Interim President Raymond Burse had indicated Kentucky State University was facing a $7 million deficit.
Students returned after they either paid their balances in full or arranged alternative payment plans with the university, according to a KYU press release published on Wednesday afternoon.
For a school that had an enrollment of about 2,800 students in 2013, the 645 students who were released represented almost 25 percent of the total student body. The measure appears to have been necessary to reestablish KSU’s financial stability.
KSU faced a historic $7 million deficit, which interim President Raymond Burse had said was “largely due” to student being delinquent in paying their bills. The Lexington-Herald said that some students owed up to $40,000, and that some bills had been carried over for more than two years. The university relies on tuition as a large part of its income: net tuition and fees accounted for 41.7 percent of the universities total operating revenue in 2013, according to KSU’s financial statement for the fiscal year 2013.
Wednesday’s press release also announced that Burse had ordered the KSU Foundation to assist 270 students who owed less than $1,000 to the university. Their total need was approximately $148,000.
According to KSU statements and reports in other news sources, the university had notified students 22 times since August 2013 that their accounts were in arrears ― a measure that appears to have had little impact as a large percentage of the student body were still behind their payments at the start of September.
Then, the line in the sand was drawn.
