When California State University, Dominguez Hills opened its doors for fall classes, the Los Angeles-area school did so under a cloud of uncertainty about its future.
Sharing the budget cutting pain with other publicly supported schools across the state and nation, Cal State Dominguez Hills is operating with less money, some 600 fewer students than it wanted, a smaller administrative and teaching staff and fewer classes. By late summer, it also had no budget for the full year, as the state continued to wrestle with the economy and a final state budget for the 2010-2011 academic year.
“We’re working at trying to be strategic in the middle of a storm,” says Dr. Sue Borrego, vice president of enrollment and student affairs at Cal State Dominguez Hills, one of 23 schools in the Cal State system. “We continue to plan for worst-case scenarios.”
The situation at Dominguez Hills reflects the trauma of changes on the nation’s higher education landscape, as schools across the nation search for ways to function effectively on less and adapt to a slower and weaker than expected national economic recovery.
“(The economy is) certainly having an impact on public universities, period, and the impact on (historically Black colleges and universities) is harder because they are more vulnerable to economic change given their largely need-based population and smaller endowments,” says Dr. Lorenzo Esters, vice president of the Office for the Advancement of Public Black Universities, a division of the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities (APLU). There are no quick fixes on the horizon, Esters adds, noting that a survey of APLU member colleges last year found 70 percent of them used federal stimulus dollars as a “short-term” measure to close gaps in their budgets.
“The real question is how do we continue to serve low-income, nontraditional and minority people, given the economic realities most public institutions are facing today. The future looks uncertain, particularly for those populations of students,” says Esters, adding that the prolonged economic slump represents a “setback” in the higher education momentum of the last decade.
Doing Business Differently
