During a hearing Wednesday, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon defended the Trump administration’s proposal to heavily cut funding for the U.S. Department of Education during the 2026 fiscal year, arguing the reductions were a key step toward winding down the agency.
“We seek to shrink federal bureaucracy, save taxpayer money and empower states who best know their local needs to manage education in this country,” McMahon said before lawmakers on the House Committee on Appropriations’s education subcommittee.
President Donald Trump’s budget request, released at the beginning of the month, would slash funding to the Education Department by 15.3%, or about $12 billion.
The plan calls for eliminating two federal programs aimed at improving college access for disadvantaged and low-income students — TRIO and Gear Up — as well as shifting the responsibility of the Federal Work-Study program to the states. And it would eliminate funding for Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, which provide need-based aid to undergraduate students.
It also would reduce funding for the already-diminished Office for Civil Rights, which investigates harassment and discrimination on college campuses and in K-12 schools, by about $49 million, a 35% cut from the previous year.
Democrats, however, slammed the budget, arguing the cuts would undermine student success and restrict pathways to higher education.
“Your visions for students aspiring to access and pay for college is particularly grim,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the appropriations committee, said during the hearing. “Some families do not need financial assistance to go to college, but that’s not true for the rest.”
‘You will not have the partnership of Congress’
Trump signed an executive order in March directing McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
His administration has shared plans to move its key functions to other agencies. In one instance, Trump suggested that operating the student loan portfolio should be the responsibility of the newly-downsized Small Business Administration.
Some Republicans on the panel voiced support for this plan Wednesday. Rep. Jake Ellzey, from Texas, suggested the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services could take over mental health support provided by the Education Department. He also proposed that the U.S. Department of Justice could oversee civil rights matters — an option McMahon floated during her confirmation hearing in February.
On Wednesday, McMahon described the Education Department as a federal funding “pass-through mechanism” and said other agencies could take over the job of distributing allocations from Congress.
“Whether the channels of that funding are through HHS, or whether they’re funneled through the DOJ, or whether they’re funneled through the Treasury or SBA or other departments, the work is going to continue to get done,” McMahon said.
However, Democrats indicated they would not support those efforts.
“You will not have the partnership of Congress in your efforts to destroy the Department of Education,” DeLauro said. “Not on our watch.”
DeLauro also slammed McMahon over recent cuts to the Education Department, which has eliminated about half of its staff and canceled hundreds of millions of dollars worth of grants.
“By recklessly incapacitating the department you lead, you are usurping Congress’ authority and infringing on Congress’ power of the purse,” she said.
Democrats also took issue with the budget’s proposal to shift the responsibility of funding programs to states.
Along with Federal Work-Study, the 2026 proposal would cut funding for other higher education programs, including the Strengthening Institutions Program, which provides grants to help colleges become more financially stable, improve their academic quality and ability to serve low-income students.
On the K-12 side, the budget proposal maintains funding for two major programs intended to support low-income students and those with disabilities. It also proposes combining 18 undisclosed grant programs into a single $2 billion block grant to states. However, the change comes with a $4.5 billion cut to those unnamed programs — an amount DeLauro said states couldn’t cover.
Rep. Madeleine Dean, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, echoed those comments, arguing that her home state couldn’t pick up the tab on programs the Education Department would no longer support.
“That’s called shift and shaft,” Dean said.
Support for TRIO and Gear Up
During the hearing, DeLauro took issue with the Trump administration’s rationale for cutting $1.6 billion allocated to the TRIO and Gear Up programs — the full amount they were allocated in fiscal 2024. In the budget proposal, the administration wrote that “access to college is not the obstacle it was for students of limited means” and said higher education institutions should use their own funding to recruit students.
Yet children of well-off families are much more likely to attend college. Among children of the highest-income families, 92% attended college, compared with 49% of children from the lowest-income families, according to a 2020 Brookings Institution report.
DeLauro asked McMahon what evidence the administration had to back its claim in the budget request.
“Simply because we have more programs reaching into the communities,” McMahon replied, adding that schools are picking up their recruiting efforts, though she did not list examples. “And if they’re not, they should be. Because it is, I believe, up to schools also to be reaching into their communities.”
At least one Republican, Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson, also took issue with proposed cuts to TRIO and Gear Up, noting that the Trump administration’s budget request described them “a relic of the past when financial incentives were needed to motivate” colleges to reach out and increase access to low-income students.
