College and university presidents preparing for the upcoming school year amid COVID-19 are focused on maintaining academic programs and current tuition levels, cutting staff and administrative positions, and addressing issues of racial injustice, according to a national survey conducted by a leading higher education organization.
The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) recently released “Responding to the Ongoing COVID-19 Crisis and to Calls for Racial Justice: A Survey of College and University Presidents,” a report detailing how college and university presidents are planning to address both the financial challenges of the pandemic and the national protest movement for racial justice.
The AAC&U in conjunction with ABC Insights, a higher education research group, surveyed members of the AAC&U Presidents’ Trust, higher education leaders of four-year public and private institutions and two-year community colleges, between June 25 and July 12, and compared their responses to those from a previous survey taken in March.
The survey found that 85% of the 119 presidents responding to the second survey said they expect to maintain, rather than raise, tuition rates, up from 81% in March when a prior survey was conducted and 142 presidents responded. Ten percent more presidents in the June/July survey anticipated no cuts to academic programs or faculty positions than in March. In both surveys the majority of the presidents surveyed anticipated revenue losses of between 5 and 14.9% (61 percent in March and 66 percent in July). In addition, the second survey revealed “presidents are anticipating the implications of a palpable shift in the national consciousness with regard to racial discrimination.”
AAC&U President Lynn Pasquerella told Diverse, “In the time since we administered the first survey to this latest one, we have seen a skyrocketing unemployment rate with 51 million people filing for unemployment [insurance] and there’s also a focus on racial justice and a moment of racial reckoning that has followed the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many others at the hands of police or people engaged in White supremacist activity.”
She added that she was “particularly interested in that majority of presidents who said they were going to focus on racial justice in new ways, not just by appointing a chief diversity officer and sending out statements about how appalled they are but really engaging in comprehensive audits about the way in which we continue in higher education to perpetuate colleges and universities as white spaces, and what we do to address that.”
Addressing inequities is a top concern
