Daily Briefing

Good morning, and welcome to Wednesday, June 25. Lee Gardner wrote the lead item and the Footnote. Julia Piper compiled Transitions. Brock Read wrote the rest. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

Signs of a slide in state support

As states finalize their annual budgets for a new fiscal year, many are slashing financial support for their public colleges. The proposed cuts represent an unwelcome and possibly worrisome development at a time when colleges face other fiscal uncertainties.

Over the long term, one year’s dip or growth in funding may not signal anything significant about public colleges’ long-term prospects. But given threats to research funding from the Trump administration, a possible expansion of the endowment tax, and other potential revenue challenges, the cuts come at an inopportune time.

Trends in state support had been encouraging in recent years. State dollars allocated for public colleges grew by 4.3 percent nationwide in the 2025 fiscal year, according to the annual “Grapevine” report produced by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO). State support has increased by 33 percent over the past five years, a welcome balm for the long-term damage caused by drastic cuts after the Great Recession of 2008.

Nonetheless, colleges are bracing for less funding in many states. A few examples:

• Public colleges in Utah are set to absorb a 10-percent cut to overall state support.
• The University of Minnesota system will suffer a 7-percent budget cut to academic programs at its five campuses.
• The University of Maryland system may face a 7-percent cut to its budget, according to Jay Perman, the chancellor, in addition to a 4-percent cut earlier this year.
• In Idaho, public colleges have been asked to identify budget cuts of up to 6 percent.
• Public colleges in Mississippi will face a 5-percent cut.

These are early indicators; a fuller reckoning won’t arrive until later. Nine states reduced support for public colleges for the 2024 fiscal year, according to SHEEO.

Some colleges may escape the haircut they were expecting. Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, had warned the University of California and California State University systems earlier this year that they might face as much as an 8-percent cut in support. That proposed cut has been reduced to 3 percent, though the budget has not been finalized.

Even when support is expected to remain flat or rise slightly in the coming year, it may amount to a cut. Public colleges in Oregon are receiving slight increases, but advocates say it’s not enough to make up for inflation and the expanding need for student services. Over all, state support for colleges per full-time equivalent student rose less than 1 percent over the rate of inflation for fiscal year 2024, according to SHEEO’s annual State Higher Education Finance report.

At the same time, many states are raising tuition, including Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, and Minnesota. It’s a brace for the bottom line of their public colleges but a risk in an era when students and their families are especially cost-conscious.

A funding downturn is, perhaps, inevitable. Many states came out of the pandemic flush with tax revenues, but state budgets have weakened, says Dustin D. Weeden, an associate vice president at SHEEO, and with them state support for colleges. Weeden and his colleagues have been discussing whether state support might have arrived at a peak, given modest growth and general economic uncertainty. If the federal government slashes Medicaid, “that’s going to put tremendous pressure on state budgets,” he adds. “We’ll see what happens with tax revenue over the next year, but there could be some bigger changes coming.”

The bigger questions: Do these cuts bode a new era of state parsimony, or are they just another speed hump on a much longer road? Will they cause even more chaos for public colleges at a most chaotic time?

Quick hits: Cuts and hikes edition

State disinvestment is just one piece in a larger puzzle of financial exigency confronting leaders of both public and private colleges. Take persistent enrollment challenges, add the Trump administration’s draconian cuts to research grants, and you end up with institutions across the sector undertaking austerity measures.

Expense reductions are cutting into bone, with faculty and staff positions coming on the table:

• Vanderbilt University Medical Center expects to lay off 650 employees as it trims operating costs by $300 million. (Tennessee Lookout)
• Cornell University’s financial-austerity measures will include work-force reductions, cuts to travel funding, a review of research operations, and the extension of a hiring freeze put in place earlier this year. (WSKG)
• Columbia College Chicago laid off 20 professors. The institution, facing a $38-million budget deficit, had already eliminated 70 staff positions and shuttered 18 majors. (MSN)
• The University of Massachusetts at Amherst has asked academic and administrative departments to “develop budget scenarios that include 3-percent and 5-percent reductions,” setting off what one professor described as “total chaos.” (Western Mass News)
• Temple University has asked departments to reduce salary costs by 5 percent to help close a budget shortfall that could reach $60 million. (6ABC)

Steep tuition hikes, unthinkable a few years ago, are becoming standard:

• The University of Minnesota will raise tuition by 6.5 percent for in-state students, and 7.5 percent for out-of-staters, at the flagship Twin Cities campus. The Crookston, Duluth, and Morris campuses will see slightly smaller increases. (The Minnesota Star Tribune)
• Minnesota State University, meanwhile, approved tuition increases ranging from 4 percent to 8 percent across the system’s 33 campuses. (The Minnesota Star Tribune)
• The University of Nebraska landed on a 5-percent tuition hike this year after two straight years of 3.5-percent increases. (Nebraska Examiner)
• The State University System of Florida has adopted 10-percent higher tuition for out-of-state students. University trustee boards must individually approve the hike. (CBS News Miami)

