University of Portland Slashing Jobs as Enrollment Drops
“The budget deficit has not stopped the university from expanding its “Diversity Center,” however.”
A classic example of ‘get woke, go broke’ in action. A chaplain was forced out as pastoral resident allegedly for criticizing a pride flag.
The College Fix reports:
Liberal Catholic university slashes jobs as enrollment and revenues drop
A liberal Catholic university that has fully embraced diversity initiatives and the LGBT agenda is facing a $13.4 million budget shortfall after nearly 250 students chose not to follow through on enrollment.
University of Portland received deposits for 1,100 students for the current semester, but only 860 enrolled at the Catholic college which costs freshman students $70,000 between tuition and room and board.
This has left University of Portland with a budget shortfall and officials have so far slashed 45 jobs, including a Title IX coordinator position.
“The University has already eliminated 45 staff positions yet [finance vice president Eric Barger] asserts that most of them were already vacant,” The Beacon reported. The budget deficit has not stopped the university from expanding its “Diversity Center,” however.
In fact, the university and its students are a major proponent of pushing liberal ideology.
For example, former residential hall director Mary Markham questioned why Dan Parrish, a Catholic priest and chaplain on campus, used “theological beliefs” to question the hanging of a rainbow pride flag.
A town hall event with Parrish included students crying because Parrish holds Catholic Church teaching along with separate conservative political beliefs.
Agitation from critics forced Parrish out as the “pastoral resident” available in the dorm halls to help students.
Dorm halls incidentally are seen as a way to extract more money from students, according to the university, now helmed by Robert Kelly, a former diversity administrator for Loyola University-Chicago
“Effective next fall, the University is requiring a two-year residency for all incoming freshman students,” the campus newspaper reported. “This means that the Class of 2027 will be required to live on campus for their freshman and sophomore year.”
“This choice was made to try and increase the revenue that comes from room and board, which makes up 16% of the university’s income,” the paper reported. “Currently, the capacity of room and board is sitting at 75%.”
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Comments
How much of the drop in enrollment is from foreign students deciding that going to a US college might not be such a great idea in the first place?
I refer to all colleges, not just U of P.
why not cut needless administration jobs, like anyone in the DEI (which should be DIE, which makes more sense) fold.
Imagine the hubris to charge $250,000+ for a college degree
Imagine the naïveté to imagine that that’d be money well spent
Imagine having access to ~$250,000+ in discretionary spending, and thinking that this place is the best place to spend that money and that this place is where you should spend 2/3rds of the next four years.
It’s as if people have lost their minds
Where are the grownups?
$250,000 is a nice tidy sum to open a business of some kind. OK, maybe $200K after, say, $50K for trade school tuition and supplies.
U of P is in an area that is rampant with feral humans. I suspect it was wise parents who decided to have their kids go elsewhere. This is Concordia Univeristy, part deux.
As I recall, Columbia Villa is less than a mile from U of P. Not a nice place.
Ten years ago or so they built the Orange/Yellow Line of the MAX train (also known as the Trimet Hotel) up through the ghetto area of North Portland to revitalize it, which was so successful, that once the dirty part of construction was over, they moved all of the residents out to E Portland which is where most of the non-antifa crimenow lives. MAX is free and convenient transpo for the ferals to move back and forth, not the fast efficient transpo for people to get to work in downtown Portland which is what the .gov types envisioned back in the days when more than 30 people actually worked in the downtown area, which has gotten so bad that they are now working on converting the empty office space to condos. U of P sits about a dozen blocks to the west of the MAX line and thus the ferals are up there looking for bikes to steal on a daily basis. It has now gotten to where each of these draconian shifts now happens every 10 years vs 30 in the old days when there was enough lapsed time that people had forgotten how the promise and failure of a project had done the full cycle. Nowadays it seems like the project isn’t even completed before they declare a failure and begin to raze it.