More universities grapple with declining enrollments and growing budget deficits.
The list of universities cutting back academic programming continues to grow. Recently, three institutions – Drake University in Iowa, Fontbonne University in St. Louis and Golden Gate University in San Francisco – have announced reductions to their degree programs, faculty positions, or both as they attempt to manage mounting enrollment and financial challenges. Here are the details for each.
Drake University
Drake University is facing a budget deficit that will reach $10.3 million by 2026 according to the Iowa Capital Dispatch. Provost Sue Mattison announced the need for the university to make substantial cost reductions at a recent faculty senate meeting. According to the draft minutes of that meeting, Pattison said the university’s operating budget was the main source of the deficits.
Drake had already made budget cuts to lower its budget shortfall, which stands at $4.3 million for Fiscal Year 2024, but “considering enrollment challenges across the country … the cuts that have already been made, and the cuts we plan to make, we are at the point where we have to cut academic programs,” the minutes indicated. “This will start with a streamlining of the curriculum and a reduction of adjuncts and overloads.”
Over the past ten years, undergraduate student credit hours at Drake have declined by more than 8,000 credit hours per academic year, while the number of full-time faculty equivalent increased from 330 to 351, counting adjunct positions.
Fontbonne University
Facing a budget shortfall of $5.2 million, Fontbonne University released its final “retrenchment plan” through which it will eventually close 21 academic programs and eliminate 19 faculty positions. The moves are expected to save the university more than $2.3 million in Fiscal Year 2025.
Fontbonne said it would offer transfer or teach-out agreements for all students unable to finish their programs at the school and would also offer free coursework and waive certain other costs to assist students in finishing.
Among the program headed to the chopping block are undergraduate majors in actuarial science, art, global studies, early childhood special education, healthcare management and religious studies. Graduate programs in art, computer science, and fine art were also among those scheduled to close.
For the 19 faculty position to be eliminated, five of which are full-time art faculty, several will be accomplished through what Fontbonne was calling “voluntary early seprations.”
In addition, the university, which has seen its enrollment decline by more than 50% in the past ten years, announced it would make reductions in other areas, including elimination of several staff positions; and cutback to travel expenses, vendor contracts, and various operating expenses.
Golden Gate University
Golden Gate University, a private, nonprofit institution in San Francisco, will discontinue its ABA-accredited Juris Doctor degree and offer a teach-out option to current JD students. While the JD program will be ended at the conclusion of this academic year, the Law School will continue to offer other degrees at the graduate and undergraduate levels.
A November 3o statement from Barbara Mendelson, the Chair of Golden Gate’s Board of Trustees, and David J. Fike, the university’s president, read, in part:
Our decision on the JD program comes amid an especially challenging period for legal education. Unfortunately, many law schools across the country have faced a persistent, decade-long decline in JD applications — and enrollment — as the job market for JD graduates in the field shifts. In addition, for several years GGU Law has failed to meet the ABA’s current bar pass compliance standard (the ABA requires that 75% of students must pass the bar within 2 years of degree completion). Financial exigency in the Law School was officially declared on May 31, 2023, and we subsequently gave notice to Law School faculty regarding their future employment at GGU.
Citing “the realities of the marketplace, our Law School’s place in it and a host of related trends and data,” the university “determined it is no longer viable to offer this degree program.” Instead, it says it plans “to build on areas of greatest potential in the legal profession, including interdisciplinary, cross-University offerings. This work will complement what is happening in our Business School, where we are developing high-demand programs for local, national, and international professionals seeking to advance their careers.”
These latest cutbacks reflect the fact that an increasing number of colleges and universities find themselves in various degrees of financial precarity. Every higher education sector is facing such risks – public and private, two-year and four-year, for-profit and not-for profit schools are in the same leaky boat. A prolonged stretch of sinking enrollments, a global pandemic, uncertainties in state funding, a public increasingly skeptical of their value, and their own tendencies to overbuild and overspend have left hundreds of colleges facing unsustainable futures.
Higher education is facing a financial reckoning requiring college leaders to take a clear-eyed accounting of what it costs to run their institutions. And many schools are reluctantly reaching the same hard conclusion – they’re offering more academic programs; employing more administrators, faculty, and staff; and spending more money on intercollegiate athletics and other nonacademic activities than they can afford.
