13 October 2023
DULUTH Fall enrollment at the University of Minnesota Duluth is down again, continuing a yearslong trend and exacerbating its budget shortfall.
A total of 9,350 students are enrolled this fall, down 325 students from a year ago, according to the University of Minnesota’s Institutional Data and Research office.
Over the summer, the University of Minnesota system relieved UMD’s expected 2024 budget deficit of $16.5 million, with system funding covering more than half and the rest covered by a one-time carry forward of funds. But breaking even with that additional help assumed consistent enrollment between 2022 and 2023.
So with less tuition revenue than expected, UMD is left with a $2.7 million shortfall in fiscal year 2024, according to UMD’s most recent expectations for revenue and expenses.
“We built the budget around being flat on enrollment, thinking we had found bottom,” University of Minnesota Duluth Interim Chancellor David McMillan told the News Tribune. “But we haven’t yet.”
Enrollment at UMD reached a high point of 11,806 students in 2011, but the region’s demographics fewer high school graduates has pushed it lower. And while McMillan noted UMD’s retention of students improved compared to last year, recruitment came in lower.
There’s an ongoing push to revamp UMD’s marketing efforts to attract more new students and focus on programs that are attracting students.
But costs will need to be cut, too. After all, the university system last summer gave UMD $8 million in one-time funding to cover its shortfall. McMillan would not give a specific dollar target for cuts.
The school is reviewing data from all undergraduate and graduate academic programs and could make decisions on the future of programs later this year and early next year.
“What we’re trying to do is get a baseline set of information around which we can evaluate. What do we do best? What could we do better? And, God forbid, what might we not do going forward?” McMillan said.
Another proposal is to increase the faculty’s teaching loads, which has become a sticking point in ongoing contract negotiations with the University Education Association-Duluth, the union representing UMD’s faculty.
John Schwetman, president of the University Education AssociationDuluth and an associate professor of English at UMD, said there has long been an understanding to keep teaching loads about 15%, or about one course, below the contract’s limit so faculty could spend time on research, grants and developing teaching practices.
“I’ve never seen my colleagues at UMD this concerned about the future of this institution and their ability to teach students in the way they have,” Schwetman said last week ahead of a union rally.
McMillan said the increase in teaching load should be considered, but noted it would still remain within the contract’s limits.
“If we can better utilize the faculty we have pick up another course here and there … you keep the costs the same and you deliver more outcomes more classes taught, more degrees granted, all that,” McMillan said. “I would much rather go there. But I think we got to look at them at the same time.”
There is also an ongoing process to consolidate or “centralize” staff across the University of Minnesota system. Some staff in human resources, marketing and communications and IT will soon transition from working for just UMD to working remotely for the entire University of Minnesota system.
As for jobs eliminated by that move, McMillan said: “There are a few, but I don’t expect it to be significant.”
He said these actions combined could help make the case that the university system should award UMD more state appropriation funding each year, an increasingly useful source of revenue as money from tuition which accounts for more than one-third of UMD’s revenue declines with enrollment.
State appropriation funding to UMD reached $64.9 million in 2024, up from $31.7 million a decade ago. During the same time, tuition revenue has fallen from $114.2 million to $104.2 million.
But to make the case for more of that funding in front of the Board of Regents, McMillan said UMD needs to first stabilize enrollment and prove that it can spend any additional money in a “wise way” that drives “better outcomes.”
“We’ve got to demonstrate that this isn’t a perpetual downward slide, that we know what it costs us to do what we do, that we’re doing it as best as we can do, and that we’ve found that enrollment equilibrium,” McMillan said.
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