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ALL STATE UNIVERSITIES SHOULD SEE FUNDING INCREASE All 15 of Michigan's four-year universities should see increases for the 2005-06 budget from the base funding levels used for the current year under the agreement reached last week by Governor Jennifer Granholm and legislative leaders. Some preliminary indications are that the increases would range from a low of .02 percent to as 7.5 percent. Nothing is yet final, and no conference committee meeting has been called yet by the House on the $1.65 billion budget. But the agreement is designed to meet three principles that each of the sides in the negotiations wanted: floor funding for Senate Republicans and a funding formula for House Republicans and an across the board increase that Ms. Granholm wanted. The agreement ends the chance that Wayne State University and Northern Michigan University would see cuts to their funding as the initial House and Senate bills proposed. A Senate official, who did not want to be identified, said the agreement uses the base funding the universities received for 2004-05 less the executive order cut as the base on which to build the 2005-06 funding. So whether the universities will consider the 2005-06 budget an actual increase is debatable, the official said. Under one possible funding scenario sketched out by the Senate Fiscal Agency, eight of the 15 schools would see increases of less than 1 percent, with Wayne and University of Michigan-Flint pulling up the rear at 0.02 percent. Going up from that, Eastern Michigan University and Michigan Technological University would see a boost of 0.03 percent, University of Michigan, Michigan State University and Lake Superior State University would see increases of 0.04 percent and Western Michigan University would see an increase of 0.07 percent. Ferris State University would then see an increase of 1.1 percent, under this scenario, while U-M-Dearborn and Central Michigan University would see boosts of 2 percent. Saginaw Valley State University would see an increase of 7.1 percent, Oakland University would see a boost of 7.2 percent and Grand Valley State University would see an increase of 7.5 percent. Even with that increase, the scenario shows that Grand Valley would receive $3,302 percent student, below the $3,650 per student that the floor funding levels would allot. To get Grand Valley up to that level would require another $10 million, one official said.