In contrast, Simpson argued the programs are highly effective at supporting low-income and minority communities, and he asked McMahon how the Education Department arrived at eliminating their funding.
“The need for TRIO I don’t think is nearly as strong because there are outreaches from colleges now into local communities, and there should be more of the universities and secondary education levels reaching into those communities,” McMahon replied. “They should be talking to them about college.”
The surge for Reform in the recent local elections in England has increased fears in the higher education sector that Labour may feel compelled to focus on driving down immigration at the expense of its other priorities and missions – James Coe has set out the risks of this approach on Wonkhe.
Vice chancellors are understandably frustrated with the public debate on immigration and do not relish the prospect of rehearsing the same political cycle in the wake of the forthcoming white paper on legal migration. All can reel off data point after data point demonstrating the value of international student recruitment to their regions and communities, which according to the most recent London Economics calculations for the academic year 2022–23 brought £41.9bn a year in economic returns to the UK. That data is well supported by polling that suggests the public is generally pretty unfussed about international students compared to other forms of legal migration. The latest insight from British Future on the public’s attitudes to international students found:
International students are seen to boost the UK economy, fill skills gaps, improve local economies and create job opportunities for locals and make cities and towns more vibrant and culturally diverse.
Heads of institution also add that of all the many and varied problems and complaints that arise from engagement with their local communities and regions, international students have never once featured. The problem, they say, is not policy, it is politics. And when politics tilts towards finding any means to drive down overall migration, higher education inevitably finds itself in the position of being collateral damage, despite the economic and reputational harm done – because it’s much easier to reduce student numbers than to tackle some of the more complex and intransigent issues with immigration.
Standing the heat
To give the government its due, the signal it wants to send on student visas is not currently about eroding the UK’s international competitiveness as a destination for study, and much more about reducing the use of that system for purposes for which it was never designed, particularly as a route to claiming asylum. Measures proposed are likely to include additional scrutiny of those entering from Nigeria, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, an approach that may sit uncomfortably as making broad assumptions about a whole cohort of applicants, but at least has the benefit of being risk-based. That nuance may be lost, however, in how the public conversation plays out both within the UK and in the countries where prospective international students and their governments and media pay close attention to the UK international policy landscape and associated mood music.
The political challenge is not limited to higher education. Recognising the derailing effect of constant short-term reactive announcements in immigration policy, a number of influential think tanks including the Institute for Government, the Institute for Public Policy Research, the Centre for Policy Studies, Onward, and British Future have called on the government to create an annual migration plan. The Institute for Government’s explanation of how it envisages an annual migration plan would work sets out benefits including clarity on overall objectives for the system with the ability to plan ahead, the segmentation of analysis and objectives by route, and the integration of wider government agendas such as those on skills, or foreign policy.
For the higher education sector, an annual planning approach could make a big difference, creating space for differentiated objectives, policy measures and monitoring of student and graduate visas – something that in many ways would be much more meaningful than removing student numbers from overall published net migration figures, or presenting them separately. It could open up a sensible discussion about what data represents a meaningful measure, what should be adopted as a target and what should be monitored. It could also open up space for a more productive conversation between higher education representatives and policymakers focused on making the most of the connections between international education, regional and national skills needs, and workforce planning.
In the weeks and months ahead the government is also expected to publish a refreshed international education strategy, which should give the sector a strong steer about what the government wants to see from international higher education. But it will be critical for that strategy to have a clear line of sight to other government priorities on both the economy and the wider immigration picture, to prevent it being siloed and becoming dispensable.
The fate of the last government’s international education strategy tells an instructive tale about what happens when government is not joined up in its agenda. Three years ago the sector and its champions in Westminster celebrated the achievement of a core objective of that strategy – attracting 600,000 students to the UK – eight years earlier than planned. But that rapid growth provided both unsustainable, as numbers dropped again in response to external shocks, and politically problematic, as students bringing dependents drove up overall numbers and the government responded with another shift in policy. The credibility and longevity of the refreshed strategy will depend on the government’s willingness to back it when the political heat is turned up in other parts of the immigration system.
Quality is our watchword
The higher education sector is justifiably proud of its international offer and keen to work with government on developing a shared plan to make the most of opportunities afforded by bringing students to the UK to study. The focus has to be on quality: attracting well-qualified and capable applicants; offering high-quality courses focused on developing career-relevant skills, particularly where there is strategic alignment with the government’s industrial strategy; and further enhancing the global employability of UK international graduates, whether it’s through securing a good job via the Graduate route, or elsewhere.
