Colleges are now starting to calculate the full costs of the coronavirus, including the fallout from declining enrollments and rising operating costs.
At places like Ithaca College, the impact of the pandemic is accelerating plans for major cuts in faculty jobs and academic programs. Beginning this spring, the college will begin to cut nearly a quarter of its 547 faculty members, said La Jerne T. Cornish, Ithaca’s provost.
The college’s undergraduate enrollment is 4,785 full-time students, more than 900 students fewer than a year ago, a decline of more than 16 percent, according to the college’s figures. At the same time, the college has a budget shortfall of $8 million because of increased operating costs — an amount that could grow before the end of the academic year, Cornish said.
Barbara K. Mistick, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, said that the extra spending required to keep colleges open will lead to more layoffs in the spring if Congress fails to pass another stimulus bill that aids higher education.
We were aware of the need to return the college to a sustainable size before the pandemic began.
Ithaca’s announcement is among the earliest in what is likely to be a cascade of budget cuts for higher education throughout the fall and winter. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that job losses at colleges have already reached historic levels. Nonprofit private and public institutions shed an estimated 337,000 jobs from February to August, according to federal data.
Many public institutions will be making more budget cuts as states offset steep declines in tax revenues. The Urban Institute estimates that state revenues will fall by as much as $200 billion by end of the 2021 fiscal year.
Early figures on college enrollment show a slight decline overall — less than 3 percent for undergraduate students, according to figures from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. But institutions vary widely.
In the Northeast and upper Midwest, the fiscal impacts of the pandemic compound demographic changes that are already depleting the number of traditional-age college students. Universities in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education will be cutting some 350 faculty positions, according to a news account from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The job cuts, initially to be spread out over five years, had been planned to offset declining enrollment.
Ithaca College, too, had planned to reduce the size of the faculty to deal with the region’s declining number of high-school graduates. But the coronavirus has forced the college to move up the timing of those cuts by two years, Cornish said.
“While the current reality of the pandemic and its effects on our students and our community have increased the urgency of this work, we were aware of the need to return the college to a sustainable size before the pandemic began,” she wrote in a letter that was sent to the faculty on Monday.
From here, the process will move quickly. By December a committee will recommend programs that will be reduced or eliminated, Cornish said, and the college’s administration will make its decisions by March, when faculty with one-year appointments have to be informed about their status for the coming year.
Claire Gleitman, a professor of English at Ithaca and chairwoman of the Humanities and Sciences Faculty Senate, said the value of humanities programs is not necessarily reflected in raw numbers. But she said the college has promised to take a more holistic approach, and she hopes the faculty will be “consulted closely and consistently.”
She added that faculty members will be proposing alternative budget cuts and ways to generate more revenue.
Cornish said the college can’t furlough enough staff to make up for the shortfalls, nor increase enrollment enough to keep the same number of faculty employed. The college is aiming to enroll about 4,700 undergraduates next fall — nearly 300 fewer than are currently enrolled.
“We can’t delay,” she said, “that would be kicking the can down the road, and we’re not going to kick the can anymore.”
