklyn, Stony Brook and Syracuse.

Board chairman Thomas Egan said the plan will “carry out the goals” of Rethinking SUNY: “to protect the academic quality of the State University while at the same time making it a more cost-efficient system of higher education.”

The plan incorporates aspects of the 1996-97 state budget that include no tuition increase, plus $51.9 million of added funding, retaining of the Educational Opportunity Program funding, and permission for trustees to consider a variable tuition rate for the five colleges of technology and agriculture.

On July 2, Governor George Pataki formally signed a bill which provides free tuition for students who are New York National Guard members and have not obtained a bachelor’s degree. Students are eligible who attend a public or private university or college in the state, but the maximum tuition in the SUNY campus tuition ceiling.

Seven SUNY campuses were prominently ranked among the nation’s Top 100 higher education values by Money magazine — more than twice the number of any other public university system in the U.S. In addition to Albany, Binghamton, Geneseo, Fredonia, Stony Brook, Buffalo and Plattsburgh made the list, and also dominated Money’s “Top Ten in the Northeast.”

In August, the federal Education Department announced that a record 51.7 million students nationwide will enroll in elementary and secondary schools this fall, a record that “will continue to be broken every year for the next ten years, amounting to a 15 percent increase by 2006.” New York’s enrollment in these schools will be 2,862,000 this fall, and the figure is expected to increase 1.2 percent by 2006.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, in its Aug. 9 issue, described interim SUNY Chancellor John W. Ryan as “one of SUNY’s biggest assets in its search” for a permanent chancellor. In August’s Empire State Report, Ryan said that SUNY “really started out almost full grown . . . and at the time required a strong central focus . . . more of a central focus than is called for today.”

Board of Trustees Vice Chairman Erland Kailbourne added that the new board “recognizes that SUNY probably has been all things to all people. But we need to drive costs down . . . and evolve toward a strategic mission.”