Deep cuts at public comprehensive colleges have often made news, but this year they seem deeper and more brutal than ever.
Last month, for example, Western Illinois University announced that it would lay off all eight of its tenured or tenure-track library staff members to help close a $22-million hole in its budget, after laying off 52 other faculty members weeks earlier. It’s the kind of move that might have been inconceivable for a four-year public university a few years ago. What’s going on?
In addition to the looming demographic cliff and increasingly dire public confidence in higher education affecting many parts of the country, institutions’ decisions just before and during Covid-19 may be partially to blame for the current wave of budget cuts roiling some public four-year institutions. More specifically, the federal funding that helped colleges withstand some of the worst financial challenges associated with the pandemic is now gone, leaving some institutions to face nagging problems that never really went away during Covid, and, in some cases, got even worse over the past four years. Now they face a reckoning that colleges that kept cutting through the pandemic may have avoided.
Take Western Illinois. In 2015, it enrolled about 11,000 students. By the fall of 2019, headcount had fallen to 7,624. The university’s finances suffered from plummeting tuition revenue and a state-budget standoff between then-Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican, and the state General Assembly that led to a year without state support, creating a persistent budget deficit for the university. It had been cutting faculty and staff numbers for years by leaving vacant positions unfilled, and it offered incentives for early retirements — both tactics common at colleges looking to shave costs gradually, without major disruptions.
But for many public regional universities, the days of gradual change are over. The waning numbers of projected college-bound high-school graduates in many parts of the country, especially the Northeast and Midwest, have left many public four-year institutions already struggling to compete for students and tuition dollars with their more-affluent private and public-flagship peers.
When the pandemic swept the country in the spring of 2020, casting doubt on the future of enrollments, housing and dining revenues, and the wellbeing of college students and employees, the Trump administration passed the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund Act, known as Heerf, funneling $76 billion to colleges and their students. Half of that money went, as intended, to aid students. The other half went, in part, toward protective gear, ventilation upgrades, online-education training for faculty, and other pandemic adaptations. But what colleges did with their half of the money was left up to them.
For many public regional universities, the days of gradual change are over.
Some leaders at struggling regional public colleges did not let the sudden infusion of cash stop them from continuing to downsize and adapt their institutions to a new reality. At Western Illinois, the federal dollars seemed to offer a temporary reprieve from their troubles.
“Three or four years ago, we should have been saying, we know what our enrollment is going to be, we know what our expenses are going to be, and we should be adjusting for that,” says Ketra M. Roselieb, executive director of financial affairs. “But we were able to push that decision off a little bit longer. We were all living day to day.”
No one was eager to lay people off during Covid, says Christopher A. Pynes, interim associate provost for academic affairs, research, and institutional effectiveness, and Western Illinois didn’t. “Then all of a sudden, the Covid money dries up, and it’s like, fix your budget today. And it’s not that easy.”
Delaying Difficult Choices
Regional public colleges have been worrying over their budgets for more than 15 years, and disappearing government money has been a big reason why. When the Great Recession rocked the country in 2007-8, states responded by slashing support for higher education. Public colleges — especially regional four-year institutions and community colleges, which usually lack the diverse revenue streams and plump endowments of their four-year flagship peers — cut everything they could to stay operational, says Kevin R. McClure, an associate professor of higher education at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. If many regional colleges cut at this point, they risk becoming very different institutions. “To the extent that there’s trimming that can happen, they have done that,” McClure says. “They’ve already got pretty thin staffs.”
While state support nationally finally rose back above pre-Recession levels in 2022, a dozen years’ worth of underfunding of public colleges by states damaged those institutions, says Edward Conroy, senior policy manager for higher-education policy at New America, a think tank, and it’s unlikely that states will ever make up for those lost dollars. It shouldn’t be surprising that some college leaders used federal Covid-aid dollars to paper over holes in their budgets, Conroy says, but “the gaps that the HEERF money plugged shouldn’t have existed in the first place.”
For public colleges facing an uncertain future due to Covid, the federal dollars were “a very welcome Band-Aid,” says Ruth Johnston, vice president for consulting at the National Association of College and University Business Officers. Once the aid salved the initial financial injuries of housing and dining refunds and pandemic-adaptation expenses, colleges faced two choices — to be strategic or to keep dressing wounds. Rising inflation and labor shortages made the choice tougher. “Some of them made great use of it and made plans for the future,” Johnston says, “and others kind of kicked the can down the road a little bit.”
Regional colleges have been worrying over their budgets for more than 15 years, and disappearing government money has been a big reason why.
Indiana University of Pennsylvania had also been losing enrollment for years prior to the pandemic — headcount enrollment fell from 15,379 in 2012 to 8,832 in 2022, a drop of 43 percent — and had been reducing its workforce through attrition for years. If a college president thinks that higher education is just in one of those temporary downturns and things will turn around in a few years, “then you just use one-time funds to bridge gaps, and you don’t make major changes or other kinds of investments,” says Michael A. Driscoll, the president. “I think a lot of people did that, and now we’re going to find out if they were right or not.”