Quick hits

• Another allegation of law-review discrimination: A lawsuit argues that the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the Michigan Law Review illegally discriminate by requiring article submissions to be accompanied by short personal essays. The suit argues that Review staffers “rig” the essay-review process to favor submissions by women, authors of color, and other underrepresented minorities. The university denies wrongdoing. In April two federal agencies opened investigations into Harvard Law Review, alleging similar discrimination in the article-selection process. (Detroit Free Press)
• New front in Virginia board fight: A group of Democratic state senators has sued the rectors who lead the governing boards of three Virginia public universities, intensifying a battle over whether new board members appointed by the state’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, will be permitted to serve. A Senate committee rejected some of Youngkin’s appointees — including the former Virginia attorney general Kenneth Cuccinelli, who was named to the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors — earlier this month. But the Youngkin administration has contended that the appointees can remain on the university boards. (The Washington Post)
• Feds out of tribal college? Sen. Jerry Moran, Republican of Kansas, is seeking to remove Haskell Indian Nations University from federal control while preserving the tribal college’s federal funding. Moran says the U.S. Bureau of Indian Education failed to provide adequate oversight while the university — which has been beset by leadership turnover and financial turmoil — mismanaged a series of sexual-assault complaints. He has introduced legislation to put Haskell under the oversight of an independent board of tribal representatives. (The Kansas City Star)
• Texas tells colleges to ID undocumented students: Earlier this month, the state revoked undocumented students’ eligibility for in-state tuition at public colleges. Now, Texas’ higher-education commissioner has told college presidents they’ll need to identify those students so their tuition rates can be adjusted. A spokesperson said the state would provide no additional guidance on how institutions should do so. (The Texas Tribune)
• Donor pulls money from Florida university: Miguel (Mike) Fernandez, a Miami businessman, suspended a $1-million donation to Florida International University, citing a state-level decision to strip undocumented students of in-state tuition benefits. Fernandez had pledged the money to fund scholarships for first-generation students. (Miami Herald)
• AAUP censures Muhlenberg: The American Association of University Professors decried the university’s dismissal last year of Maura Finkelstein, a tenured professor of anthropology who had reposted a poet’s Instagram call to “not cower to Zionists,” as a violation of academic freedom and due process. (AAUP)
• U. of Cincinnati shutters DEI programs: Citing a new state law that bans campus DEI efforts, the university is closing its Equity and Inclusion Office, LGBTQ Center, Women’s Center, and Ethnic Programs and Services Center. Its African American Cultural and Resource Center will be rechristened as the “Cultural Center.” “Unwinding deeply rooted efforts around inclusion will undoubtedly challenge core feelings of belonging for many in our community,” wrote the university’s president, Neville Pinto, in an email to students and faculty. (Cincinnati Enquirer)

Transitions

• Susan S. Hasseler, president of Muskingum University, in Ohio, plans to retire at the end of the 2025-26 academic year.
• Alicia Estey, chief financial and operating officer and vice president for finance and operations at Boise State University, has been named vice president for finance and administration at the University of Vermont.
• Chuck Clemons, a former state representative in the Florida House of Representatives, has been named vice president for government and community relations at the University of Florida.

To submit a new-hire announcement, email people@chronicle.com. You can also find Transitions online here.

Footnote

As colleges ready themselves for their incoming freshmen this fall, they’re once again contemplating enrollment’s eternal questions: What, exactly, do rising college students want to hear from colleges recruiting them? And how do they want to hear it?

The annual E-Expectations Trend Report from the college-marketing firm Ruffalo Noel Levitz brings some fresh insights — and, in one key finding, cuts against conventional wisdom.

Despite the stereotype that today’s students are ever-texting TikTok obsessives immune to older forms of outreach, some of the most tried-and-true avenues of contact still work best.

A survey of more than 1,500 high-school students found that 91 percent used colleges’ websites in their search and that 87 percent use email every week, with 74 percent preferring it as the primary mode of contact with colleges. (Tales of high-school and college students never looking at their email abound, but this is what the survey found.)

Seventy-seven percent of respondents have taken virtual campus tours, and 84 percent of that group found the tours useful. But real-world tours still come out slightly ahead: Eighty percent of the students have made in-person visits, and 88 percent of those who did found them helpful.

That doesn’t mean colleges don’t have to worry about TikTok. While Instagram remains the most popular social-media platform — 63 percent of respondents use it — YouTube and TikTok are the second- and third-most popular, and the survey found that colleges aren’t getting their message out on those platforms nearly as effectively.

So there’s still plenty of work for social-media managers and digital innovators to do. Just don’t ignore the outreach that has always mattered. It still does.