What Universities Say They Can’t Afford – and What They Rarely Cut
Universities across the country are announcing budget cuts, program eliminations, and hiring freezes. The language is familiar: scarcity, constraint, difficult choices. But look closer at where the cuts fall, and where they don’t, and a pattern emerges. Austerity, it turns out, is not evenly applied.
I saw this firsthand at Sarah Lawrence College, where I teach. Earlier this year, the College hosted Ezra Klein – a nationally prominent public intellectual whose campus appearances command substantial speaking fees – as part of a presidentially sponsored speaker series, while simultaneously emphasizing austerity in its academic core. After I wrote about that decision, many faculty from across the country reached out to say the same thing: this is happening everywhere.
The COVID-19 pandemic made these patterns harder to ignore. Federal relief funds papered over structural deficits for two years; when that money ran out, the underlying dynamics reasserted themselves. Universities are not merely navigating constraints. They are making consistent choices about what can be stretched indefinitely and what must be protected.
As a professor, I hear the language of austerity constantly. No money for raises or teaching. Searches delayed. Departments told to “be flexible.” Yet what becomes clear, over time, is that the scarcity is selective.
Start with personnel. Since the pandemic, colleges have relied heavily on hiring freezes, buyouts, and delayed searches that fall disproportionately on instructional staff. Duke University announced large-scale cost-cutting that included faculty and staff buyouts, with nearly 600 employees accepting and warnings of further reductions. Indiana University eliminated or consolidated over 100 degree programs and cut 19 percent of its degree offerings, many in the humanities and social sciences, responding to state-mandated enrollment thresholds. These are not cosmetic adjustments. They reshape curricula, narrow intellectual breadth, and reduce teaching capacity in ways that faculty and students feel immediately.
At the same time, national data tell a different story about where growth continues. Analyses of federal IPEDS data show that non-instructional staffing has expanded far faster than tenure-track faculty over the past two decades, even as teaching loads rise and reliance on contingent labor increases. According to the AAUP, 68 percent of faculty held contingent appointments in 2023, up from 47 percent in 1987. The growth in non-instructional staff is uneven - some of it in student-facing services, some in positions harder to justify - but the asymmetry with instructional investment remains. In practice, universities reduce the number of people who teach before they reduce the number of people who manage, coordinate, or communicate.
Public universities make this pattern especially visible. While state operating support per student has recovered somewhat in recent years, it took more than a decade of reinvestment - and recovery has been uneven across states, aided significantly by enrollment declines and federal stimulus funding. Twenty-two states still have not returned to pre-2008 funding levels. Meanwhile, system-level offices, compliance infrastructure, communications teams, and centralized initiatives remain far more insulated. Some of this reflects real regulatory burden - Title IX, research compliance, accessibility requirements - but not all of it, and institutions rarely audit whether administrative growth is proportionate to the mandates that justify it. Academic units absorb volatility; administrative structures are stabilized.
The pattern shows in specific decisions. The same budget cycle that freezes faculty lines will fund a new associate vice provost, a rebranding campaign, or a master plan consultancy. Administrators often respond that such spending comes from “restricted” funds earmarked by donors. But restricted funds do not appear by accident; they are the cumulative result of years of institutional signaling about what is worth funding. If colleges treated labor-intensive teaching as central to their missions, they would find donors for those purposes, too. The restrictions reflect choices already made.
Elite private institutions, often assumed to be immune to such pressures, display similar internal hierarchies. Departments at wealthy universities routinely report constrained hiring and minimal discretionary funds even as institutions sustain large administrative apparatuses and high-visibility programming. Research on endowment spending confirms the pattern: when investment returns increase, institutions preserve administrative positions but not faculty lines. The issue is not insolvency; it is classification. Some expenditures are treated as essential to institutional standing and reputation; others are treated as flexible even when they sit at the heart of the educational mission. These patterns are most visible at resource-rich institutions, where the choices are starkest, but they replicate downward - with harsher consequences at regional publics and community colleges, where there is less margin for error.
First-year education makes this mismatch difficult to defend. Nearly every college describes the first year as foundational: the moment when students learn how to think, write, argue, and belong in an intellectual community. Yet first-year seminars are often funded at levels that barely support basic enrichment.
At Sarah Lawrence, faculty teaching in the First-Year Studies program receive $200 for the entire year, not enough to take students into New York City even once on the train for a museum visit, a court observation, or a civic excursion. Meanwhile, a single high-profile speaker appearance - even at a fraction of typical market rates - can exceed what dozens of such courses receive combined. Museum visits, civic excursions, and shared intellectual experiences quietly disappear. Faculty teaching these courses routinely subsidize them through unpaid labor, personal resources, and sheer institutional loyalty. If first-year education were treated as core infrastructure - on par with IT systems or student services - it would not be funded as an afterthought.
Students experience the consequences in ways that rarely appear in strategic plans. Sections fill before registration opens. Adjuncts teaching four courses across two campuses cannot write meaningful recommendations. Advising loads grow until meetings become triage. The student who needs a professor’s mentorship - not just a signature - finds that professor overextended, undersupported, and increasingly scarce. Tuition has risen dramatically over the past two decades; students and families are paying more than ever. They are not, in most cases, parsing how that gets spent.
The reason for this asymmetry is widely understood. Teaching is assumed to be elastic; classes will meet, faculty will show up, and students will enroll. The costs of underinvestment are delayed and diffuse. Cuts to communications or compliance, by contrast, are feared to produce immediate dysfunction. Those areas are protected.
Economists have long noted that universities spend in pursuit of prestige. Howard Bowen codified what became known as the revenue theory of cost: universities raise all the money they can and spend all they raise, with “the cumulative effect” tending “toward ever increasing expenditure.” What has changed is the environment: rankings pressure, donor expectations, and political scrutiny have compressed institutional time horizons. Teaching’s benefits are cumulative and resistant to measurement. It gets treated as a cost center. The reliance on contingent labor is sometimes attributed to PhD overproduction, but whatever the market conditions, institutions choose how to allocate their dollars.
The consequences are no longer abstract. Faculty morale erodes when sacrifice is asymmetrical. Programs narrow even as administrative complexity grows. Over time, institutions risk hollowing out the very practices that distinguish education from credentialing backed by marketing budgets.
This is not an argument about bad faith. Many administrators are responding rationally to the incentives they face. But rational responses can still produce corrosive outcomes, and the incentives themselves deserve scrutiny. Transparency would be a start. Boards could require side-by-side reporting of instructional and non-instructional spending trends. Accreditors could ask how institutions allocate marginal dollars during periods of declared constraint. Faculty governance bodies could demand that budget presentations distinguish between imposed costs and strategic choices. Visibility is the precondition for accountability.
Universities are not merely managing scarcity. They are revealing what they believe can be stretched indefinitely and what they believe must be protected at all costs. Strategic plans and mission statements insist that teaching comes first. Budget choices suggest otherwise. As a professor, I see the consequences directly: students arrive eager for serious intellectual formation, while faculty are asked to deliver it with fewer tools, less time, and diminishing institutional support. No amount of rhetoric can offset a funding structure that treats teaching as expendable.
When austerity applies only to teaching and labor, it is not a necessity. It is a choice.
