Penn State Offered Buyouts. At This Campus, 40 Percent of Staff Raised Their Hands.

At Pennsylvania State University at New Kensington, a tight-knit campus about 30 minutes northeast of Pittsburgh, faculty members and staff kicked off the fall semester with a sense of dread.

Forty percent of the staff and 10 percent of the faculty there had taken voluntary buyouts that were offered across the system’s regional campuses earlier this year. Among those leaving the campus, where enrollment has dropped by about a third over the past 10 years, were the registrar, the director of student affairs, all three employees in the business and finance office, and the chancellor.

Buyouts are intended to be a humane way to cut costs while avoiding layoffs and allowing employees a measure of agency in deciding when to leave a job. But they can hurt morale and have unintended consequences, like when more people — or different ones than expected — raise their hands to go. That’s what many faculty and staff think happened at New Kensington.

While buyouts are fairly common in higher education as a way to reduce costs, according to Robert Kelchen, a professor in educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, they are typically aimed at employees closer to retirement. “It’s not exactly the most strategic option, but it’s an option,” Kelchen said. “If the goal is to try to free up money or turn over the work force, it’s probably the best way to do it, but you have an issue of the people you really want to take the buyout may not take the buyout, or you have too many people take the buyout and a unit is effectively demolished.” In addition, he said, laws and union contracts mean colleges may have limited options for how they implement buyouts.

Across Penn State’s regional campuses, about one in five eligible employees took the buyout, although the numbers varied significantly across the 20 institutions. Many left in June; the rest, who were asked to stay on to help ease the transition, will leave by the end of December.

It’s too early to know the precise impact of the loss of so many people and the decades of institutional knowledge they embodied. At New Kensington, professors and staff welcoming new students to campus for orientation on a sparkling, sunny day in late August said they were anxious that students might not get the help that they need — when college seems too expensive, too hard, or just too much — with so many fewer people around to catch them.

“I always worry about the students who are, quote unquote, fall-through-the-cracks students — that maybe with one piece of information or one additional contact with someone, they would learn how to better navigate a situation,” said Andrea Adolph, an associate professor of English. Like many of the faculty, staff, and students at New Kensington, Adolph was the first in her family to attend college.

Administrators insist that students will not feel the impact of the buyouts. “Our campus did not experience staff departures in vital student-service areas, and we do not anticipate any diminishment of the quality or availability of these services at the campus,” Corinne Coulson, a spokeswoman for New Kensington, wrote in an email to The Chronicle.

The Buyout Program

The buyouts — formally known as the voluntary separation-incentive program — offered one year’s salary and six months of subsidized health insurance to most of the tenure-track faculty, staff, and administrators with at least one year on the job at Penn State’s regional institutions, known as the Commonwealth Campuses. Over the past 10 years, enrollment on these campuses has declined about 24 percent, while the number of faculty and staff have remained about the same, according to administrators. Student enrollment declined at 18 of the 20 Commonwealth Campuses over the past decade, with nine campuses seeing decreases of more than 40 percent.

Across the regional campuses, 383 employees, or about 21 percent of those who were eligible, took the buyouts, cutting overall personnel by 10 percent. Seventy-seven percent of those who took the buyout were staff; fewer faculty members took the offer. The buyouts cut $43 million in expenses from salaries and benefits, although the actual savings will depend on the number of positions that are backfilled.

In addition to New Kensington, the campuses hit hardest by the buyouts are York, where 41 percent of staff took buyouts, and Wilkes-Barre, with 38 percent. New Kensington and York lost more professors — 10 percent each — than any of the other campuses.

Penn State will also cut costs by consolidating leadership at the Commonwealth Campuses; some chancellors will oversee two or three campuses. The university will centralize facilities, information technology, and finance, moving salaries and benefits for those employees from the individual campuses to the university’s general overhead budget. Penn State’s president, Neeli Bendapudi, has promised to spend up to $20 million of her strategic funds as a one-time infusion to facilitate these changes and allow the university until June of 2026 to balance the budget for the Commonwealth Campuses. In January, the university also announced a review to better align its academic programs with what students and employers want.

Colleges in Pennsylvania face many of the same headwinds as their peers across the country, including population shifts and anemic state funding. In fiscal year 2023, Pennsylvania ranked 41st in the nation for public higher-education appropriations per full-time equivalent student, according to a 2023 analysis by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. And Penn State receives less funding from the state per resident student than any other public institution, according to the university. Pennsylvania also has a relatively large number of colleges for the size of its traditional college-aged student population, a 2022 Chronicle analysis found.

Penn State’s Commonwealth Campuses serve more first-generation college students, Pell Grant recipients, and historically underrepresented students than the university’s main campus, at University Park. About 42 percent of undergraduate students at University Park come from out-of-state, compared to only 15 percent at New Kensington. Many students at New Kensington go there because they want to stay closer to home, don’t have the means to pay for college elsewhere, or want to save money by starting there and finishing up at University Park. New Kensington had 456 students last year, down from 1,089 20 years ago.

