Many things, small so far, are disappearing from Colorado College.
There are fewer snacks in Armstrong Hall, the reception desk in the athletic center’s Great Hall is no longer staffed by fitness center student workers and the Organismal Biology and Ecology Department is operating with one fewer transmission-electron microscope.
A third consecutive year of underenrollment is forcing CC to cut operating budgets for departments across campus. The school relies more on tuition than endowment or philanthropy to pay the bills, so fewer students and a higher concentration who need financial aid means a shortfall of $12-14 million, according to a Sep. 14 interview with Chief Financial Officer Lori Seager.
CC is not alone. College enrollment is down nationwide, largely because of the “demographic cliff.” Birthrates fell after the 2008 financial crisis, leaving a smaller generation of kids heading to college now.
The results have been far-reaching across higher education. Experts project that more than 440 of the country’s private, nonprofit four-year institutions are at risk of closing their doors because of enrollment trends.
Compounding the crisis: More students are opting for bigger state schools and current foreign policy means fewer international students, according to Vice President of Enrollment Tony Cabasco.
CC isn’t in danger of closing down, but it is struggling to enroll students more than its self-defined peer institutions, The Catalyst reported last month.
The decline is so pronounced that CC is adjusting its enrollment target to about 2,000 students down from 2,160, its target in years past. The college currently enrolls about 1,950 students, according to Seager.
“When we began really talking seriously with the Board last February about the realities of enrollment for CC, we agreed that we would need to reduce the budget on the expense side,” Seager said.
The college is saving money in a myriad of ways. Beyond cutting departmental budgets, it has instituted a freeze on salary raises and cost of living adjustments, offered eligible staff and faculty early retirement buyouts and intentionally left vacant positions unfilled, according to emails from former Dean of the Faculty Emily Chan and an interview with Seager.
Layoffs are not on the table yet. “If the College cannot achieve sufficient savings through the first two tiers, staffing reductions may need to be considered,” Chan wrote in an email to faculty on May 20.
Seager said that the college hadn’t implemented any staffing reductions to The Catalyst in an interview.
Every CC administrator and faculty member The Catalyst spoke with said they prioritized maintaining student experience when deciding where to make cuts.
The Catalyst asked 40 students if they noticed changes in their experience because of budget cuts. Twenty-five of them said they had, describing less food at events, diminished funding for field trips and noticeable staffing shortages around the college.
Questions about fairness have emerged. Five faculty department chairs told The Catalyst they have concerns about transparency from upper administration when it comes to whether every department on campus is taking a hit.
Some faculty chairs have taken matters into their own hands, inputting their cuts into a shared spreadsheet that a faculty member created, which The Catalyst reviewed.
“Faculty would like clarity when it comes to the reductions across athletics, student life, housing and other divisions,” Physics Department Chair Natalie Gosnell said. “We want to understand what all the cuts look like and the shape of the reductions across campus and why.”
In the four weeks since The Catalyst interviewed Gosnell, Seager shared that all divisions were asked to reduce their budgets by 10% over the next two years in a “Work of the College” presentation, but she did not provide specifics, Gosnell told The Catalyst.
“I think that the community can rest assured that every single division across this college has taken their fair share,” Seager said.
The consensus among those The Catalyst interviewed was that the present budget situation is unprecedented. Several drew comparisons with the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic when CC had to tighten its belt.
Even so, none of the CC staff and faculty interviewed by The Catalyst said it felt like the college or their department is in crisis.
“I don’t want people to feel like their hair is on fire,” Seager said. “But this is not optional. We are achieving these savings.”
The Catalyst interviewed nine faculty members, seven of whom are department chairs. Aubrey Pautler, laboratory and animal suite technician in the Department of Organismal Biology and Ecology and Chris Starr, the director of Campus Recreation, sat for interviews as well. The Catalyst also spoke with Seager, Cabasco, Chief Operational Officer Pedro de Araujo, Athletics Director Lesley Irvine, Vice President of Student Life Edwin Hamada, Vice President for Advancement Molly Bodnar and Vice President for Strategic Operations and Experiential Education Megan Nicklaus.
The paper reviewed a copy of the Baker-Tilly Report, a timely external review that Seager says has informed recent financial decisions, as well as emails from Chan about budget updates and early retirement buyout options for CC faculty. The Catalyst also obtained a document outlining updated spending guidelines for staff and faculty as of July 9.
CC President Manya Whitaker declined to comment through a spokesperson. She sat for a separate interview with The Catalyst in early September. “There is no budget deficit,” she said at the time. “We are not in a crisis.”
