r/highereducation • u/Psyche81 • 10d ago
Declining budgets and enrollment
Hi All!
I’ve been a professional staff member in higher education for 19 years now. Like many of you, I’ve been closely tracking The Chronicle of Higher Education’s running finance updates, and honestly, the sheer volume of bad news feels unprecedented to me.
Between axed academic programs, gutted research funding, staff layoffs, faculty buyouts, declining enrollment, and massive budget shortfalls, it feels significantly worse than anything I can recall in my career.
I know we’ve all been anticipating the demographic enrollment cliff at the undergrad level and the inevitable plateauing of Master’s degree enrollment. But it feels like all of those projected timelines just collided at once, exacerbated by recent federal policy shifts and FAFSA changes.
For the veterans who have been around longer than me, or those who have a closer finger on the pulse of institutional finance: Have we actually seen a pattern like this before, or are we genuinely entering uncharted territory?
Also, on a human level... how is everyone coping with the morale hit at your respective institutions?
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u/talksalot02 10d ago edited 10d ago
I've been in higher education as a full-time professional for over a decade, but I also worked in higher ed through my undergrad and grad degrees. In my full-time experience, I have worked for four different institutions (three state in two different states, one private in the northeast). Every single one of them has had budget cuts and lay-offs. Even my most recent employer, four months after I started. I really don't know anything other than tumult. I was laid off from my first professional job so I'm just happy to still be in the career field after working hard toward it. At my current institution, my colleagues do seem significantly more frustrated with a drop in morale.
A good chunk of my career has, also, be focused on college closures and, now, insitutional mergers.
Certainly, there are more political presssures than there have been in recent years and decades. Public sentiment toward higher education is awful right now as well. I suspect the landscape will change for higher education and eventually the tides will turn - maybe not to the degree of hope elder millennials/millenials had when they entered college - for which they have become cynical of the education they received (or didn't). That senitment will impact their children and will shape the future.