The value of international recruitment is not always very tangible to people living in communities in terms of valuable skills and cultural capital – and that breaks down to telling stories in ways that people can connect with. As one Labour Member of Parliament suggested to us, many parts of Britain are in the process of reimagining their collective identities, and part of the job is building a compelling identity connection with the new economy rather than harkening back to an imagined past. That is work that sits somewhat apart from simply explaining the value of international students, but may also turn out to be intimately connected to it.
Higher education institutions can work with employers, the regional and national policymakers concerned with skills, innovation and growth, and in local communities, to further that agenda, but they need the breathing space afforded by policy stability and a clear plan from government they can trust will be sustainable. To create that space, the sector will need to demonstrate that it has a high standard of practice and will not tolerate abuse of the system. “Abuse” is a loaded word; many of the practices that raise alarm are technically legal, but they put the system as a whole in jeopardy. The sector has a great track record on developing a shared standard of practice through instruments like the Agent Quality Framework, but it may also need to collectively think through whose job it is to call out those who fall short of those standards, to avoid the whole sector being tarred with the brush of irresponsible practice.
While the landscape is complicated and at times disheartening, UK higher education can cut through the noise by sticking like glue to its quality message. Many universities are bigger and longer standing than Premier League football clubs – but those bastions of community pride have also had to work through challenges with their places and update their practice as the landscape has shifted. There is an opportunity with the forthcoming white paper and international education strategy to get the government and the sector on the same side when it comes to international higher education. Both parties will need to show willing to hear where the other is coming from to avoid another five years of frustration.
This article is published in association with IDP Education. It draws on a private discussion held with policymakers and heads of institution on the theme of international higher education’s contribution to regional economic growth. The authors would like to thank all those who took part in that discussion.
The number of college presidents who testified before the House Committee on Education and Workforce this week about how they’ve handled alleged campus incidents of antisemitism. While Republicans have said they’re trying to combat antisemitism, some Democrats accused GOP lawmakers of using those concerns to quell constitutionally protected speech during the hearing with the leaders of Haverford College, DePaul University and California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.
April brought deep cuts to universities in Florida, Michigan and elsewhere.
Although changes driven by the Trump administration that have included cutting grant funding and capping research reimbursement costs have driven hiring freezes and other changes, the cuts below are not directly tied to Trump. However, Trump’s agenda has directly prompted some job losses. For example, the University of Montana eliminated 42 positions after Congress excluded the Defense Critical Language and Culture Program from a government funding bill.
But most of the below job cuts, program eliminations and other changes are instead tied to declining enrollment, rising operating costs and other factors challenging the sector.
Jacksonville University
Some of the deepest cuts in April were at Jacksonville University, which slashed 40 faculty jobs.
Officials also announced plans to shutter JU’s music and theater programs in a cost-cutting effort, which, coupled with faculty layoffs, is expected to save the private university $10 million.
President Tim Cost called the move “the most robust strategic review of our academic offerings we have ever done” in an April 15 video posted to Facebook where he cast the cuts as “strategic recalibration.” Cost argued that the move would improve academics and “streamline” expenses.
Cost argued that higher education as a sector is beset with challenges and referenced hard choices at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University and Pennsylvania State University. However, with the exception of Penn State, hiring freezes and other changes at those institutions have been driven by changes to federal research funding. (Jacksonville is not a research university, while those institutions are.)
Unmentioned in Cost’s video were concerns that the university could close, which were raised in JU’s most recent audit. Specifically, auditors noted that the university fell out of compliance with its debt agreements. Violations of such covenants can result in debt becoming due immediately. Jacksonville had nearly $144 million in debt at the end of fiscal year 2024.
Despite the university’s financial challenges, enrollment is up. In fall 2015, JU enrolled 4,048 students, federal data shows. This spring, that number was 4,601, according to a bond filing.
JU’s deep cuts have been met with anger and a sense of betrayal from faculty members.
“I really believed that this was a place that believed in its mission,” an anonymous faculty member who was laid off told local media. “And now it is so completely changing that mission. And what’s worse is they are gaslighting us into pretending like this has always been the plan.”
Although faculty voted no confidence in Cost, college officials have argued that changes at JU have followed its shared governance processes, which included faculty input, and that such changes are necessary to drop low-performing programs and prioritize other academic offerings.
