Annual budget development at Millersville is a bottom-up process, beginning with departments who identify their greatest unfunded needs for personnel, operating funds, equipment, and space. Our mission, vision, and institutional goals (see Chapter 2) guide departments in identifying their most pressing needs. Academic programs within each school then integrate and prioritize their requests through School Councils. The priorities of the three schools and other units in Academic Affairs are then integrated by the Deans' Council. Requests within each of the other four divisions are similarly integrated and prioritized by the Vice President and his or her staff. The President's Advisory Council then makes final resource allocation decisions. At each step, priorities are generally based on the relation of each need to our mission, vision, and institutional goals. This process therefore enables us to link our expenditures to our established priorities.

Our annual resource request process does not include a systematic, long-range plan for the modernization of aging technologies and instructional equipment. While we have an equipment budget every year, allocations are made on an ad hoc basis depending on available funding and what seems to be the most pressing need at the moment. Departments who need more powerful computers to run current software, modern laboratory equipment to share the latest scientific theories, or new instructional equipment to help students learn have no guarantee that their needs will be met. While we have done an adequate job keeping most of our operations reasonably current, occasionally crises arise that need immediate attention.