After Years of State Budget Woes, the U. of Illinois Will Hire Hundreds of Faculty Members
By Emma KerrMay 17, 2018
The U. of Illinois system plans to hire hundreds of faculty members to meet student demand after seeing an enrollment surge.U. of Illinois
Ending years of “especially conservative” hiring and a declining staff caused by state budget turmoil, the University of Illinois system announced on Thursday plans to hire hundreds of faculty members over the next five years.
Timothy L. Killeen, the system’s president, said in a news release that the university had the funding for the ambitious hiring plan because of cost controls and growing revenues. The decision was made to meet student demand as enrollment reached an all-time high of nearly 84,000 students last fall, he said.
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The U. of Illinois system plans to hire hundreds of faculty members to meet student demand after seeing an enrollment surge.U. of Illinois
Ending years of “especially conservative” hiring and a declining staff caused by state budget turmoil, the University of Illinois system announced on Thursday plans to hire hundreds of faculty members over the next five years.
Timothy L. Killeen, the system’s president, said in a news release that the university had the funding for the ambitious hiring plan because of cost controls and growing revenues. The decision was made to meet student demand as enrollment reached an all-time high of nearly 84,000 students last fall, he said.
“In the end, our universities rise on the quality of our students and faculty,” Killeen said in the release. The flagship university was hit hard in recent years by the state’s budget standoff. Illinois went without a state budget for two years during a political stalemate that froze state funding for colleges for 10 months. The university system’s state funding in 2018 was down 10 percent from 2015.
Starting in 2016, students began to leave the state of Illinois to attend college elsewhere, causing a dip in freshman enrollmentstatewide.
The University of Illinois froze tuition four years in a row, a move unanimously approved by its trustees again this past January. The university did not lay off faculty members like other state colleges, but in 2017, Killeen said Illinois wasn’t immune to the funding problems.
The system was down about 400 full-time-equivalent administrative staff members in 2017, he said, “which has stretched us relatively thin.”
The number of faculty members has grown by only 2 percent in the last five years, and most of those positions have been untenured, according to the news release. Michael Amiridis, chancellor of the University of Illinois at Chicago, emphasized the importance of adding tenure-track faculty members in the coming hiring spree. The hiring will also combat large class sizes.
“This is an issue that cuts to our core; an issue that transcends campuses and disciplines, with implications now and into the future,” Killeen said. “So we must reinvest in talent and set an ambitious goal that will support our excellence and reputation across the U of I system.”
