Drexel University Lays Off 60 Staffers Due to Lowered Enrollment
“part of a larger trend linked to declining enrollment at universities across the country”
Unfortunately for Drexel, they are just the type of school for these problems. A medium sized, private school. All of this was predicted.
The College Fix reports:
Drexel U. lays off 60 staffers due to enrollment drop, ‘flawed’ FAFSA rollout
Drexel University is laying off 60 employees this fall, citing budget cuts due to a decrease in student enrollment and increased operating costs.
The cuts at the private Philadelphia institution, announced late last month, are part of a larger trend linked to declining enrollment at universities across the country.
“The decision to lay off members of our professional staff is never made lightly,” the university stated in the announcement, Inside Higher Ed reported. “This is part of Drexel’s plan for resolving an approximate 10% imbalance in its operating budget in order to ensure resilience amid financial headwinds facing the higher education sector.”
Will Grogan, a previous program manager of Drexel’s Construction Management curriculum, was among the employees who lost their jobs.
Grogan said he was thankful for his supervisor’s transparency in a conversation with The College Fix on LinkedIn.
“I was very grateful that my supervisor was honest and compassionate about the situation that was outside of either of our control,” he told The Fix.
“I’m leaving behind some fantastic students and priceless colleagues. 6 years and 9 months is the longest I’ve ever been somewhere besides grade school,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post.
In a message to the campus in October, Interim President Denis O’Brien blamed the university’s financial troubles, in part, on the “flawed rollout” of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
The revised FAFSA came out three months late and was followed by glitches. The Department of Education estimated approximately 30 percent of college applications were affected, The Fix reported earlier this year.
O’Brien said the university came about 500 students short of its enrollment goal this year, and the decline added $22 million to the current budget deficit.
He attributed “increased investments both in financial aid to promote access and affordability and in student supports to ensure their success and wellbeing, and rising costs associated with doing business” as the main drivers of the university’s budget imbalance.
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Comments
unfortunately college degrees have become a shamscam
listening to some of them, native-born, speaking/writing LTE on/in the media only proves the point
(LTE – less than English)
Surely couldn’t have any connection with any of the s*t we’ve heard about Drexel recently.
We might be seeing “educational Darwinism”.
“Construction Management” sounds like an actually useful field of study, so they lay off a professor in that department. Maybe the trend of white males beginning to opt for the trades rather than higher-ed is making a difference.
Indeed it is, and you have to know a lot about soils, material science, building codes, tests and measurements, and a bunch of other stuff hard to learn outside of the university. I’m baffled they cut back here.
This surprises me a bit. Because of its Co-op and internship programs, Drexel has an excellent job placement rate, at least for its engineering graduates. My kid got great jobs out of Drexel and has just landed another. He’s making more than I’ve ever made and I hope he takes care of me in my older(er) age.
But the FAFSA snafu as well as the population dip seems to have finally struck at this level. It’s a portend of things to come.
See, Drexel took in a tier of students who are quite good but not quite good enough to make MIT, CalTech, or Brown. Now that there are fewer students to go around, the more esteemed schools are taking those students in, leaving a school like Drexel a little short. That will just cascade down the chain.
Also, Drexel is expensive (believe me, I know, as I financed my son to go through). If you are in-state in Pennsylvania, you’re better off going to Penn State. Your education will be just as good, and you won’t pay as much. Likewise, if you are in-state in, say, New Jersey, you are going to get just as good an education going to Rutgers. So why pay the premium?
So it will be interesting to see how this plays out with other second-tier private universities like Seton Hall, Ithaca, and Wake Forest. By “second-tier” I’m not referring to quality, by the way, but perceived status — they are all fine schools. Princeton, Cornell, and Duke would be the top-tier private schools in each of those respective regions.
As enrollments continue to drop, the top tier will continue to cannibalize enrollments from those second-tier schools, I imagine. And if tuition continues to rise, they’ll be squeezed from the other end by public flagships.