Concordia University
The private Christian university plans to lay off 46 employees across two states.
Concordia University—which has its primary campus in Wisconsin—informed the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity in a letter it would move forward with plans to lay off 41 employees at its Ann Arbor campus on May 31 or “during the 14-day period thereafter.” Another five employees will be laid off in Wisconsin, according to a similar filing there.
Concordia announced last summer that most Ann Arbor academic programs would go online.
Concordia has navigated financial struggles in recent years and closed three campuses it operated in Wisconsin in 2023. However, officials have sought to reassure community members that there are no immediate plans to close the Ann Arbor campus.
“Concordia Ann Arbor will continue to offer a variety of degree options in 2025 and beyond,” reads a university page on frequently asked questions. The page added that “Concordia can no longer sustain multi-million-dollar operational losses at the Ann Arbor campus.”
California State University, Sacramento
Facing state budget cuts, the public university in California made a series of personnel changes in April.
“Due to the severe state budget cuts and the escalating labor costs we are facing for the upcoming fiscal year, 28 management (MPP) positions have been eliminated, merged, or not retained. These actions included 15 MPP employees who were released from their positions today,” Sacramento State president Luke Wood wrote to the campus community April 7.
More changes are on the horizon as Sac State navigates a $37 million budget deficit, amid cuts to state appropriations that will ultimately hit all 23 California State University system members.
The private Pennsylvania institution laid off staff members in the library, as well as areas such as facilities and event services, but appeared to spare faculty, according to a list obtained by the news outlet. Officials told LancasterOnline that F&M was exercising “responsible management” by “reducing the number of our employees to better match the size of our student body.” (Like many other colleges, Franklin & Marshall’s enrollment has slipped in recent years from 2,209 students in fall 2014, according to federal data, to around 1,900 currently.)
Some other jobs were also changed from a 12-month to a 10-month schedule.
University of Akron
Amid efforts to trim $22 million from its budget by the end of fiscal year 2026, the University of Akron is eliminating its physics and anthropology departments, Cleveland.com reported.
Approximately 20 full-time faculty members across the university have also accepted voluntary separation agreements, the news outlet confirmed. An advisory committee to help steer faculty cuts and ideas for generating revenue has pitched buyouts as a possible alternative to layoffs.
University of Toledo
Elsewhere in Ohio, the University of Toledo is suspending nine programs due to a state politics and policies.
The public university announced last month that it’s pausing admission to the Africana studies, Asian studies, data analytics, disability studies, Middle East studies, philosophy, religious studies, Spanish and women’s and gender studies programs, to comply with legislation, Senate Bill 1, that recently passed and became law.
All affected programs will remain available as minors, according to the university website.
SB 1—controversial and sweeping legislation that affects both program offerings and campus speech—bans diversity efforts in higher education and requires colleges to drop undergraduate programs that yield fewer than five degrees annually, on average, over a three-year period.
Unrelated to SB 1, Toledo also announced it was suspending admissions to a dozen other undergraduate and graduate programs, following a recent review of academic offerings.
Portland Community College
More than a dozen programs could be cut at Oregon’s largest community college.
Portland Community College is currently weighing a plan to eliminate as many as 14 programs in a cost-cutting effort, local CBS affiliate KOIN reported. So far, PCC has identified two programs that will be eliminated within two years: music and sonic arts, and gerontology.
Other potential programs on the chopping block at PCC are anthropology, art, Chinese, criminal justice, electronic engineering technology, English for speakers of other languages, general science, German, machine manufacturing technology, Russian, theater arts and welding.
Middlebury College
Officials at the private liberal arts college in Vermont announced a series of cost-cutting moves last month, including employee buyouts, in an effort to plug a projected $14 million budget hole.
Middlebury officials blamed the deficit on declining enrollment and increased operating costs.
Other fiscal moves include reducing Middlebury’s retirement matching contributions, shedding rental property leases and evaluating health insurance plans for possible changes. Altogether, officials said initial efforts are expected “to realize more than $10 million” in savings.
Canisius University
The private Jesuit university in Buffalo, N.Y., is offering buyouts to staff as part of a plan to identify $15 million in savings across the next two fiscal years, NBC affiliate WGRZ reported.
University of Technology Sydney vice-chancellor Professor Andrew Parfitt said his management team has found a path toward financial viability. Picture: Damian Shaw
Western Sydney University (WSU) is expected to cut up to 400 jobs to help cope with an almost 80 million deficit in 2026 amid a “large deterioration” in student numbers.
