Catholic U., facing $30M deficit, considers ‘three main changes’ to academic operations

The Catholic University of America in Washington will look into consolidating some academic departments, as part of a recently announced effort to address a $30 million budget deficit.

In a Jan. 17 email to the university community, Aaron Dominguez, the university’s executive vice president and provost, said that “three main changes” to academic operations have been proposed.

Affected areas of study include the performing arts, social service, nursing and art.

President Peter Kilpatrick wrote in a Dec. 6 email to alumni that the university had to seek “both budget cuts and revenue growth” to counter the deficit, citing a number of challenges in the nation’s higher education landscape.

Kilpatrick wrote that the university — which depends heavily on tuition revenue — would work to eliminate its “undue reliance on financial reserves and investment payouts to balance the budget.”

Among the headwinds cited by Kilpatrick in that email were rising costs, increased competition for students, the long-term impact of COVID, inflation and the “poorly redesigned” FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) form, which was plagued by technical glitches.

In a Dec. 18 follow-up email to the university community, the university’s board of trustees chair Robert Neal stressed that the challenges confronting the school are “significant but surmountable.”

Dominguez stressed in his email that “no structural changes will be implemented during the current academic year,” and that all of the university’s students “will be supported to complete their current undergraduate or graduate degrees in their majors.”

The proposed changes announced by Dominguez would relocate the music and drama departments of the Benjamin T. Rome School of Music, Drama, and Art to the university’s School of Arts and Sciences. The drama and art disciplines had been moved to the Rome School, originally a music school, in 2018.

The art department itself would be moved to the university’s School of Architecture and Planning.

Lastly, the university’s National Catholic School of Social Service and Conway School of Nursing would be brought together “into an expanded school housing both nursing and social work programs,” wrote Dominguez.

He noted that the “consultative phase” for the proposed changes will elicit input from the university’s deans, faculty, staff and students.

“Ultimately, many of the changes will require approval from the Board of Trustees,” Dominguez wrote.

He admitted that the “changes we hope to adopt will be difficult in some respects.”

However, he said, “we must adjust our current financial model to create a stronger and more sustainable organization that will allow Catholic University to navigate the increasingly dynamic and competitive landscape of Catholic higher education.”

The university is far from alone in its financial difficulties, with at least 16 U.S. nonprofit colleges and universities — many of them dependent on tuition, rather than endowments — shuttering in 2024. In 2023, at least 14 schools closed, with researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia projecting the trend to accelerate in the next five years.

In December, Federal Reserve scholars released a report on “Predicting College Closures and Financial Distress,” observing that long-term trends and the post-pandemic recovery have created “serious financial headwinds” for the nation’s postsecondary education sector.

Enrollment fell 15% from 2010 to 2021, and although the fall 2023 semester “saw the first across-the-board increase in enrollment in many years,” downturns in the overall number of graduating U.S. high school seniors — higher education’s anticipated “demographic cliff” — accounts for a “sizeable portion” of the waning enrollment trends, said the researchers.

In addition, said the Federal Reserve report, fewer high school graduates are enrolling in college upon graduation, with the rate sliding from 70 to 62 percent over the past decade.

“This decline, which also began before the pandemic, could reflect growing skepticism among the public about the value of higher education,” said the researchers.

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