When the buyout program was announced in May, some at New Kensington were relieved it wasn’t worse news. “There has been worry about closing the entire time I’ve been here,” said Kevin J.G. Snider, the chancellor, now in his 17th year at the campus.

Some employees close to retirement were happy to take a year’s salary as a parting gift. Some younger employees took the separation money, went on vacation, and said they would look for a job when they return. Most tenured professors farther from retirement didn’t have to think long about turning down the buyout.

But others had harder decisions to make. Some took the buyout because they were afraid that if they didn’t, they could get laid off down the road. Others considered taking the buyout but decided to stay because their children receive generous employee discounts on Penn State tuition.

Non-tenure-track faculty, whom the university recently started shifting to one-year contracts, were not eligible for the buyouts. Some felt the university was sending a message that they were expendable. Why offer a buyout to someone whose contract you can just decide not to renew?

Welcome Day

At New Kensington’s orientation day, a student-affairs staff member took advantage of a brief lull in the morning’s activities to take down two posters with photos of the student-affairs team. She and a colleague pointed out all the people who were now gone.

Other departments were also affected by the buyouts. One of the college’s two academic advisers moved over to student affairs, leaving the remaining adviser stretched. The coordinator who helped students with tutoring and disability services would soon be gone. The chancellor, Snider, will stay on through December, in part to ease the transition for the Digital Foundry, a facility providing training on digital-manufacturing technologies created under his leadership. The Foundry has played a part in revitalizing the once-dilapidated downtown area a few miles from campus. It now boasts a pub, a brewery, a Mexican restaurant, a used record store, bakeries, and an axe-throwing venue.

After the buyouts, Penn State plans to consolidate services for many of the regional campuses. But it’s still unclear exactly what that will look like.

In the past, if a student on another campus had a family emergency two weeks into a semester and wanted to return home and enroll at New Kensington, the registrar there could pick up the phone and smooth the way, making sure that the student could get into the classes they needed. Until now, students would sometimes bring cash to the business office to pay their tuition (about $6,900 a semester for state residents, compared to about $9,800 at University Park ), to keep from having to pay a credit-card fee online.

Many of these transactions can be completed online or by phone. But each of those interactions once represented a chance to talk with a student, to help them figure out what they didn’t know they didn’t know, to help them feel seen. Where does a budget account for the value of a human connection?

Allie Miller, a senior at New Kensington, will miss seeing the faces of a couple of staff members who helped her to feel at home — and to thrive — at college. Jim Shields, the associate director of career services and professional-development programs, spent time talking with Miller about her future, suggesting multiple careers based on her skills and interests, along with possible alternatives if her master’s program didn’t work out. “He was present at almost every event that went on at campus,” said Miller. “He was everywhere and everyone knew him.”

Miller will also miss checking in with Susan Dale, an administrative-support assistant in the academic-affairs office. Dale supervised Miller in her job as a campus facilitator, helping professors to set up classrooms for remote students. Dale trained Miller, and somewhere along the way, Miller started visiting Dale in her office just to talk “about daily life things,” Miller said.

When Miller graduated from high school, not far from New Kensington, she was unsure whether she wanted to go to college. Today, she is pursuing a master’s degree, thanks in part to the connections she made with professors and staff.

‘Where Do We Start to Rebuild?’

On campus, professors and staff still seemed to be adjusting to their new reality. John Craig Hammond, an associate professor of history and the assistant director of academic affairs, has had to find instructors to cover classes for the three tenure-track professors and one tenured professor who took the buyout. “There was nothing strategic about it,” Hammond said of the buyouts. “There was no consultation with the campuses.”

Adolph, the English professor, said faculty members are only able to do their jobs with the support of staff. “It denigrates the labor of people who are front-facing and student-facing,” she said of the buyouts. “And that’s really sad and unfortunate.”

Penelope Morrison, an associate professor of biobehavioral health, said she understands that Penn State had to make cuts. But she wants to know the endgame. “Where do we start to rebuild? What’s that path forward going to be looking like?”

Snider, the soon-to-depart chancellor, seems to have mostly made his peace with the changes. With enrollment shrinking so much, he says, staying the same is not an option.

For now, many at New Kensington are focused on getting through the fall semester. “We’re at the point where if somebody walks in with a question about how do I get this bill paid … there’s nobody to go to with that question,” said Hammond. “We’ll pull it off to the best of our ability. But what that’s going to look like, we don’t know.”

Said Morrison: “We’re all just kind of holding our breath to see how it’s going to shake out.”

Interactive News Editor Brian O’Leary contributed to this article.