Akron’s works to fix financial problem, low enrollment

Arts & Theatre          Athletics

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By Melissa Puppo & Kimberleigh Anderson

Five months after University of Akron President Scott L. Scarborough announced a three- year plan to fund strategic growth and address budget issues, the University continues its efforts to face its current financial problem.

“The University of Akron’s future is bright, but first we need to fix its finances,” Scarborough said in a prepared statement in July.

‘A $60million financial problem’

After much discussion and review with the leadership of faculty, leadership with faculty senate and faculty union, it was decided to make several budget cuts to try “to deal with what was identified as a $60 million financial problem for the university,” said Wayne Hill, associate vice president for marketing and chief marketing officer.

The three-year plan — plus a $40 million budget cut — included the elimination of 215 non-faculty positions, the university’s baseball program and non-academic programming in E.J. Thomas Hall. The Board of Trustees at the University also approved of other changes.

The plan “reduces University expenses by $40 million, raises graduate tuition and undergraduate fees by $10 million, and projects profitable enrollment growth in the third year of the plan by $10 million,” as stated on the University of Akron’s website.

“It was a balanced issue to try to preserve the academic core emission of the university,” Hill said. “It was difficult, but only done after a lot of study. Probably the most extensive range of involvement of study that has been done in some time.”

The plan was drafted following a nine-month review and analysis of University finances.

UA layoffs

With numerous cuts made at the university, 161 staff members were also laid off and a total of 213 positions have been eliminated, Hill said. Some of those positions were not filled at the time. Staff from the University’s Multicultural Center and the UA Press was laid off, in addition to several employees in the registrations and registrar’s office and information technology.

No cuts were made in faculty, however.

The community was notified on July 28 of the changes following the President’s announcement, just prior to the start of the fall semester.

“The university is obviously important and an integral part of the community, but the focus that we had was making sure that the university community if you will, faculty, staff, students were made aware of the changes first then communicated outward from there,” Hill said.

With many jobs eliminated, the University has stated that a number of callbacks to personnel have been made because of a variety of regulations and laws. Hill said the actual number of individuals who ended up losing their jobs was somewhere less than the 161 people who were initially notified their positions were being abolished.

With the university continuing to deal with its “$60million financial problem,” roughly 55 full-time faculty members have been hired for the 2016-2017 academic year.

Hill said the new faculty might include current lecturers on staff who would be retained as full faculty members as opposed to the ongoing lecturing.

[pullquote] “It was a balanced issue to try to preserve the academic core emission of the university.” -Wayne Hill [/pullquote]

“[Hiring the faculty] is an important element of the university, and that commitment to increase the faculty is very deep,” Hill said.

There are other elements that have factored into new changes being made at the University, including the effort to increase student population.

Decline in enrollment

The University of Akron is facing another year of decrease in enrollment. This year’s enrollment is down a little over 2 percent, said Lauri Thorpe, Associate Vice President for Enrollment Management and appointed Associate Dean of the Graduate School.

There are currently 25, 1777 undergraduate students enrolled compared to last year’s 25,865 students, according to Akron’s Fall 2015 Census Report.

“We were actually anticipating it could be a larger decrease,” Thorpe said. “ As you know the number of 18 year olds in the state of Ohio and certainly in the Midwest continues to decline as the demographics of that population is getting smaller and smaller here year after year.”

The University attributes two key components to explain their decrease in student body numbers — the first, demographics, along with the university’s recent departure from the Open Admission Policy that many schools use across the country.

The Open Admission Policy is a type of non-selective, non-competitive college admission process in the United States. Entrance into a college or university included only a high school diploma or a General Educational Development certificate, compared to other schools that use selective admission policies. Oftentimes, selective admission schools take into account a student’s standardized test scores along with other academic-related criteria.

“The students who applied to Akron had to obtain a higher ACT and GPA in order to be admitted,” Thorpe said.

This led to 900 fewer students in the fall 2013 and 2014 entering classes and again, this year’s fall 2015 semester. Akron welcomed their largest freshman honors class, however, which jumped to 587 students in 2014 and 640 fall 2015 compared to an average of about 330.

“Cuts [have] occurred at the university of Akron, just as cuts have occurred at universities across the country,” Thorpe said. “What we know is true is that subsidy to colleges, state universities certainly has been eroding over time. [Budget cuts are] not uncommon from what’s been happening across the country at many schools.”

Currently, the university has no plans to work on getting several programs back, including the baseball program.

Student Response

TV2’s Kimberleigh Anderson takes a closer look at student response and morale in light of the budget cuts at the University of Akron.