Cuts to higher education spending paint liberal arts colleges into a corner
It’s no secret that since the second Trump administration took office, higher education has been placed on the back burner. With more than $12 billion in total education grants either being disrupted or cancelled, targeting a variety of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and research initiatives, if a school only has to temporarily pause development then it probably feels like it made out like a bandit. Many schools are having to run understaffed departments and even cut programs to meet budgetary requirements. Large public state schools are obviously plagued by this as we’ve seen in our own backyard. Around 580 majors have been cut or merged across public universities in Indiana according to WFYI.
While hell in a handbasket for large state schools is cutting majors, that’s almost a given for smaller liberal art schools. The real threat is complete closure. Many liberal art schools have hit the panic button hoping to just survive the storm. Growth in the liberal arts seems impossible, yet somehow there are pockets where it is happening. One of those pockets being an all male college out of Crawfordsville, Indiana. Not only has Wabash increased its endowment size over the last five years, it has gradually increased its enrollment numbers over the last few years to challenge its historic highs. This is in the face of multiple challenges plaguing higher education institutions.
“I think the biggest challenge is that for a decade now, slowly, students and their families have been questioning the value of higher education,” said Scott Feller, President of the College. “And for those students reliant on the federal and state government to provide some subsidy. Well that subsidy is going down. So many small colleges are being squeezed at both ends. At the lower income end, we’ve got decreasing government funding. At the higher end of income we have people questioning the investment.”
The wallet starts to hurt when you look at the federal scholarship cuts that were made. Between the value of Stafford loans not adjusting for inflation and O’Bannon grants being cut by several thousand dollars, colleges are left holding the bag making it up with institutional aid.
“It basically means a college now has to pick up an extra $2,000 or $3,000 that used to be paid for by a Stafford loan and an extra several thousand dollars from O’Bannon,” said Feller. “We’re talking about up to $7,000 per student that a college needs to make up with institutional aid. That’s money that comes right out of our budget.”
Small liberal arts colleges in the best of positions are bracing for the impact that these cuts are going to have.
“‘Budget cuts,’” said editors of The Carroll News, Isabella Kierce and Anna Maxwell, in their article about John Carroll’s budgetary moves. “Two words John Carroll University students dread to hear, especially when the phrase starts circulating on campus…Over the summer, university administration tasked senior leaders with evaluating expenses across departments and identifying potential reductions based on how significantly they would affect the university’s priorities.”
These types of cuts are more of a preventative measure than anything. Choosing to make cuts before cuts are chosen for them. A more drastic view of this picture can be seen in other schools in our conference. The College of Wooster laid off 22 staff members in February in order to meet budgetary expectations laid out by its board of trustees.
“[President of College of Wooster Anne] Mccall went on to explain how the board of trustees asked her to decrease the budget deficit that started at $8.7 million to ‘reduce it as significantly as we could,’” said Gianna Hayes, Chief News Editor of The Wooster Voice in her article on the staff lay offs.
In addition to layoffs we’ve seen schools cut student activity budgets and implement staff hiring freezes. This includes a school that hits a little closer to home – that school down south.
“While budget requests for this semester amounted to $159,055, limited funds from the DePauw administration meant DSG [DePauw Student Government] could fulfill only half of those requests, leaving 40 out of 79 student organizations who received less than half of their requested budget, and out of those 22 who received nothing,” said Evelyn Zachary the Assistant News and Sports Editor of the DePauw student newspaper in her article, “Administrative budget cuts, student government procedures leave over a quarter of student organizations without funding.”
Wabash is not totally immune to the issues that plague these other institutions, but it has hit us slower out the gate. So, why has this turbulent time for higher education seem to have hit Wabash slower than our contemporaries? Once again the answer is simple – alumni ties to the rescue.
“The majority of our budget comes from alumni and friends at Wabash College,” said Feller. “So at most colleges you might see $1 from alums and friends, $2 from students. At Wabash, that’s flipped. $1 from students, $2 from alumni and friends. So it’s not that we’re immune to this. It is a challenge. It’s very hard to balance the budget. But relative to our peers, its not nearly as hard.”
Wabash hasn’t put faith in hunkering down and waiting for the storm to pass. It is committed to making sure we are better off on the other side than we were entering.
“I think it’s probably not going to be that hard to stay ahead of our peers, but I don’t think that’s sufficient,” said Feller. “Wabash could get substantially weaker and still be ahead of its peers. What the Board of Trustees and I want to do while there are difficult times is still be advancing the College. That’s why you see $100 million capital investments going into the college. We want to be prepared for when the pendulum swings. We want to be prepared for better times.”