How the Coronavirus Might — or Might Not — Slow Research Universities’ Ambitions

The coronavirus’s financial toll may jeopardize colleges’ longstanding campaigns to bolster research, expand operations, and grow national prestige.

The pursuit of that vision is a well-trodden path. Universities who set out to rise in Carnegie Foundation rankings, for example, attempt to add doctoral programs and invest internally in research in an effort to nab larger outside money later. The payoff can be big. Successful campuses could secure big grants, woo corporate partners, and recruit top faculty.

Now, with the coronavirus disrupting all elements of campus life, money is tight everywhere. Small, private colleges face life-or-death decisions, and while research universities have larger cushions, they are announcing some of the biggest losses. How this sector fares during the pandemic may narrow striving research universities’ ambitious future plans.

Coronavirus Hits Campus

As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.

• Covid-19 Is Pushing University Hospitals to Their Limits
• Colleges Are Canceling Spring Break. In Its Place: ‘Wellness Days’
• The Real Covid-19 Enrollment Crisis: Fewer Low-Income Students Went Straight to College

As it stands, few striving institutions actually break through to become national names, said Brendan Cantwell, an associate professor and coordinator of the Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education program at Michigan State University. The financial strain of the coronavirus may make that path even tougher to pursue.

The University of Houston’s president, Renu Khator, has sought many of the accompanying trademarks of a national research university. The university has recruited National Academies members to the faculty, earned a top designation from the Carnegie Foundation, and pushed for inclusion to a major athletics conference. Its latest effort? Opening a medical school.

Houston is nearing success on that front, though things look different than the university initially envisioned. A ceremonial groundbreaking for a four story, roughly 150,000-square-foot building was canceled; they plan to start clearing land in June. Khator said she does not know whether the first class will start classes in July virtually or in person. The new college, she said, will be subject to budget cuts, just as the rest of the university will.

She declined to estimate early projections of the university’s revenue losses, saying elements like state funding and summer enrollment are unclear.

“There are a lot of different areas where we’ll have stress,” she said in an interview. “It all depends on how deep, how long. We have to be prepared for various scenarios.”

Broadly, Khator said, the goals of the university will not change. But she said Houston must be open to a sharpened focus to get there. She has convened several task forces; one is on what the “new normal” looks like for the medium and long range. “What will be the changes we will see in our external environment, and how would our strategies change?

Cantwell said that Houston is now well established as a research player. Those at the early stage of that path face a different set of choices. They may struggle to find the money to compete in research, he said, and it could be challenging to pivot to online when campuses like Southern New Hampshire University are so far ahead in that space.

Returning to a more regionally focused mission is a third option. Philip G. Altbach, founding director of the Boston College Center for International Higher Education, said it is unlikely but possible that the crisis may “kick some of those folks in the pants” to re-evaluate their priorities to focus on their local areas, not national ambitions.

But the “how” of that pivot isn’t as straightforward as it sounds, Cantwell said. Do you add to teaching loads? Stop plans for construction? What do you do with the chemicals and machinery that fills your wet labs?

“There will be more of a focus on what can we do for the residents of our state, and, even narrower than that, what can we do for the residents of the region in which universities are located,” said Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute and a former board member at Cornell and the State University of New York. “That’s going to dictate changes in the nature of the curriculum and changes in admissions.”

Though research universities will fare better than less-wealthy institutions in the sector, campuses have already announced big losses. Ehrenberg ticked off several categories: They’ll need to spend more money on financial aid to keep students enrolled, endowment returns will be dismal, summer-program revenue will tank, cuts to federal research dollars are anticipated, and tuition from out-of-region families who prefer closer-to-home options may shrink. That’s outside of state-funding losses.

The University of Central Florida, in materials submitted to the board, said it is anticipating that some of these shifts will challenge its high ambitions. The campus was dubbed a university with “very high” research activity by the Carnegie Foundation the same year as Houston. It now aims to be a top 50 public university in U.S. News & World Report’s national rankings and qualify for acceptance in the Association of American Universities.

The impact of coronavirus could be wide-reaching, those materials outlined. Today, most students don’t come from the nearby area, and the virus may make those students less likely to come back, the materials said. A hiring freeze would halt the recruitment of National Academy faculty members. The university wrote that it expects available research funding to drop, potentially severely, as the economy declines. And if fewer international students come for doctoral programs, the number of degrees awarded will decline — as will research funding.

The university’s new president, Alexander N. Cartwright, was unavailable for comment. Heather Smith, a spokesperson for the campus, says Central Florida’s intent is to “keep moving forward and continue to find ways to make an impact,” including on coronavirus-related research. Uncertainty about future external funding, she wrote in an email, affects all universities.

Striving institutions have navigated crises before. From the dot-com bubble bursting in 2000 to the 2008 financial crisis, “things slow that journey and make that journey harder, but if you want to be a leading research university, you can’t get on the path and get off the path,” said Robert A. Brown, president of Boston University. “It doesn’t work that way.”

Brown knows that firsthand. In the Great Recession, BU had to focus on students’ financial needs, he said. And students’ academic priorities shifted “fairly dramatically” during that time period, causing the university to rebalance its offerings. After, BU returned to its strategic plan.

Cantwell said BU is one of the “very few places” that has transformed in 25 years “into a real powerhouse.” With powerhouse status comes deep coffers and financial stability. The university, Brown said, will use a “significant amount” of its reserves to recoup part of its $52-million losses this fiscal year. The university has enacted a staff-hiring freeze, halted nonessential construction, and cut top administrators’ salaries. Brown declined to estimate how large the 2021 fiscal year’s hit might be, saying the range is too wide.

The Johns Hopkins University said it estimates a net loss of $475 million through June 2021. Much of that comes from the loss of physician clinical revenue. Though Hopkins’s health system and its university are two separate organizational entities, physicians are on the university’s payroll, President Ronald J. Daniels said, leading to the big hits.

Daniels said the university is nervous about what any decline in federal support in research might mean. In a moment where the government has taken on so much public debt, he expects there to be competition for non-defense domestic discretionary funding. That dynamic, he said, “will ultimately cannibalize the capacity at the federal government to fund research activity that is at the core of our mission.”

Lindsay Ellis is a senior reporter covering research universities. Follow her on Twitter @lindsayaellis, or email her at lindsay.ellis@chronicle.com.