A CC spokesperson made a Board of Trustees member available for an interview after repeated requests for comment over two weeks but not before The Catalyst’s publication deadline. The Housing Department did not return requests for comment through a spokesperson. Chan did not respond to an emailed request for comment in late September and Interim Dean of the Faculty Sandi Wong declined to comment. The Catalyst asked every faculty department chair for comment and more than half declined to speak or did not respond.
Last Spring, Seager and other administrators asked divisional leaders across campus to model what budget cuts of varying percentages would look like for their respective teams. It released operational budgets for the school year over the summer. Every department official The Catalyst spoke with said their budget was reduced by some percentage.
Chan’s May 20 email outlined “three tiers of adjustment,” which Seager also shared with The Catalyst in an interview.
The first is an “all-funds” approach, which means using endowments and other gifts first, eliminating or reducing meals, cutting travel beyond fieldwork and “official faculty conference/research travel” and complying with a document outlining allowable and non-allowable expenses.
The second tier is an examination of activity and event expenses. “So we look at those activities and events and programs that we have across the college, and we think about, does this really serve those strategic priorities?” Seager said.
The third tier, which the college is yet to implement, calls for staffing reductions.
Based on interviews with The Catalyst, most budget reductions fall under the first tier. Divisional leaders, like faculty department chairs, are responsible for determining where to make cuts, given a reduction by a certain percentage.
Cuts to operating budgets across academic departments ranged from 8.5% to 20%, according to interviews with department chairs.
Gosnell, chair of the Physics Department, told The Catalyst that her department is facing a reduction of 8.5%. It plans to achieve those savings by buying less food for department events, she said.
“We’ve had a long-held practice of providing food for our department community at almost every opportunity we could,” she said. “It’s just a little bit less of that. Honestly, I don’t think our students are going to notice.”
Four Physics students, Aidan Niklaus ‘27, Sean Lam ‘27, Ruby Kofron ‘28 and Sam Rosen ‘28, told The Catalyst they hadn’t noticed changes in the department. “I only see more classes being offered annually and I feel like our lab equipment is a little old but definitely functional and serviced,” Rosen said.
The Spanish and Portuguese Department is also saving money by buying less food. Its chair, Andreea Marinescu, told The Catalyst its budget was reduced by 12%. It decided to stop providing meals for departmental lunch meetings and reduced paid hours for its student tutor positions. “We decided that the cuts will try to impact the student events or student experiences as little as possible,” she said.
The Organismal Biology and Ecology Department, which took an 8.5% cut, decided to shut down one of the transmission electron microscopes in the microscopy lab.
“There were two in there,” said Pautler, the laboratory and animal suite technician. “They offlined one of them because it costs an incredible amount of money.”
Letting the service contract for the microscope lapse covered most of the 8.5% reduction, Pautler said. Beyond that, the department is saving money by providing less food at events and replacing less broken equipment.
It’s business as usual for the Asian Studies Department, which is well-endowed enough that even this year’s 20% cut to their operating budget will have essentially no effect.
“Because we have access to a generous endowed fund, our finances are fine,” Professor David Gardiner, the department’s chair, told The Catalyst in an email. “The Dean’s Office has reduced by 20% the small amount they normally give us, but we have always depended more on our endowment payout.”
“Some academic departments may be more well-resourced with gifts,” Seager said. “And others might have nothing, so the capacity to achieve savings is different across departments. And so we don’t really want to just apply any cuts straight across the board.”
The Athletics Department took a different approach. Every varsity sports team, regardless of National Collegiate Athletic Association division, endowment or fundraising numbers, took a 10% cut, according to Irvine, the athletics director. “It was going to be really important for me to sit with each of the head coaches and ask them to present to me how they were going to do it,” she told The Catalyst in an interview. “This isn’t changing anything in terms of mission value.”
Teams are saving money by buying less food, changing travel schedules to reduce nights spent in hotels and using in-house nutritionists instead of hiring someone outside the college, according to Irvine. The Strength and Conditioning Department stopped stocking the refrigerator in the weight room with snacks for athletes.
Five student-athletes told the Catalyst they noticed the fridge hadn’t been stocked and were disappointed about it. “Student-athletes need food after they work out,” Wyatt Furda ‘27, a lacrosse player, said. “In the past there were always protein shakes and bars we could grab, but it’s been empty this year.”
Seager and Irvine told The Catalyst the department is also saving money by leaving an athletic trainer position vacant. Cody Ahlgrimm, who served as the athletic trainer for the Men’s Hockey team, took a job with The Air Force Academy’s football team this summer, according to the Air Force athletics website. CC had initially posted the job listing but removed it in late September.
