PORTSMOUTH — State funding for the University System of New Hampshire came in nearly $30 million below what school officials considered the worst-case scenario. 

That is the conundrum facing University of New Hampshire President Mark Huddleston following the passage of a biennial state budget that Huddleston said “eviscerated” state support for the University System of New Hampshire.

UNH already planned to increase tuition by a little over 5 percent before the “staggering” state budget cuts were known, Huddleston said. The cuts required an additional $650 tuition hike for in-state students. If the university had passed the entire cut onto students, that supplemental increase would have been $4,650, he said.

“We froze salaries. We froze hiring. We did RIFs (reductions in force). We cut expense budgets to the bone. We ate that, trying to shelter New Hampshire kids as much as possible from those tuition increases,” Huddleston said.

For more information, see Portsmouth Herald.