KU's priorities for the 2024 session

KU's priorities for the 2024 session

KU will work with lawmakers to garner support for the higher education provisions in the Governor's budget proposal.

On January 11, Governor Laura Kelly released her Fiscal Year 2025 budget recommendations, which serve as a starting point for legislative debate.

We are pleased to report that the Governor recommends significant new funding for higher education, which would help KU continue to fulfill its mission and prioritize affordability for students. We appreciate and support the Governor’s recommendations, and we will spend the coming months advocating for lawmakers to include her proposals in the final budget.

Key elements of the Governor’s recommendations for state universities are as follows:

Ongoing funding

Last year, the Legislature provided $20 million to state universities to expand financial aid for students. Due in part to this funding, KU went on to recruit its largest freshman class in history in 2023.

This year, KU joins the Kansas Board of Regents in asking the Legislature to add an additional $14.1 million in funding for need-based aid, which would get Kansas up to the average amount provided by neighboring states.

The argument for this funding is straightforward. First, it benefits students by making college more affordable. And second, it benefits the state because the majority of KU students stay in the region after graduation and join the Kansas workforce — and do so in high-impact fields such as health care, architecture and design, engineering and business. In other words, if the Legislature supports KU’s ability to recruit students, it directly benefits the Kansas workforce.

Each year, the Kansas Legislature appropriates base funding to the state's public universities through a block grant to the Kansas Board of Regents. This base funding is what enables the university to conduct its core operations related to education, service and research. This year, KU is asking lawmakers to enhance this funding to help universities address inflation and other mandatory cost increases while holding tuition as steady as possible for students and families.

One-time funding

KU is seeking a $75 million investment from the state to help build a new building for our nationally designated KU Cancer Center. If the state chooses to fund the $75 million request, that will trigger an additional $75 million of private matching funds that have already been identified within the philanthropic community.

This crucial project is needed to enable KU to bring together doctors, researchers and patients in a single facility, which leads to better patient care and more effective research collaborations that lead to new cures and therapies. Currently, our doctors, researchers and patients are geographically fragmented across multiple facilities throughout the Kansas City metro area.

More specifically, the creation of a single facility will:

  • increase lab space, allowing us to increase the number of researchers
  • create an environment in which researchers and clinicians can collaborate more effectively, accelerating the growth of clinical trials and reducing the time to get treatments from bench to bedside
  • enhance the cancer center's depth of expertise in some of the most cutting-edge cancer treatments such as CAR-T and immunotherapy

A commitment to growing our physical facilities was one factor in the NIH's decision to consider us a nationally designated comprehensive cancer center. If we are unable to follow through on our growth plans, our comprehensive designation may be at risk during future NIH reviews.

This funding is intended to help universities address ongoing long-term deferred maintenance challenges.

This funding will help improve student outcomes by enabling universities to implement National Institute for Student Success recommendations.

This funding will help university address cybersecurity threats and make necessary enhancements to IT infrastructure to protect students, faculty and Kansas citizens.

This funding will help universities demolish old facilities and consolidate space in a way that ultimately saves money for both the universities and the state, as well as students and families.

Additionally, the Governor proposes a 5 percent pay increase for State employees, including university employees.

Overall, this is a very helpful proposal for universities. Related to this, it is worth recalling that past two years’ budgets have been the best higher education budget in decades, for which we remain grateful to the Governor and the Legislature. 

Looking ahead

Remember, the Governor’s budget proposal is just that – a proposal – and her recommendations may or may not end up in the State’s final budget.

Also, remember that even if these proposals make it into the State’s budget, our university must continue to manage structural budget challenges at the Lawrence campus that require us to continue managing costs and finding new revenue sources.