As Utah lawmakers convene for the latest legislative session, the state’s public colleges and universities are bracing for budget cuts, and for the first time this month Utah higher education leaders publicly discussed the total dollar amount slated to be slashed.
That figure? $60 million.
“That’s where we are right now in the discussions,” said Geoff Landward, the commissioner over higher education.
But the talks, he said — and the stress about the impact on higher education — are ongoing. “Every time I see the word ‘Legislature,’ this wave of anxiety crashes over me,” Landward added.
While $60 million is not insignificant, it is less than previous discussions have focused on.
Republican state lawmakers have been eyeing cuts to higher education for months now, with Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz leading the charge. Schultz has previously said he wants higher education to operate more effectively — graduating more students with degrees that land them in higher-paying jobs. He’s also expressed concern about growing administrative costs while the price for a student to attend has ballooned and a dive in enrollment is projected in the years to come.
In October, he proposed a 10% cut.
Depending on which part of the budget for the state’s traditional public colleges that ask was applied, it could’ve meant a reduction as high as $3 billion. That’s accounting for the overall $30 billion higher education budget, for example.
If it was calculated on what the state appropriates annually — about $1.8 billion last year — the cut could’ve been $180 million.
Instead, Landward said, the amount at this time has been determined with a roughly 9% cut to the line item that the Legislature appropriates for instruction, not counting the money for graduate-level teaching. Also not included in that is the funding schools collect through tuition that’s spent on teaching.
Last year, that instruction cost paid for by the state — through taxpayer funds — was about $700 million.
The newly proposed $60 million cut would be pulled from each of the eight public colleges and universities, proportionally. The biggest schools, including the University of Utah and Utah Valley University, will see the biggest cuts.
Landward said at this point, schools are going to be allowed to come up with the money for the cuts from anywhere — not just instruction. So they could trim their budget for athletics. Or it could come out of student services or administration. The University of Utah, for instance, has instructed all departments to run a “planning exercise” to prepare for the reductions.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Commissioner of Higher Education Geoffrey Landward speaks during a news conference in downtown Salt Lake City on Friday, Dec. 1, 2023.
The money will then be pooled into a restricted account, and each college or university can push to get their share back in a reallocation.
But the returned funding must be spent on the instruction that Schultz wants to see — for degrees and programs that have high graduation rates, lead to jobs that are in high demand in Utah or result in high-paying careers.
A recent audit commissioned by the Legislature suggested that schools cut programs that don’t meet those metrics and instead focus resources on nursing, engineering and business.
Landward said the Utah Board of Higher Education will be tasked with developing the criteria for any reallocations and then approving proposals from each school. He said the metrics will include wages, market demand and completion rates. But he hopes they will be “more nuanced,” too, to account for less quantifiable benefits, such as community enrichment or teaching students life skills.
That comes after faculty across the state have raised fears that liberal arts programs will be the first on the chopping block for not being “high-performing” enough based on the datasets chosen.
Weber State President Brad Mortensen said during the Utah Board of Higher Education meeting earlier this month that the liberal arts provide value, including teaching students how to communicate and think critically. Already, he said, some of those offerings have shrunken after the board moved to reduce the required hours for “general education” classes that students must take to complete their degrees, many of which are in the humanities.
Some of the programs that have been deemed “under-performing” by the state audit, such as language or arts majors, are also so small that eliminating them won’t make much of an impact in terms of funding, Mortensen added.
One program at Weber that’s been looked at, he said for example, accounts for just 0.13% of the instructional budget there.
Stacee McIff, the president of Snow College in central Utah, added that most of the classes at the small rural school she oversees are general education; most students get an associate’s degree there before transferring to a large university in the state. That’s what Utah Gov. Spencer Cox did before transferring to Utah State University.
Landward said the lawmakers he’s spoken to “have been responsive to that and willing to consider those things.” And the legislation, he said, is still being drafted. He said Rep. Karen Peterson, R-Clinton, told him she’d provide a draft to him before the session starts on Tuesday.
The commissioner said he’s been told there will be a three-year time period for schools to make the budget adjustments with the $60 million cut, with one-year backfills each year until then. That will also allow schools to “teach out” any programs that will be cut, meaning students who are currently enrolled in them will be able to finish their degrees.
University of Utah President Taylor Randall raised that concern during the meeting. He also questioned how lawmakers are defining administrative bloat when they say that’s a spending concern for higher education.
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) University of Utah President Taylor Randall gives remarks at Camp Williams in Bluffdale on Monday, Aug. 19, 2024.
Randall said in recent years, the U. has been putting more funding toward student counseling services and campus safety, which would both increase administrative costs. Also under that umbrella would be the raises he said he moved to increase for graduate students who are teaching courses.
“To us, that’s not administrative bloat,” he said. “That’s line-item things to make our institutions better.”
He said there needs to be a more refined way of reporting those costs, so lawmakers actually see what they include beyond administrative salaries. Randall made $1.1 million last year in salary and benefits combined, according to Utah’s transparency website for public employees’ salaries.
But the president also said he appreciates the flexibility in finding places to make cuts, which he said has helped even “while this is going to still be hard.”
The coming budget cut and reallocation also comes after the Legislature already trimmed 1.5% of higher education funding during last session. That amounted to about $20 million.
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