In the fall of 2020, Indiana stepped up its personnel cuts. The institution lost 178 positions between June of 2019 and June of 2021 through retirements, not hiring for positions, and layoffs, including tenured faculty members and members of the president’s cabinet. People losing their jobs in the middle of a pandemic “was horrible in a human sense in multiple ways, but was necessary given where we were,” he says. “We could have ridden another year with the relief funds that we were seeing,” but the university would still be in financially untenable shape. Driscoll still mulls the decision. “I’m not saying it’s good or bad,” he says. “I could have easily been convinced to go the other way, with a different set of arguments on the table.”
In addition to spending its $29 million in federal Covid aid on ventilation upgrades and online training for faculty and staff members, Indiana also used state Covid aid, in part, to pay off $11 million in institutional dining debt, which now saves the university $1.5 million a year. Indiana is currently undergoing a review to increase its operational efficiency, but it should not result in job or program losses, Driscoll says.
The University of Toledo had been losing students before the pandemic as well — its full-time equivalent enrollment fell from 20,381 in the fall of 2015 to 15,013 in 2023, a decline of 26 percent. It had been pruning back its budget, but it had also been ramping up the sophistication of its financial forecasting, says Matthew J. Schroeder, former vice president for finance and administration and now interim president. Understanding institutional finances better allowed leaders to better understand their costs and how they stacked up against projected revenues. When the university’s federal-aid dollars came in, “we were doing what was necessary, but trying to keep some of that powder dry,” he says, “knowing that the pandemic was hopefully going to be a relatively short-term issue” and that the university’s long-standing issues would re-emerge.
Toledo had begun a process of downsizing its 800-acre campus to adjust to its new, smaller enrollment and reduce the costs of maintaining buildings it no longer needed. Since 2016, the university has shed 1.3 million square feet of facilities, or about 16 percent of its previous space. For example, a former community-college campus that the university owned was acquired by a local public-school system. In some ways, the pandemic made the downsizing easier. Due to Covid restrictions, the campus was still relatively underpopulated through the spring of 2021, “making it simpler to take buildings offline,” Schroeder says. “The disruption was minimal.”
The University of Toledo isn’t out of the woods, financially. It’s currently undergoing an academic-program review, which could lead to changes or even closures. But the stimulus funds “gave us a little bit of breathing room to continue to be disciplined around some of the restructuring and changes that we made during the pandemic,” Schroeder says, “and continue to make post pandemic.”
More Cuts Ahead
It’s tough to make deep cuts to a college, but making many shallow cuts can be just as difficult and damaging, in some respects. Western Illinois had been reducing employees for years, but “there are certain positions that can’t be reduced,” says Pynes, the interim associate provost. “You have to have a registrar’s office that can function, and you can’t reduce the registrar’s office 40 percent just because you’ve lost 40 percent of your students.”
But there were enough reductions in staff through retirements and attrition that day-to-day operations became a challenge. “We have an accountant who’s probably doing the work of what two accountants did 10 years ago,” says Roselieb, the executive director of financial affairs, “and that just hasn’t set us up for success from a morale standpoint, or really from a financial standpoint.”
Multiple unbalanced budgets are going to lead to a significant cash concern, and that is, ultimately, where we’re at.
The pandemic didn’t help Western Illinois’ enrollment or its expenses, but it did bring about $22 million in federal stimulus aid, which alleviated immediate financial concerns for the short term. But the university continued to run structural budget deficits — for fiscal year 2025, it faces a $22-million gap on an annual operating budget of about $100 million. And the Covid money is gone. “Multiple unbalanced budgets are going to lead to a significant cash concern,” Roselieb says, “and that is, ultimately, where we’re at.”
In 2023, Western Illinois offered an “irrevocable retirement” deal newly approved by the state that allows faculty members to work for two years before leaving their jobs. When the 26 retirements take effect in 2025, they will save the university about $2.6 million a year. In early 2024, Guiyou Huang also stepped down as president. Kristi Mindrup, formerly vice president of the university’s Quad Cities branch campus, took over as interim president.
Despite the faculty cuts this summer, there are probably more cuts ahead. Western Illinois’ enrollment was hit hard this year, not least due to trouble with the FAFSA — 26 percent of its students are eligible for Pell Grants. Its overall enrollment has gone from 7,073 in the fall of 2023 to 6,332 this fall, a drop of 10 percent. Freshman enrollment fell from 968 in the fall of 2023 to 634, a plunge of 35 percent.
Yet Western Illinois has never had a formal academic program review, though it has cut majors. (For example, the university no longer offers a philosophy major, though it does offer a minor. Pynes is a philosophy professor.) He adds that there are not many older professors left for whom early retirement is likely to appeal.
The campus should probably work on shrinking itself, too, he says — at 1,200 acres, it was built for more than 12,000 students, not half that. College leaders have been discussing moving faculty from half-occupied buildings to concentrate more people and make it seem more lively, less vacant. But that could take a while. There’s only one employee left on the maintenance staff who paints.
