By Dezmond Remington
Campus may look different this fall semester.
The CSU system is facing a budget shortfall and Cal Poly Humboldt is no exception. To offset a gap in projected expenses and revenue of about $8.3 million, the University Resource Planning Committee (URPC) announced that methods such as reducing the student-faculty ratio, hiring fewer tenure-track professors, and having fewer classes in lower-demand majors will be implemented.
The shortfall has been caused by a combination of things. According to Provost for Academic Affairs Jenn Capps, the main contributor is increases in salaries for CSU employees.
“What happens in the CSU system is that the salary increases are bargained for through the different unions, and then negotiated and arrived at,” Capps said. “And it isn’t as if the resources to fund that come with both those agreements. [They do] a little bit, but not enough to cover the increases, so we’re left with a gap. So, as you can imagine, you have to figure out with existing resources to cover that.”
Rising prices of goods and utilities are also contributing to the gap.
Exactly how big that gap is won’t be known until fall semester, when enrollment numbers are in. The URPC has plans for 3, 5, and 8% reductions.
Many of the planned savings are hiring-related. Humboldt has had a student-faculty ratio of about 16-1 since its enrollment dropped from a peak of over 8,000 in the mid-2010s to under 6,000 today, one of the lowest in the CSU system. According to Capps, the number of faculty didn’t drop at the same rate. One of the reduction strategies is to leave some of those positions unfilled when people retire or quit.
“I get it,” Capps said. “Folks [say], ‘Well, Jane Smith left, so I want to hire somebody for Jane Smith.’ But when Jane Smith was hired, you had 200 more students in your department. Do you still need [them]? That one-for-one replacement thing just won’t work for us. What ends up happening is that all programs are starved for resources, and that’s not fair to anybody.”
Some lower-enrollment classes with multiple sections will likely also be canceled.
“As students are enrolling for the fall term, are we noticing places where students aren’t enrolling in classes, and should we cut those?” Capps said. “Or do we see places where there’s a waitlist and we should add a section to have flexibility? Sometimes it feels like the students just kind of wait. They don’t feel an urgency to register because they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll get there, whatever,’ whereas I’m used to campuses where students are like, ‘Oh, what’s the timeframe? I gotta get in there because I won’t get my class.’ So, maybe somewhere in the middle is good. I don’t want people to be totally stressed out, but I want people to register as soon as they can, so that we can get an accurate picture of what students need. And the more everybody waits [until] the last minute, the more difficult it is.”