“This position was posted then we pivoted as we continue to adjust to the evolving financial landscape and look for ways for each division to be efficient and creative,” Irvine told The Catalyst in an email. “We are confident with our current sport performance team makeup that we can provide the highest quality care to our student-athletes.”
Like her colleagues, Starr, the director of Campus Recreation, kept student experience at the forefront when deciding where to make cuts. “We’re still gonna run all our intramurals. Club sports won’t know any difference,” she said. “I just thought it was really, really, very, very important to preserve that student programming.”
Starr chose to make reductions by no longer staffing the welcome desk in the athletic center’s Great Hall with fitness center student employees. Beyond that, she said, it’s probably not the year to purchase any new equipment.
Even the Office of Admissions, charged with stabilizing enrollment, took a hit. Its operating budget was slashed by 10%, according to Cabasco, the department’s vice president. It achieved the necessary savings by reducing employee travel, deciding not to fill an open financial counselor position and no longer offering faculty stipends for participating in open house days, Cabasco said.
The Department of Student Life, which includes Housing, Campus Activities and Arts and Crafts, is operating as usual, Associate Vice President of Student Life Hamada told The Catalyst. Housing is down an associate director and an administrative assistant, and it’s unclear when or if the college plans on filling those positions.
“They have been kind of rethinking how it’s done,” Hamada said. “We don’t want to stick with what we’ve had, especially if we need to evolve.”
The Department of Experiential Education, which includes the Career Center, the Collaborative for Community Engagement and the Office of Sustainability, is saving money by spending less on food and travel.
It also decided to leave a fellowships and awards coordinator position vacant and have other staffers pick up the slack, according to Nicklaus, who leads the department. “We looked at her portfolio and said, are there other ways that we could support the core functions?” Nicklaus said. “For example, Venture Grants are now being supported by the Director of Field Studies, and the Sheffer Grant Committee, an award that supports Roman Catholic studies, is now with the Chaplain’s Office.”
In addition to cutting costs, CC is working to boost revenue from tuition and fundraising.
But English Department Chair Sylvan Goldberg, who previously served on the faculty budget committee, wants clarity when it comes to those efforts.
“Right-sizing the budget doesn’t have to mean cutting it,” he said. “It can mean building and bolstering it. If I’m being asked to make these cuts, I’d like to know what we are doing to drum up additional revenue.”
Admissions is working to generate tuition revenue in a number of ways, according to Cabasco, like by recruiting high schoolers earlier in their college search and restarting a summer pre-college program that brings high schoolers to campus for a shortened CC class.
Cabasco hopes the pre-college program will bring more full-pay students to CC. “There’s a higher proportion that’s probably in the full-pay category, but we also reserve about a quarter of the spots for students on aid,” he said.
In September of last year, the college sunsetted its Stroud Scholars Program, a college-preparatory program targeted at low-income and minority high school students.
“Fewer Stroud scholars have chosen to walk through the CC door than we’d hoped,” Chief Operating Officer de Araujo said in a statement at the time.
President Whitaker’s office rolled out a new five-year strategic plan this Fall called “Claim Our Space.” According to CC’s website, its goals are to break into the top 25 in national rankings, achieve a 90% graduation rate and reduce the acceptance rate to below 20%. CC accepted 26% of students this year in an effort to enroll more, Dean of Admissions Karen Kristoff told The Catalyst in September. Enrollment rose less than that because many students declined acceptance.
The Department of Advancement remains focused on building relationships with alumni, who account for most of the donations CC receives, according to Vice President of Advancement Bodnar. “There’s not a quick fix,” she said. “What’s important is that we’re building a fundraising operation that can sustainably and consistently achieve growth over time.”
She told the Catalyst that the most recent fiscal year saw strong revenue for the college from donations, a pattern she hopes will keep up this year.
A study by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education found that the demographic cliff will likely hurt college admissions for at least the next 15 years. If it lasts that long, or even longer, cuts to college programs could become permanent.
“I think the thing that sometimes gets lost in these conversations is that we are all on the same side here,” Goldberg said. “We all want the college to persist.”
This isn’t a comprehensive account of all of the ways budget reductions are affecting life on campus. The Catalyst plans to keep covering this story. If you have tips about the budget, please email veronicavvbianco@gmail.com and/or s_mcgarr@thecatalystnews.com. If you’d like to remain anonymous, our tip line is open on our website.