Dive Brief:
- Brown University is looking to hold down faculty growth to 1% and freeze its unrestricted staff headcount as it tries to reduce a structural budget deficit.
- Officials at the Ivy League institution also want to trim annual expense growth related to running its doctoral programs from 6% to 4% by reducing admissions targets and cohort sizes, according to a campus message Tuesday from Provost Francis Doyle III and Sarah Latham, executive vice president for finance and administration.
- Brown’s leaders expect those and other efforts to contain the university’s fiscal 2026 deficit to $60 million. That’s down from a projected $90 million if the university made no operational changes to address the budget problems, according to the officials.
Dive Insight:
Doyle and Latham outlined an extensive list of factors eating away at Brown’s revenue and margins that by now are familiar across the higher education world: static student body size , growing tuition discounts, inflation driving up salaries and other operating costs, unionization, and growth in faculty and staff positions following the coronavirus pandemic.
Given those pressures, the highly selective university is looking at a $46 million structural deficit for the current fiscal year. Although that’s only 3% of the university’s total operating budget, Doyle and Latham said “increases in the deficit over time are not sustainable.”
“We are also at the upper limit of the fiscally responsible range for taking contributions from the Brown endowment without reducing future resources available for financial aid, academic support and other priorities,” they added.
Those issues have led to the announced slate of budget actions, which are meant to address the deficits gradually over the next five or six years, rather than all at once.
Top on the list is restricting staff and faculty growth. The officials noted that faculty headcount has jumped by 20% over the past decade, and unrestricted staff — roles not funded externally by grants or donations — by 28%.
During that same period, undergraduate enrollment grew by significantly less at 13%, Doyle and Latham noted, adding that “little further growth is expected.” As of fall 2023, Brown enrolled 7,741 undergraduates and 11,516 total students, according to federal data.
While holding down employee headcounts, Brown plans still to continue paying competitive salaries, the officials said.
Along with limiting employee counts and doctoral cohort sizes — the latter of which will vary by program — Brown aims to keep growth in its general operating expenses to 3% for fiscal 2026. That’s compared to a currently projected 7.3% increase.
To limit expense growth, Brown leaders will ask departments to submit flat operating budgets for fiscal 2026, Doyle and Latham said.
Besides attacking costs, the university hopes to boost revenue, specifically through growing its master’s programs. The plan outlined this week calls for eventually doubling the number of residential master's students and increasing online enrollment to 2,000 students in five years. Just 8% of Brown's roughly 3,800 total graduate students were enrolled online in fall 2023, according to federal figures.