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The U.S. Department of Education on Friday moved to terminate federal K-12 funding for the Maine Department of Education, following through on its promise to cut off the state and ultimately others if they do not enforce Title IX so as to keep transgender students from girls’ locker rooms, restrooms and athletic teams.
The move marks the first time the Trump administration has officially initiated a cut in federal funding to a state K-12 school system over civil rights violations.
The department at the same time referred its Title IX investigation of Maine to the U.S. Department of Justice for enforcement — after multiple threats that it would do so if the state did not sign onto a resolution agreement within 10 days of the agency finding Maine in violation of Title IX.
“The Department has given Maine every opportunity to come into compliance with Title IX, but the state’s leaders have stubbornly refused to do so, choosing instead to prioritize an extremist ideological agenda over their students’ safety, privacy, and dignity,” said Craig Trainor, acting assistant education secretary for civil rights in an April 11 statement.
Gov. Janet Mills “would have done well to adhere to the wisdom embedded in the old idiom — be careful what you wish for,” Trainor said. “Now she will see the Trump Administration in court.”
Mills has maintained since the investigation’s launch that the state is not in violation of Title IX. The governor has said the federal investigation is “not just about who can compete on the athletic field,” but rather “about whether a President can force compliance with his will, without regard for the rule of law that governs our nation. I believe he cannot.”
A swift investigation
The directed investigation — meaning one initiated without a public complaint — was initiated by the department on Feb. 21 and concluded less than a month later in March. The move was precipitated by a public spat between Mills and Trump in February over the state’s transgender athlete policies, during which Mills threatened to see Trump in court.
The day the investigation was launched, alongside a nearly identical one into Maine by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services also over Title IX, Mills said the outcome was “all but predetermined.”
Indeed, the investigation’s directed nature, quick turnaround time, high stakes attached, and referral to the Department of Justice — which traditionally has been reserved for egregious cases — has raised eyebrows in the education civil rights community.
The seemingly targeted, quick and aggressive enforcement strategy marks a significant shift from education civil rights enforcement under past administrations. Investigations traditionally took months or years, involved interviews and other investigative tools, and concluded with a negotiation with schools to bring them into compliance with federal law. Resolution agreements often included changes to school district operations like conducting climate surveys or hiring or training staff to ensure all students have access to an equal education.
Resolution agreement rebuffed
In this case, however, the administration gave Maine 10 days to sign a draft resolution agreement that would change state and district policies to define “females” by “a reproductive system with the biological function of producing eggs (ova),” and “males” by having “a reproductive system with the biological function of producing sperm.” “Gender” would be the same as “sex” under the agreement.
The draft agreement also would have required the state to apologize to each cisgender girl impacted by the state’s transgender female athlete policy “for allowing her educational experience and participation in school sports to be marred by sex discrimination.”
After the state refused to sign the agreement, the department warned officials on March 31 that it would send the case to the Department of Justice by April 11.
“Under prior administrations, enforcement was an illusory proposition. No more,” said Trainor in a March 31 statement. “The Trump-McMahon Education Department is moving quickly to ensure that federal funds no longer support patently illegal practices that harm women and girls.”
While cutting off states or districts from funds was always within the Education Department’s power, it was a stick that was rarely used in past administrations, and especially not over Title IX, according to the Association of Title IX Administrators.
Within three months under this Trump administration, the department has threatened the cancellation of more than $9.5 billion for Ivy League universities over alleged Title VI and Title IX violations related to alleged antisemitism and LGBTQ+ policies, threatened some 60 colleges and a handful of districts with additional loss of funding over allegations of antisemitism, and promised that “this is only the beginning.”
University of Southern Queensland acting vice-chancellor Karen Nelson said significant financial pressures driven by rising costs and a shifting funding landscape was behind staff cuts at the university. Picture: Anna Singleton/Newswire
The University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ) will shed 259 jobs to plug a multi-million dollar budget hole despite all other Queensland universities reporting a 2024 surplus.
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After weeks of uncertainty, two tribal colleges have been told they can hire back all employees who were laid off as part of the Trump administration’s deep cuts across the federal workforce in February, part of a judge’s order restoring some federal employees whose positions were terminated.
Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, widely known as SIPI, in New Mexico lost about 70 employees in mid-February amid widespread staffing cuts to federal agencies. While most of the nation’s 37 tribal colleges and universities are chartered by American Indian tribes, Haskell and SIPI are not associated with individual tribes and are run by the federal government.
