Inside Higher Ed: Who Gets How Much Money and Where It Goes
Sure, public universities generally make their annual budgets available. But how much did the chemistry department spend on copying at Kinko’s – yesterday?
At Oregon State University, that kind of detailed information on financial transactions is accessible online, albeit only to those connected to computers on the campus. “It’s pretty basic, but it is very transparent. Everybody in the institution can see everything that goes on everywhere,” says Mark McCambridge, vice president for finance and administration at Oregon State.
“There’s always this mystery — ‘The vice president is holding back money,’ or ‘This person got more money than I did’.… There’s always that mystery that surrounds the budget, and in our case it isn’t there.”
On Oregon State’s budget reporting Web site, users can track expenditures, transaction by transaction, by clicking through the various budget lines in an academic department or administrative office, from the president’s on down. As shown in a demonstration of the system, accessible here, users dissecting the biology department’s budget can check out expenditures under “lab supplies” and see, for instance, $49.15 spent at WARD’S Natural Science one day, and $115.47 spent at PETCO three days earlier.
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