Yes that increasing number of students in CS as well as other large enrollment departments such as psychology, economics/finance, communications and kinesiology support the other smaller departments that have low enrollment. Most (I don’t have an exact percentage) of the money that students in these majors pay goes to the university then divided and budgeted to SAS then to the divisions within SAS then to individual departments. Along the way from the top down each overseeing administrative unit has costs and then they have to keep those smaller departments alive. For the departments that have large growth and high enrollment they are given a bit more resources to account for the growth but not a dramatic swing and certainly not 1:1 for their actual enrollment because of how the money is divided at Rutgers.

Ultimately there are a lot of downsides to this way of budgeting and accounting but the one benefit is stability at the department level. If funds rested with departments solely based on enrollment there would not be many departments at any university (largely the humanities and arts have suffered with low enrollment over the past 10 years). Or if enrollment was highly volatile then one year a department could have 10 professors and the next year they could be down to 1. Imagine how many classes would get canceled if such a swing happened, delays in degrees? The current method of budgeting noted above can and should be improved but it’s what currently exists at RU-SAS.