About 55 employees were laid off and 15 accepted offers to resign, according to a lawsuit filed last month by tribes and students. The colleges were forced to cancel or reconfigure a wide range of services, from sports and food service to financial aid and classes. In some cases, instructors were hired by other universities as adjuncts and then sent back to the tribal colleges to keep teaching.
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It was not clear this week when and if the workers would return, whether the employees who resigned would also be offered their jobs back, or if the government would allow colleges to fill vacancies. Both colleges said some employees had turned down the offers.
The Bureau of Indian Education, which runs the colleges, declined to answer questions except to confirm the laid-off workers would be offered jobs with back pay to comply with a judge’s order that the government reverse course on thousands of layoffs of probationary employees. But the agency also noted the jobs would be available “as the White House pursues its appeals process,” indicating possible turmoil if an appeals court reinstates the layoffs.
Both colleges said the bureau also has refused to answer most of their questions.
SIPI leaders were told last week that the positions were being restored, said Adam Begaye, chairman of the SIPI Board of Regents. The 270-student college lost 21 employees, he said, four of whom decided to take early retirement. All but one of the remaining 17 agreed to return, Begaye said.
The chaos has been difficult for those employees, he said, and the college is providing counseling.
“We want to make sure they have an easy adjustment, no matter what they’ve endured,” Begaye said.
The chairman of Haskell’s Board of Regents, Dalton Henry, said he was unsure how many of the 50 lost employees were returning. Like SIPI, Haskell was forced after the layoffs to shift job responsibilities and increase the workload for instructors and others.
Haskell was reviewed by accreditors in December, and Henry said he was worried how the turmoil would affect the process. Colleges and universities must be accredited to offer federal and state financial aid and participate in most other publicly funded programs.
Henry declined to discuss his thoughts on the chaos, saying there was nothing the college could do about it.
“Whatever guidance is provided, that’s what we have to adhere to,” he said. “It’s a concern. But at this point, it’s the federal government’s decision.”
The Bureau of Indian Affairs declined to make the presidents of the two colleges available for interviews.
Tribal colleges and universities were established to comply with treaties and the federal trust responsibility, legally binding agreements in which the United States promised to fund Indigenous education and other needs. But college leaders argue the country has violated those contracts by consistently failing to fund the schools adequately.
In the federal lawsuit claiming the Haskell and SIPI cuts were illegal, students and tribes argued the Bureau of Indian Education has long understaffed the colleges. The agency’s “well-documented and persistent inadequacies in operating its schools range from fiscal mismanagement to failure to provide adequate education to inhospitable buildings,” plaintiffs claimed.
Sen. Jerry Moran and Rep. Tracey Mann, both Kansas Republicans, said before Trump took office that they plan to introduce a bill shifting Haskell from federal control to a congressional charter, which would protect the university from cuts across federal agencies such as the Bureau of Indian Education.
“[F]or the last few years the university has been neglected and mismanaged by the Bureau of Indian Education,” Moran said in a written statement in December. “The bureau has failed to protect students, respond to my congressional inquiries or meet the basic infrastructure needs of the school.”
The February cuts brought rare public visibility to tribal colleges, most of which are in remote locations. Trump’s executive orders spurred outrage from Indigenous communities and a flurry of national news attention.
“We’re using this chaos as a blessing in disguise to make sure our family and friends in the community know what SIPI provides,” said Begaye, the SIPI board president.
The uncertainty surrounding the colleges’ funding has left a lasting mark, said Ahniwake Rose, president and CEO of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which advocates for tribal colleges. But she added she was proud of how the schools have weathered the cuts.
“Indian country is always one of the most resourceful and creative populations,” she said. “We’ve always made do with less. I think you saw resilience and creativity from Haskell and SIPI.”
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Dive Brief:
St. Norbert College’s trustee board recently approved discontinuing 20 academic programs, according to a message last week from college President Laurie Joyner.
Additionally, the Wisconsin college expects to terminate 21 faculty positions by May. It will eliminate another six faculty positions in 2026.
The cuts come as the private Catholic institution looks to shed $7 million in costs to balance its budget for fiscal 2026. “These decisions, though difficult, set us on a path to emerge stronger from this transitional period,” Joyner said Thursday.
