The Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system (CSCU) is facing a $140 million budget shortfall next fiscal year. Leaders within the university system presented a deficit mitigation plan to the Board of Regents Wednesday.
Stakeholders, staff and students have waited months to learn more about the budget shortfall and the potential impact it may have on campuses across the state. They’ve been concerned about closures, tuition hikes and cuts to crucial academic programs.
CSCU leaders said personnel cuts would cost more than $35 million without layoffs. They say this is due to the state losing its access to additional state funding, such as pandemic relief funds.
Dr. Lloyd Blanchard, chief financial officer of CSCU, says the university system is facing such a severe budget shortfall because of enrollment decline, exacerbated by the pandemic along with one-time funds available to the university.
Blanchard says the deficit will be addressed through the implementation of new programs, growing the student population, and improving full-time staffer retention rates.
CSCU officials say they will also seek assistance from the state. They would ask Gov. Ned Lamont and the General Assembly to cover the remaining $47 million.
The proposed plan would include a path forward where the university system would “streamline right sized operations” and move around employees when “the time is right.”
Officials said these cuts would not include layoffs or campus closures but they didn’t mention how many jobs would be eliminated or moved around.
Early Wednesday morning, a group of CSCU professors, students, and staff gathered outside before the Board of Regents meeting with protest signs, demanding that public education be prioritized more in the state budget.
They say politicians need to invest more in Connecticut by properly funding its public education system.
“Governor Lamont and his budget secretary Jeff Beckham have decided that it’s more important to maintain our state’s inequality than to educate students from Connecticut’s middle and working classes,” said John O’Connor, secretary of CSU-AAUP, the union representing university employees.
“The budget mitigation plan … is larger class sizes. It has fewer faculty, O’Connor said. “It has canceled sections. It has higher tuition. Each of these cuts on their own will make it harder for students to get into college and stay there until they graduate.”
Xander Tyler, a senior at Central Connecticut State University, said they have already noticed resources vanishing from what once was a place of vast amounts of opportunities while experiencing endless tuition hikes.
“As I graduate and leave the CSCU system, the class of 2027 is staring down a $100 million budget deficit,” Tyler said. “They will know a skeleton of the university that I attended. One that was already struggling to meet the needs of students and faculty.”
Tyler says this will lead CSCU to lose more competent and passionate professors, along with courses, programs, and clubs that are of interest to students. The concern is that this may lead students in Connecticut to go elsewhere for their education and leave the state altogether.
“Students will lose opportunities that allow students to shape their education in alignment with their passion and their goals,” Tyler said. “We are the state’s future, the next generation of working professionals and yet what matters to us never once came up during the formulation of this budget.”
