With tight deadline, Utah universities scramble to cut 10% of budget for courses

With Utah public universities preparing to make cuts on what may be considered low-performing programs to comply with a new state law, different institutions are quickly making plans to merge colleges, and to lay off some of their staff.

This year the Utah Legislature approved HB265, giving instructions to the Utah Board of Higher Education to cut 10% of budgets for courses and switch that funding from “underperforming programs” to degrees that may have waitlists. That left universities scrambling to meet the state-imposed deadlines starting with a first draft of the plans due on May 9 to the Utah Board of Higher Education. 

While that’s the initial deadline, the schools have three years to implement their plans in order to receive the ongoing total of $60 million retained by the state in a “strategic reinvestment account” meant to be spent on high-demand programs. 

Salt Lake Community College, which has to cut $5.2 million to invest in other areas, is gathering leaders at the institution to evaluate their instructional budget considering factors such as completion time, outcomes and workforce demand, said Jason Pickavance, interim provost for the office of Academic Affairs at the college.

Budget bills targeting ‘underperforming’ university programs press forward

Reallocations within schools weren’t invented with the bill, Pickavance said. They are a routine exercise the college goes through to update its curriculum and keep up with what’s needed in the workforce. Already having a system in place is what may make this process even more challenging, he added, since programs have already been streamlined. 

“One of the things I’ve done to make the exercise more achievable is I’ve extended it to non-instructional areas of Academic Affairs,” Pickavance said. Those areas include a curriculum office, testing services, a library and an e-learning office. “One of the charges to the deans and the associate provosts is to consider not just looking at instruction, but thinking about how they might consolidate staff or administration in their area.”

That means that as part of the reallocation process, there could be layoffs to decrease the number of academic administrators — which include associate deans, directors, deans and associate provosts. Other staff lines would also be consolidated.

As for programs, that’s still under consideration since their effectiveness evaluation is more nuanced than simple enrollment and graduation metrics. 

SLCC’s dental hygiene program, for example, is a small program that admits about 25 students per cohort, he said. But that’s partly because there’s a fixed number of stations where instructors can teach. So, that program, despite its demand and success won’t be getting larger anytime soon. 

“They graduate every one of those students, and every one of those students goes and gets a job,” Pickavance said. “So that program, to me, is a very small, but high performing program.”

But programs like, say, psychology, which has hundreds of students a year, don’t have those kinds of equipment constraints and are designed to transfer students to other institutions, and not necessarily to get them directly in the workforce. 

“The technical challenges we came up with as we were thinking about ‘how do we want to evaluate programs?’ is that programs are very varied in their purpose and in their scope,” he said. “And you really want to think about is a program accomplishing what it’s intending to accomplish, not holding a program to some rigid one-size-fits-all metric.”

So far, it has been an anxiety-inducing process, Pickavance said. While the college is working hard to be responsive and agile while managing taxpayer dollars, they are also trying to approach this from a humane perspective.

“We’re talking about staff or faculty, and I expect there will be some people that we have to let go,” he said. “I hope it’s minimal, and I hope that we’re really thinking carefully about, if we do have to discontinue, is there another spot in the college that we can find a space for them?”

USU is merging colleges and cutting staff

Utah State University, which must cut $12.5 million as part of the state’s reallocation project, is making two college mergers. 

The first will combine the Caine College of the Arts, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the College of Science, resulting in a new college “that aligns with common arts and sciences models nationally,” Alan Smith, interim president of USU said in an update. Joe Ward, the dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences is set to lead it.

The second will be a merger of the S.J. & Jessie E. Quinney College of Natural Resources and the College of Agriculture and Applied Sciences into a new school “that aligns with those found at several thriving land-grant institutions,” Smith wrote. A dean of this new college is still to be determined. 

“The restructuring of these colleges will be accompanied by department consolidations, moves, and reconfigurations that strengthen alignment and cohesion,” Smith said. “These changes will likely impact downstream programs, initiatives, and centers or institutes.”

At the end of March, Smith wrote in another message that “there will be no way to avoid job cuts,” since personnel are the primary cost of the institution, offering faculty and staff to apply for a “voluntary separation incentive plan,” with cash incentives depending on age and years of service.  

Under the new bill the university may also adopt policies that supersede other institutional policies to reach the goals, Smith wrote. So, “existing policies tied to curricular changes, tenured roles, and other areas will not be applied when implementing our HB 265 plan.”

University of Utah bracing to cut $19 million, plus federal cuts

The University of Utah saw this coming, Mitzi Montoya, senior vice president for Academic Affairs, said in a newsletter. In early 2024, the Utah System of Higher Education received an ongoing 1.5% cut in its budgets beginning this summer and heard that more could come in 2025, so the university had already anticipated a 10% reduction.

To save the $19.7 million the U. has to reallocate, each academic unit will meet to develop plans before the initial draft deadline coming up in May, Montoya said in an Academic Senate meeting on April 7.

“We’re focusing particular support on working with the deans that have programs that might be flagged as lower enrollment,” Montoya said in the meeting. “The task is to work on developing explanations of the data, potentially growing enrollment, or making whatever changes may need to happen from a curricular standpoint.”

Audit: Could cutting low-performing college programs help Utah’s academic outlook? 

Programs that have fewer than 40 students enrolled are to be considered “low enrollment,” a benchmark also used by the Utah System of Higher Education.

Some of the low enrollment but high impact programs that may be affected by the reallocations are mining engineering, metallurgical engineering and geological engineering. 

“We are also using our data to build a picture of the contributions of our smaller programs,” Montoya wrote in the newsletter. “We can’t know what the outcome of this process will be, but we do know that we will continue to be committed to the full swath of disciplines that make an R1 institution such as ours strong and contribute to research advancement.”

One of the goals at the state’s flagship university is also to invest to support student growth, Montoya said in the meeting. She noted that some areas where lawmakers would like to see growth are accounting, data science and nursing, all highlighted in the audit that inspired HB265.

With looming federal cuts, the university is also bracing for changes in its research department, guiding researchers to move with urgency, and “aligning discovery with national priorities,” according to a message from Erin Rothwell, the U.’s vice president for Research.