Dive Brief:

• Leaders at Christian Brothers University say the institution is on track to log a budget surplus for the current fiscal year and be taken off finance-related probation by its accreditor by winter 2025, according to an announcement on Friday.
• The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges put Christian Brothers on probation in December 2023. Earlier that year, in September, the private Catholic university had declared financial exigency and later announced major budget cuts to rein in deficits.
• The Tennessee university has also increased first-year student enrollment and “significantly” boosted fundraising over the past year, Chief Financial Officer Ron Brandon said in the statement.

Dive Insight:

When Christian Brothers declared financial exigency last fall — kicking off a process that allowed it to lay off tenured professors and make other structural cuts — it faced a potential deficit of up to $7 million by the end of 2024. 

That forecast came on the heels of enrollment declines, with fall headcount dropping 10.3% to 1,934 students between 2017 and 2022. 

In its latest announcement, the university said the probation designation from SACSCOC “led to swift and difficult decisions that ultimately better positioned CBU for future success.”  

The university set about cutting millions from its budget to, as the institution put it at the time, “restore our financial viability and reallocate our programs and resources” so that it could “continue this work for another 150 years.”

In December, the institution announced that it would eliminate 28 faculty positions, 11 of which were vacant or held by faculty set to retire. The other 17 cuts came through layoffs. Christian Brothers also nixed a dozen programs with low enrollment, including English, history, ecology and engineering physics. 

By the end of the fiscal year in May 2024, Christian Brothers posted a total deficit of $2.5 million, down from $4.9 million the year before. 

More recently, Christian Brothers has reduced executive salaries by 5%, scrapped or scaled back some vendor contracts, and identified 20 nonfaculty staff positions for elimination, 12 of which are vacant.

In Friday's announcement, the university touted Chris Englert, who became interim university president on June 1, for helping to "energize alumni donors and attract newfound support from other charitable partners.” 

Prior to that, in February, the university said it had raised $4.1 million as of Jan. 19 on a fundraising goal of $9 million. 

Christian Brothers also said then that completed applications and admissions were up 38% year over year and deposits were comparable to the previous year, which it deemed “encouraging given the issues created by the change in the FAFSA application.”

Despite all those efforts, Englert noted in Friday's statement, “Still, we must continue on this trajectory to be fully compliant, so we’re working cross-functionally to invest in the right student resources and programs.”