Dive Insight:
Not long after Joyner joined St. Norbert in July 2023 — having previously led St. Xavier University in Chicago — she found “a significant miscalculation” in the upcoming budget for the fiscal 2024 year, according to the college.
After two consecutive years of running deficits, the 2024 budget’s gap was even larger than expected. The college subsequently moved to cut $12 million from the budget — including through multiple rounds of layoffs.But it still faces a $7 million deficit in fiscal 2026 and anticipated further gaps in the years ahead.
The deficits follow shrinking enrollments and rising costs. In 2022, according to the college, it had the highest faculty numbers in a decade but hundreds fewer students. Headcount during those 10 years fell by 405 students, with 1,882 students attending in fall 2022, per federal data.
The shrinking student body is a major source of financial strain on St. Norbert. The college received 50% of its core revenue from tuition and fees in the 2023 fiscal year, according to latest federal data.
Between fiscal 2021 and 2024, revenue from tuition and fees fell 13.1% to $35.8 million at St. Norbert, according to its financial statements.
The college says it is restructuring from “a position of relative strength as it adjusts its staffing to mirror its student population,” and the cuts are “creating an even stronger foundation as we prepare to weather the headwinds facing higher education.”
The slate of programs approved for discontinuation include both majors and minors running the gamut from studio art and theology to physics and applied mathematics. Students enrolled in majors and minors set for discontinuation will be able to complete them, Joyner said. And some coursework in discontinued programs will continue to be taught.
Incoming Office for Students chair Edward Peck would have expected that many of the questions he would face at his pre-appointment Education Committee hearing would concern the precarious financial situations that are the reality at many higher education institutions.
His answer to this line of inquiry was instructive. As a part of an urgent briefing with the current chief executive he would want to know:
the extent to which those universities have done all the things you do as an organisation when you face financial pressures. There are five or six things that you routinely do. To what extent have they been done by those organisations? To what extent is the financial pressure they are facing particularly acute because they have not yet got through all the cost reduction measures that would have enabled them to balance income with expenditure?
To many with an interest in universities – as places to study, as employers, as local anchor institutions – this idea of “five or six things” would have been confusing and opaque. Is there really a commonly understood playbook for institutions facing financial peril? If there is, why would there be any doubt as to whether senior leaders were following these well-worn tracks to safety? If there genuinely is a pre-packaged solution to universities running out of money, why do so many find themselves in precarious financial situations?
It would help to take each of these “five or six things” (I’m going to go with five) in turn.
1. Size and shape
If your university is smaller than expected in terms of students or income this year, the chances are it has been this size before.
The sector has grown enormously over the last few years, and the way that funding incentives currently work (both in terms of boom and bust in international recruitment, and the demise – in England – of the old HEFCE tolerance band) has meant that the expansion needed to teach more students, run more estate, or conduct more research has had to happen quickly – taking action when the money and need is there, rather than as a part of a long term plan.
Piecemeal expansion suffers when compared against strategic growth in that the kinds of efficiencies that a more considered approach offers are simply not available. Planned growth allows you to build capacity in a strategic way, in ways that take into account the wider pressures the institution is facing, the direction it wants to head, or plans for long term sustainability.
Often senior leaders look back to the resources needed in previous years for a similar cohort or workload in determining costs at a subject area or service level of granularity. If we could teach x undergraduates with y academic staff and z additional resources in 2015–16, why do we need more now? – that’s the question.
It’s a fair question – but it is a starting point, not a fully formed strategic plan for change. You may need more resources because there is more or different work to do – perhaps your current crop of academics are bringing in research contracts that need specialist support, perhaps the module choices available to undergraduates are more expansive, perhaps the students you are currently recruiting have different support needs. There’s any number of reasons why 2024-25 is not a repeat of 2015-16, and the act of comparison is the start of the conversation that might help unpack some of these a bit.
2. Pausing and reprofiling
Imagine that at your university the last few rounds of the national student survey have seen students increasingly bring up the issue of a lack of library capacity as a problem. In response, the initial plan was to increase this capacity – an extension to the existing building paid for with borrowing, refurbishment and update of the rest of the building, and more money for digital resources.
A sound plan, but three years of lower than expected recruitment, declining income elsewhere, and an increased cost of doing business (construction costs are way up, for example) mean that the idea of putting the plan into action is keeping the director of finance up at night. It may be a necessary improvement, but it is no longer affordable.
