South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Belt-tightening may not be enough
Colleges make deep budget cuts to close shortfalls amid virus
Ohio Wesleyan University is eliminating 18 majors. The University of Florida’s trustees this month took the first steps toward letting the school furlough faculty. The University of California, Berkeley, has paused admissions to its doctoral programs in anthropology, sociology and art history.
As it resurges across the country, the coronavirus is forcing universities large and small to make deep and possibly lasting cuts to close widening budget shortfalls.
By one estimate, the pandemic has cost colleges at least $120 billion, with even Harvard University, despite its $41.9 billion endowment, reporting a $10 million deficit that has prompted belttightening.
Though many colleges imposed stopgap measures such as hiring freezes and early retirements to save money in the spring, the persistence of the economic downturn is taking a devastating financial toll, pushing many to lay off or furlough employees, delay graduate admissions and even cut or consolidate core programs like liberal arts departments.
The University of South Florida announced this month that its College of Education would become a graduate school only, phasing out undergraduate education degrees to help close a $6.8 million budget gap. In Ohio, the University of Akron, citing the coronavirus, successfully invoked a clause in its collective-bargaining agreement in September to supersede tenure rules and lay off 97 unionized faculty members.
“We haven’t seen a budget crisis like this in a generation,” said Robert
Kelchen, a Seton Hall University associate professor of higher education who has been tracking the administrative response to the pandemic. “There’s nothing off-limits at this point.”
Even before the pandemic, colleges and universities were grappling with a growing financial crisis, broughtonby years of shrinking state support, declining enrollment, and student concerns with skyrocketing tuition and burdensome debt.
Now the coronavirus has amplified the financial trouble systemwide, though elite, well-endowed colleges seem sure to weather it with far less pain.
“We have been in aggressive recession management for 12 years — probably more than 12 years,” Daniel Greenstein, chancellor of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education,
told his board of governors this month as members voted to forge ahead with a proposal to merge a halfdozen small schools into two academic entities.
Once linchpins of social mobility in the state’sworking-class coal towns, the 14 campuses in Pennsylvania’s system have lost roughly a fifth of their enrollment over the past decade. The proposal, long underway but made more urgent by pandemic losses, would merge Clarion, California and Edinboro universities into one unit and Bloomsburg, Lock Haven and Mansfield universities into another to serve a region whose demographics have changed.
Such pressures have reached critical mass throughout the country in the months since the pandemic hit.
State governments from
Washington to Connecticut, tightening their own belts, have told public universities to expect cuts in appropriations. Students and families, facing skyrocketing unemployment, have balked at the prospect of paying full fare for largely online instruction, opting instead for gap years or less expensive schools closer to home.
Costs have also soared as colleges have spent millions on testing, tracing and quarantining students, only to face outbreaks.
Freshman enrollment is down over 16% from last year, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center has reported — part of a 4% overall drop in undergraduate enrollment that is taking tuition revenue downwith it.
In a letter to Congress last week, the American Council on Education and other higher education or
ganizations estimated that the viruswould cost institutions more than $120 billion in increased student aid, lost housing fees, forgone sports revenue, public health measures, learning technology and other adjustments.
And because donations to all but the heftiest endowments limit those funds to specific uses, most colleges cannot freely dip into them as emergency reserves.
That has meant months of cutbacks, including abolishing athletic programs, deferring campus construction and laying off administrative staff and cafeteria workers.
Scores of graduate programs have temporarily stopped taking new doctoral students — the result of financial aid budgets strained by current doctoral candidates whose research
is taking more time because of the pandemic.
As schools exhaust the possibilities of trims around the margins, what is left, administrators say, is payroll, typically the largest line item in higher education. Since February, when the coronavirus hit, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported that colleges and universities have shed more than 300,000 mostly nonfaculty jobs.
“Some of these institutions have redone their budgets three, four, five times,” saidJimHundrieser, vice president for consulting and business development at the National Association of College and University Business Officers, a professional organization for finance officers in higher education.
“As this next chapter unfolds, what’s left is just staffing.”