You may have heard something about this little economic downturn thing. A colleague of mine sent me a link to a New York Times just the other day, “Tough times strain colleges rich and poor.” The article names all kinds of colleges and universities in the U.S. and describes their problems: huge losses to endowments, massive layoffs, budget freezes, etc., etc.
Obviously, this makes me think of our own problems here at EMU.
The optimistic side of me likes to think that things here won’t be as bad as they are in some places in the U.S. because EMU has already endured several years of aggressive budget cutting and when you’re already kind of poor, being a little bit more poor doesn’t make that much difference. We don’t have to worry about our endowment loosing too much money because our endowment isn’t that big in the first place.
But I know there is going to be an emergency budget council meeting this coming week, and I have heard rumors of mid-year budget cuts from the state. I’ve even heard the rumor– and this is just a rumor– that the state is contemplating a 7% cut next fiscal year, which would be devastating. What will these probable/possible cuts mean for hiring? For Pray-Harrold? For Mark-Jefferson?
Yet on the other hand, as more and more college-bound people and their parents have less and less money to work with in this crapola economy, more affordable options like EMU start to look a heck of a lot better than some fancy private university or even places like U of M and MSU. In other words, everyone else’s own money problems might actually increase applications and enrollment at EMU.
