Anthony Amore Wants To Take On Bloat In Higher Education, If Elected State Auditor

Printed from: https://newbostonpost.com/2022/11/08/anthony-amore-wants-to-take-on-bloat-in-higher-education-if-elected-state-auditor/

Are state colleges spending as efficiently as they should be in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts?

Republican auditor candidate Anthony Amore wants to find out. 

If elected, auditing the University of Massachusetts system is among his top priorities. In auditing the UMass system, Amore says he wants to find wasteful spending and make recommendations to those who run UMass on what they could do to run their operation more efficiently.

The UMass system includes five schools that enroll about 75,000 students combined:  UMass Amherst, UMass Boston, UMass Lowell, UMass Dartmouth, and UMass Medical (Worcester). The UMass system has a $3.8 billion budget in fiscal year 2023, according to its web site; $648 million of that $3.8 billion comes from Bay State taxpayers.

“I have a daughter at UMass,” Amore told NewBostonPost in a telephone interview. “I was there recently to see the football team lose yet again. I enjoy it because my daughter is in this amazing marching band, but I see construction every time I visit and I wonder why. There may be a good reason for it, but I do know that enrollment has been dwindling every year since 2014. I think there was an uptick this year with us coming out of COVID. And I know there’s been an uptick in tuition and I know that very well from my own finances.

“Where’s the tuition money going?” he added. “Where are the tax dollars going? Why are the top 100 salaries in state government dominated by UMass employees? Not just educators, too. Administrative folks. Why? Why is this the case? Why is it so expensive to do construction on UMass campus and less so on another? All of these things need to be fleshed out.”

For the current school year thr UMass system hiked its tuition by 2.5 percent for in-state undergraduates, after two years of tuition freezes. As a result, tuition jumped to $16,952 at UMass Amherst, $15,172 at UMass Boston, $14,854 at UMass Dartmouth, $16,182 at UMass Lowell, and $46,310 at UMass Medical. 

Amore noted that UMass loses more than $50 million per year on athletics, which USA Today confirms. UMass Amherst lost $38.9 million on athletics and UMass Lowell lost $18.9 million during the 2019-2020 school year, a combined $57.4 million, according to the report; the two schools are NCAA Division 1 programs.

“That’s troublesome, right?” Amore said of these losses. “I’m not saying they should do away with sports. I’m a huge sports fan. Every one of the major sports, I’m a diehard, but at a certain point, you have to look at a cost-benefit to these sports and see, ‘Could the losses be a little less extreme?’ ”

Amore said that making sure the UMass system spends its dollars wisely is particularly important because working people struggle to afford higher education for themselves and their families.

“These are things I’d like to look at because every family struggles with the idea of how much college costs, especially the people who can afford it the least,” he said. “And by that, I mean working families who are less likely to get aid — they make too much money to get aid, but not enough to be comfortably paying for college tuition.”

Amore is running against Democratic state Senator Diana DiZoglio (D-Methuen) in the Auditor’s race. It’s an open-seat race, as incumbent Democrat Suzanne Bump, who was first elected in 2010, is not seeking a fourth term in office. 

DiZoglio’s campaign could not be reached for comment on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or Monday this week.

 

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