Colleagues,
On March 9, I hosted a town hall to outline how Academic Affairs is approaching the upcoming university-wide budget reductions. A recording of this meeting with captions can be found on the Academic Budget and Planning webpage. I thank those of you who participated in those meetings; the questions you posed before and during the town halls really helped us to clarify information about the budget.
As we have shared, the university is facing a need to reduce expenditures as a result of declining enrollments over the past ten years. Those enrollment declines reflect a decreasing number of Oregon high school graduates who may consider attending college, along with a decrease in the numbers of international and non-resident domestic students who are attending PSU. These declining enrollments have resulted in an overall decrease in PSU’s tuition dollars, the chief source of our revenues. Based on analyses of the state’s demographics, we do not foresee a significant change in this enrollment pattern for the next five years.
While the university has taken budget reductions over the past three years, those reductions have not matched the pace of the enrollment decline. As I shared during the March 9 budget town hall, these enrollment declines are projected to continue through 2025.
This leaves us as a university with a projected gap of approximately $18 million between our budgeted expenditures — in other words, roughly what it costs us to fund our operations — and our revenues — which come primarily from tuition and state funds. Of the $18 million university total, Academic Affairs must close a gap of approximately $12 million.
Because it would be extraordinarily disruptive to try and close this gap in one year, I laid out a multi-year, multi-faceted plan to achieve this goal.
Closing the gap toolkit
- Stabilize and, where possible, increase enrollments: Based on all of our data for the next five years, while it is not possible to close the gap through increased enrollments alone, there are areas where student and workforce demand suggests that we can increase revenues through increased enrollments.
- Support services review: Identify savings we might achieve as part of President Percy’s university-wide support services review.
- Attrition and vacancies: Some savings can be realized by not refilling positions vacated by retirements or departures. Again, these alone will not be sufficient to cover the gap, but they can contribute to reducing expenditures. I believe that we cannot achieve our goals exclusively through attrition, chiefly because vacancies are extremely unlikely to match with the strategic goals of Academic Affairs or colleges and schools.
- Program reduction: Intentional conversations about program reorganization, redesign, reduction or elimination will form a component of our overall efforts.
- Tenure relinquishment/retirement incentive program: We are working actively with the AAUP on developing a program that serves the needs of faculty as well as the university.
- State advocacy: PSU will continue to advocate for state funds to support our distinctive mission.
- Launch ReImagine PSU Initiative: This enables units to think creatively about how to adapt our practices to a changing enrollment, student and workforce environment.
Webpages on the way
To sustain my commitment to transparency, I am creating an Academic Affairs webpage to gather information relating to our approaches to budget reduction, including the Program Reduction Process. Please look for this webpage soon. Because of their importance, I am writing separately to you about the Program Reduction Process and the ReImagine Initiative I announced at the town hall.
Best,
Susan Jeffords,
Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs