Higher Education, Fiscal Administration, and Budgeting

This book takes an applied approach to budgeting and fiscal administration in higher education. It presents new and aspiring leaders in higher education and student affairs with the fundamental knowledge and skills to supervise, analyze, and implement budgets that make the best and most effective use of limited resources. By exploring the foundational elements of fiscal administration and outlining the process step-by-step, this text carefully takes leaders through real-world examples and includes myriad opportunities for application. Indeed, a major goal of this text is to provide readers with a set of technical skills that can be applied across a range of contexts. Our expectation is that current and future higher education and student affairs leaders will find this text invaluable in their day-to-day work and that the material presented here will help them engage in fruitful decisions around the allocation of scare resources.

Gabriel Serna and Spencer Weiler’s Higher Education, Fiscal Administration, and Budgeting is exceptionally well crafted, providing critical insights into how institutional budgeting actually happens and how it should happen. The authors go beyond the normal high-level considerations (though those are included) to provide specific guidance regarding the skills college and university budget managers will need to do their jobs right. Students of higher education, future administrators, and those currently working within higher education will benefit from Serna and Weiler’s work., The authors offer a new spin to traditional higher education budgeting texts by focusing on forecasting, strategy, and data-driven decision making. The book provides an accessible introduction to the fiscal administration of colleges and universities while connecting leadership with finance., Higher Education, Fiscal Administration, and Budgeting is a rare treasure in the field of finance and budgeting. By focusing on the fiscal management of colleges and universities, Serna and Weiler expertly and clearly teach us the foundational budgetary concepts, skills and strategies that all current and future administrators—whether in academic or student affairs—need to effectively and efficiently manage both operating and capital budgets. Replete with numerous illustrations, examples, and practical budget experiences using real data, this book offers a lively and engaging treatment of budgeting and fiscal administration., Serna and Weiler do a masterful job of explaining complicated financial concepts in a way that will be accessible to students and faculty alike. This book will surely be a must-read for graduate courses in higher education finance and budgeting.

Dr. Gabriel R. Serna is an assistant professor in the School of Education at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. His research interests include higher education economics, finance and policy. Dr. Spencer C. Weiler is an associate professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Northern Colorado. In addition to numerous publications (books, book chapters, and journal articles) in the area of school finance and budgeting, Dr. Weiler is honored to have worked 15 years in public education.