Interim Provost Susan Ford told the faculty senate Tuesday the university has a $3 million budget deficit.

“State college revenue comes from two places which are the state and tuition,” she said.

State revenues are down since the 2008 recession, so universities are getting less money from their legislature, Ford said. More tuition revenue is the only way to cover the deficit.

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The SIU Board of Trustees rejected a request to increase tuition earlier this year.

Ford said she has been reading up on ways to increase funding for the university.

“The single best thing you can do to increase the amount of tuition revenue your university brings in is retention,” Ford said.

Retention refers to the number of students who choose to come back instead of dropping out, taking time off or transferring to another institution.

Ford praised SIU staff for increasing the retention rate from 60 percent to 68 percent for returning sophomores but said the new goal should be even higher.

“We should be at 85 percent if we want to be similar to our peers,” Ford said.

Ford said while a lot of effort is made for freshman to return for their sophomore year, it is most important to look at retention rates for returning seniors as well. An alarming number of juniors do not return for their senior year, a trend at every university in the country, she said.

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“The primary reason that students leave in their junior and do not continue to their senior year is that they do not declare a major or they kept switching between their majors and find themselves without the right courses and things they need to graduate,” Ford said. “They’re running out of money, they lose their way and they drift off.”

Ford said some ways to improve retention of these students would be more advisement and planning with students, though she is open to more concrete ideas.

Sajal Lahiri, vice president of the faculty senate, said finances are not the only reason people leave the university.

“Part of it is voluntary, part of it is involuntary, some students just get kicked out,” Lahiri said.

Reasons for getting kicked out include violations of the law, drug abuse or poor grades, Lahiri said.

One policy put in place last year is the forced removal of students with a zero grade point average from the university, Ford said. Normally students with low grades are put on academic probation and have time to bring them up but students with a zero are different and do not usually contribute much to the budget of the school, she said.

“They just came to come,” Ford said. “They came to get a financial aid package or get away from home and they are a drain on us.”

Removing students with a low GPA is not nearly as important as attracting new ones, Ford said.

Lahiri said increasing enrollment is not the only way to raise tuition revenue.

“There is another way to increase revenue and that is to increase tuition and fees,” Lahiri said.

SIU is one of Illinois’ least expensive public four-year universities and that attracts good students, Lahiri said.

“For years, it was known as the poor man’s university,” Lahiri said.

Ford is hopeful the university will find a way to overcome it deficit.

“This is a great institution and we have great students and we have great faculty,” Ford said. “We need to make sure we stay that way 10 years from now if not get better so we need to put our minds together and tackle this.”