WATERLOO — As Wilfrid Laurier University deals with a projected $25-million deficit, its counterpart down the road reports no financial troubles.

"Essentially it's business as usual at the University of Waterloo," UW spokesperson Nick Manning said.

"We're still going through our budget process right now. We will know at the end of this month what our numbers are. But we're feeling confident that if there is a shortfall in our budget, it may well be slim."

Of course, UW and Laurier are very different animals and Laurier is being hit by a "perfect storm," said Jim Butler, Laurier's vice-president of finance and administration.

"Aside from being down the street from one another, they are incredibly different institutions," Manning said.

UW, which has 35,000 students, double the number at Laurier, is well known for math, computer science and engineering.

Laurier has nine faculties: business and economics, arts, liberal arts, social work, education, music, science, human and social sciences and graduate and post-doctoral studies.

Butler said arts applications are dropping across the province.

Another factor in Laurier's financial struggles is the provincial government's funding formula that generally gives more per-student funding for UW's programs than Laurier's.

"An arts student would draw half the funding of an engineering student," Butler said. "Laurier's one of the lowest operating-grant-per-student-funded schools in the system."

And UW is "one of the highest," Butler said.

The difference represents millions of dollars.

"You've also got differences in the amount of research funding," Butler said. "UW's able to charge overhead for their research and that sort of thing, which we don't. So it's a very different structure.

"The other thing is, during … the late '90s, '80s, universities were allowed to charge more — certain programs were allowed to be deregulated — and Laurier did not take full advantage of that like other institutions did. We were poised to increase our tuition levels for our undergraduate business program when a moratorium got slapped on."

The result?

"An undergraduate business program here is $7,500, at Western it's $14,500, at U of T it's $14,500, at Queen's it's $14,500. So if we were allowed — and we're not allowed — to charge what our competitors charge, we'd bring in roughly $20 million to $25 million additional revenue per year and that would pretty much obviate the need for most of these cuts."

Pensions are another issue.

"We've got an $87-million pension liability that requires us to put $9 million in special payments to address the deficit per year," Butler said.

The number of international students — who pay as much as triple the standard tuition — also sets UW and Laurier apart. Thirteen per cent of UW undergraduates are international students, compared to about four per cent of the student body at Laurier.

"International students are attracted to the computing sciences, engineering," Butler said. "You don't generally attract international students to history, English, that sort of thing."

He called all the factors affecting Laurier's bottom line "the perfect storm."

Bill Salatka is an associate professor of accounting at Laurier and the chief negotiator for the Wilfrid Laurier University Faculty Association.

"In a bargaining year, it is very important to understand the difference between internal budgets and public, externally reported audited financial statements," he wrote in an article for the faculty association.

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"Budgets are an internal tool used by university administrators to direct and constrain the use of resources by employees. Budgets are financial stories made up by the administration. A common theme in budgets is that all employees must do more with less."

Salatka said Laurier is not in a financial crisis and is unlikely to face one in the near future.

Butler, who stressed he never called it a financial crisis, said Laurier realized last June that enrolment would be down significantly.

"That's a lot of (lost) revenue," he said. "I'm not inventing that. It's just the facts. This is not some fantasy creation."

UW has no enrolment troubles.

"Enrolment has grown year over year for the past decade," Manning said.

There is a real buzz about UW, Manning said.

"We were in Silicon Valley (recently) and we talked to employers down there and they all say, 'Wow, something's really happening in Waterloo.' It's producing people who are uncommon and have a skill set that many university graduates don't have."

A mention in last week's New York Times won't hurt. In an op-ed piece, Frank Bruni published an excerpt from his new book, "Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania."

Bruni wrote that he spoke with Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, a well-known provider of first-step seed money for tech startups.

"I asked him if any one school stood out in terms of students and graduates whose ideas took off. 'Yes,' he responded, and I was sure of the name I'd hear next: Stanford. It's his alma mater, though he left before he graduated, and it's famous as a feeder of Silicon Valley success.

"But this is what he said: 'The University of Waterloo.' It's a public school in the Canadian province of Ontario, and as of last summer, it was the source of eight proud ventures that Y Combinator had helped along."

The California tech industry "loves our students," Manning said, "and we see huge numbers of them employed by Facebook and Google and Microsoft."

A report last year in Business Insider said 122 UW alumni work at Facebook. That puts the university at number four on the list of most alumni at the social network. Stanford was No. 1 with 289 alumni.

"We've set our sights on being one of the world's top innovation universities," Manning said. "While we've got some way to go to achieve that goal, we want to be up there with the Stanfords and MITs of this world. We're pushing hard to do that."