In other words some or all of this valuable work isn’t going to happen this year, as things stand. One decision might be to redesign the project – perhaps covering some of the refurbishment and the content subscriptions but not the new build (and thus not the new borrowing). Even these elements would still have a cost, and with no new finance this would be coming out of recurrent funds. And there’s not as much available as there used to be.
So the other end of this point is reprofiling existing debt. For even a moderately leveraged university the repayment of capital and interest (under 6 per cent is pretty decent for new borrowing these days) takes up a fair chunk of available recurrent funding each year. If you are able to renegotiate your repayments – extending the loan term perhaps, or offering additional covenants, or both – this frees up recurrent funding to meet other needs.
Both of these solutions are temporary ones – one day that library will need sorting out, and paying less of your loan back now inevitably means paying more back later. But sometimes suboptimal solutions are all that are available.
3. Bringing things together
There may well be cases where the same thing is being done in multiple ways, by multiple teams, across a single institution. There might be benefits in every faculty having an admissions team and a research manager, but in a time of financial constraint you have to ask whether a central team might be more efficient – and whether this efficiency is more important than the benefits being realised from the current configuration.
Again – the calculus here differs from institution to institution. Where faculty autonomy is the norm, it may be that benefits are being realised that the centre doesn’t know exist, much less understand. As I am sure is becoming increasingly clear, questions like these are the start of a conversation – not the end. Even if in bald resource terms centralisation is a saving, you may not be taking all of the variables into account.
Conversely, where there are clear savings and no meaningful reduction in benefits you are still entering into a course of action that could prove hugely disruptive to individual staff members. For some, your plan may represent a long hoped for chance for progression or role redesign – for others it may be the push that means that their years of experience are lost to the university as they retire or move to another role. With campus redundancies in the news each week, staff are rightly suspicious of change – bringing people along with new structures requires a huge investment of time and effort in communication, consultation, and flexibility.
4. Focus
There are many, many more effective ways to run a surplus than being a university. The converse of this is that people who run universities probably have non-financial reasons to want to run universities rather than running something else. In some of the wilder us-versus-them framings of campus industrial relations we can lose sight of the fact that pretty much everyone involved wants a university to keep on being a university, despite the benefits that would come alongside a sudden pivot into, say, rare earth metal extraction or marketing generative AI.
That’s an admittedly flippant expression of something that is often forgotten in university strategising. We all have our reasons to be there. Expressing these is often the start of understanding which are the things a particular university does that are non-negotiably essential, and which are the things we do that are either generating income to subsidise these, or facilitating these things being done.
If there is something that a university is doing that is non-essential, is not helping essential activity to get done, and it is not generating income to subsidise the things that are essential, why is it being done at all?
Of course, this presupposes that everyone agrees on what activity fits into each category. Even posing the question can be painful. Once again, we are at the very beginning of a journey that probably took up a large part of governance and management meetings over the past few years.
5. Addressing underperformance
A couple of years ago, my party trick at conferences involving senior university staff was to show them my “fake subject TEF”. Confronted with a by subject analysis of student progression and satisfaction at their own provider, many of the staff I talked to would give me a similar answer – and it started “ah, I know why that is…”
The problems our universities face are already known to those who work there. External datapoints only confirm things that are pretty well understood, and usually confirm an instinct to act on them sooner rather than later – a reason why OfS investigations have tended to find the smoking guns already put beyond use by the time they get on campus.
If the problems within your institution are less obvious, a well-judged comparison with a competitor could help make things clear. A lot of the data you might want to play with is closely guarded, but there are ways in which you might use HESA’s public data to make a start (my tips – Student table 37, Staff table 11, Finance table 8). Otherwise, your staff will have a rich experience of working at other universities – what are the key differences. What is special about the way your place does things – and are there ways you can learn from the way things are done elsewhere.
Bring to the boil and mix well
If you are a university governor hoping for the mythical playbook, I can only apologise. If there was an easy way to make university books balance, we wouldn’t be where we are now.
What is on offer is the hard choices and difficult conversations that will very often lead to arguments, mistrust, and conspiracy theories. At boards and councils up and down the UK, variations on the above conversations are at the root of everything you feel is going wrong on campus.
You’ll be learning just how good your senior executive and governors actually are at running large, complex, beautiful organisations like universities. Parts of the university you may never have given a second thought to – the planning team, the finance department, the data analysis directorate, internal audit, procurement – will be coming up with ever more ingenious ways to make savings while preserving the university as a whole.
