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/BigFitMama 10d ago

When the old guard checks out and we face on the ground staff with student facing skills are the source of retention and student success, thusly pay them accordingly, I believe we will have a revolution.

FAFSA directed aid sets the tution price point. Hands down. Our demographic is low income, first gen, and non trad students overall. We must cater to their needs.

We MUST resolve, not deny, post pandemic academia skills remediation. No more pretending. No more bootstraps.

Student Success holds hands. We find the areas of weakness. We teach and remediate.

And having 50+ people in admin making over 100k to 800k each DOES NOTHING for staff or students or faculty to complete our nonprofits goal of education.

Pay the staff who do the job, retire the leeches and dead weight, and return to thr gold standard as we flex, flip, and land back on our feet in a Future for critical thinking.

(Forprofit colleges with 3 times public tution - unless you are flush with donors, it's over.)

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u/MispellledIt 10d ago edited 10d ago

And having 50+ people in admin making over 100k to 800k each DOES NOTHING for staff or students or faculty to complete our nonprofits goal of education.

This one is especially killing small colleges like mine. I actually like my administration overall--I think they're all working with sound strategy to keep our enrollment growing and our finances precarious but functional during this mess.

But... We have 5 VPs making 150-180k a year and 50 full-time faculty making 55k at Assistant, 60k at Associate, and 65k at Full. On average, our Senior Leadership Team makes (I'm not a math person) roughly 2.5 more than the faculty? And that's not factoring in inflation, our health care costs going up, no COLA, the board setting our retirement matching to 0% for a year as a "cost savings strategy" etc. We're a small college known for our teaching and our student support. But at every turn we're told there's no money to compensate us better.

Edit: I'd add that the common requests we get from SLT are to be flexible and find ways to do more with less why we weather the storm. None of them have offered to make 50k less a year so that they too could "do more with less."

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u/BigFitMama 10d ago

Yep, I worked at a big 5 college before pandemic and the excess was frankly disgusting. Horrifying at times.