* AP…

Southern Illinois University trustees will consider a plan to gradually shift state funding from the Carbondale campus to the Edwardsville campus to reflect enrollment shifts. Historically the Carbondale campus has had about 64 percent of state funding and about 36 percent went to Edwardsville. That split mirrored enrollment, The (Carbondale) Southern Illinoisan reported. However enrollment at the Carbondale campus has been declining and more students are enrolling at Edwardsville. Enrollment distribution between the two schools is now about equal with Carbondale at about 14,500 students and Edwardsville with about 13,800 students. Trustees are to vote at the April 12 meeting on whether to “begin a phased adjustment of the state appropriation allocation in a more equitable fashion.”

* The Southern…

The first phase of the proposal, a “good-faith effort” to begin the process, would reallocate an additional $5.1 million of the state appropriation to the Edwardsville campus for FY ’19. The proposal doesn’t lay out a definite end goal for reallocation, but it calls for System President Randy Dunn to hire an external consultant to develop a recommended formula for addressing the funding gap — and it anticipates that the recommendation might fall somewhere between $17.7 million and $23.3 million in funds transferred to SIUE. During the state budget impasse last year, SIUC borrowed $35 million from SIUE after exhausting $83 million in reserves. On March 1, the SIUE Faculty Senate adopted a resolution calling on the Board of Trustees to “create a new, fair and dynamic formula” to “reallocate the SIU system budget in a just and equitable manner.”

* I skimmed through the report yesterday (click here). What really jumped out at me was that SIUC’s fall 1999 enrollment was 22,596 and its fall 2017 enrollment was just 14,184. That’s a 37 percent decrease. Whoa.

Meanwhile, fall 1999 enrollment at SIUE was 11,877, compared to 13,796 last fall.

To say that SIUC’s future is bleak would be an understatement. Its legislators better get on this soon or they could wind up with a ghost town.