The Money Problem No College Can Escape

By capriciously withholding research grants, taxing endowments, and threatening international-student tuition, the Trump administration is engaged in a no-holds-barred assault on the fiscal foundations of the American research university. It’s time to abandon wishful thinking, along with any quisling notion that institutions can negotiate in good faith with an administration whose goal is to control American universities — or destroy those that won’t submit.

In the short term, universities that hope to maintain freedom of thought and research have no choice but to resist with every tool at their disposal. That means unequivocally challenging the Trump administration’s illegal and unconstitutional actions. It means building coalitions and using every available resource.

So far, universities have mobilized little of their imposing arsenal. American higher education comprises some of the nation’s finest minds. Our political scientists have spent decades studying authoritarian regimes. Legal scholars and historians have demonstrated the rich democratic resources of our constitutional system. Think of our authorities in taxation and finance. Why have universities not turned more to their extraordinary in-house expertise?

The answer, I fear, leads us to boards of trustees, many of which are drawn from the same elite worlds as Big Law and private equity that have capitulated with such alacrity to the Trump administration — and many of which may even be hostile to the idea of universities as centers of independent thought. The longer-term response to the Trumpian assault, therefore, is to transform the ways universities make major strategic decisions.

Here is one benefit of the current moment, if there is one: It casts a harsh light on the extent to which even our country’s private research universities have grown beyond their ability to support themselves. The surge in federal spending during the Cold War famously helped create the modern American university. More recent pressures, however, have pushed universities to behave like for-profit companies, with leadership drawn from the corporate world.

We’re often told we have to do what donors want because they pay the bills. Except it turns out they don’t! At some institutions, like mine, the largest share of revenue comes from faculty-generated grants.

Perhaps it’s time to start giving us more say on how the money is spent?

François Furstenberg is a professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University.

I am most concerned about two non-Trump-related developments. First, the increase in short-notice college closures: In the last 18 months or so, colleges giving longer timelines for closure, like Fontbonne University, in Missouri, are increasingly rare. If a college gives any indication that it is in financial trouble, it now runs a serious risk of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, so some are hiding damaging financial information from their stakeholders.

Second, the accreditation process continues to be unresponsive to market conditions. Decades of focusing on dotting I’s and crossing T’s have given us a system that focuses on inputs and largely ignores outputs. Who are accreditors working for: the colleges who pay their fees, or students? Accreditors need to help more colleges close in a responsible fashion.

College leaders should take a long-term outlook and create balanced budgets with reasonable revenue and cost forecasts. They should also increasingly look to mergers. Scaling both academic and nonacademic operations across five or more colleges will become a more common solution to budgetary woes. Other industries have engaged in considerable merger-and-acquisition consolidation over the past decades. It’s now higher education’s turn.

For those working in colleges, I suggest they monitor enrollment trends, net tuition revenue, four-year graduation rates, endowment value, and endowment draw. It takes about four or five years to recover from one bad enrollment year, and low graduation rates will be the kryptonite of many colleges. Strong endowment value and limited utilization of the endowment mark financially secure colleges.

Gary D. Stocker is the founder of College Viability, LLC.

These aren’t abstract concerns at Swarthmore College. We’ve lost several research grants. Nearly 15 percent of our students face uncertainty due to shifting visa and immigration policies. And financial unpredictability makes it difficult to plan for the future.

We have been working on multiple fronts to plan for and react to federal actions in order to minimize disruption and harm to our community. We are scenario planning; we have deferred passing our budget until the fall, when we hopefully will have a clearer sense of the higher-education landscape; we are making up funding for lost research aid; we are working to protect our international students; and we are engaging with lawmakers to advocate for Swarthmore and higher education broadly.

All of our work is guided by four principles laid out by our president, Valerie Smith: Swarthmore will continue to keep our campus community safe; we will defend academic freedom; we will foster a diverse and equitable community; and we will comply with the law without preemptively adhering to any changes in federal policy that undermine our mission.

We must continue to make the case to policymakers — and to the public — about what’s at stake. For generations, American higher education has been a beacon of innovation, discovery, and opportunity. It has driven scientific breakthroughs, seeded countless industries, and attracted some of the brightest minds from around the world. (Swarthmore alone has six Nobel Prize-winning alumni.) Colleges are engines of economic growth, social mobility, and civic life. What’s at stake now is the long-term viability of a system that has helped shape the modern world.

Robert Goldberg is the vice president for finance and administration at Swarthmore College.

Located in an immigrant neighborhood in the heart of Minneapolis, Augsburg’s student body has come to reflect the diversity of our surrounding school districts. Years of intentional efforts to create college-access pipelines, build trust with local communities, understand the needs of low-income students, and reduce barriers have made Augsburg one of the most diverse private institutions in the country — a vibrant multicultural campus that equips students for life in a pluralistic democracy.

Today our student body is under threat, seemingly from a dozen directions at once, such as having their immigration status, political speech, and financial aid imperiled. These threats manifest in deeply personal ways that affect the ability of low-income, first-generation students to enroll in and graduate from college. But there is also a cumulative impact felt at the institutional level when barriers to education get higher.

Managing the budget of a small, enrollment-driven private university is a complex affair, even in the best of times. Prudent budget planning means sacrifices from all quarters to ensure that our students can be successful. On paper, this looks like a reduction in faculty stipends, longer vacancy periods for open positions, and operating budgets honed with surgical precision.

It is also paramount that we remain in compliance with legal requirements to ensure the continued availability of Title IV funding for our students. Over the last six months, simply keeping on top of those requirements has been an enormous effort.

With more than 20 years of experience as a university president, I recognize the fear in this moment for our students, faculty, staff, board members, and the wider community that count on us. As I stand before them urging prudent budgets, I also offer a word of hope: The work we do every day to educate students and usher them toward lives of meaning and purpose is the most effective way to resist the forces that seek to undermine our mission. And resist we will.

Paul C. Pribbenow is president of Augsburg University.