Why SU faces a budget deficit — and how its administration plans to address it
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As Syracuse University students, faculty and staff begin to settle into a new semester, its administration is grappling with a different challenge behind the scenes – the unprecedented number of admitted students who decided not to attend SU.
Chancellor Mike Haynie wrote in a campus-wide email on June 11 that the university missed its fall 2026 enrollment target, resulting in a 1.5% operating deficit for the upcoming fiscal year. Haynie wrote that SU’s deficit is “something the University has not experienced in quite some time.”
In the email, Haynie pointed to heightened competition for incoming college students as one of the deficit’s main causes, as SU is not alone in navigating budget shortfalls in recent years. Many colleges and universities across the country face similar challenges due to low enrollment.
“For most colleges and universities, when there’s a budget crunch, it’s driven by an enrollment dip,” Barrett Taylor, a professor of higher education at the University of Northern Texas, said.
Haynie formed a committee in June hoping to address the university’s low enrollment and budget issues. He recruited Whitman School of Management professor Amber Anand and Maxwell professor Jennifer Karas Montez as co-chairs.
In his email announcing the committee, Haynie posed questions the group has been tasked with answering, such as “What is now — and what can be in the future — the purpose and distinctive contribution of Syracuse University for the students who enroll here, and more broadly in American higher education?”
“Once the semester starts, the committee will reach out to the University community to seek input on the questions the Chancellor has posed,” Anand and Montez said in a statement to The D.O. “We encourage students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends of the University to share their thoughts to help guide our report.”
The committee’s report is due to the Chancellor on Nov. 15, SU’s Student Government Association President Emily Castillo-Melean and Executive Vice President Max Lachut said in a statement to The D.O.
The two plan to push for student input on the committee. The work of the committee will complement, not replace, existing budget processes and shared governance, a university spokesperson said in a Tuesday statement to The D.O.
Although hearing about a budget deficit may be new for the SU community, it isn’t unheard of in the world of higher education.
The University of Vermont also faces a $12 million deficit after projecting a 15% decrease in freshman undergraduate student enrollment and a 7% overall decrease across all undergraduate grades. Similarly, the University of Wyoming faces a $15 million deficit caused by enrollment decline, inflation and reduced investment income, according to reporting by WyoFile.
“It’s sort of a reflection of changes in demographics over the last few years,” Michah Rothbart, an associate professor at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs who specializes in public finance and financial management, said.
SU is a tuition-dependent university, meaning 65% of its operating budget comes from student services revenue, syracuse.com reported. That revenue includes tuition, room and board costs and athletic event ticket sales.
The university announced it would raise tuition by nearly 4% in May, jumping from $66,580 to $69,180, increasing the estimated cost of attendance to $95,676 for students living on campus.
Rothbart said changes for tuition-dependent colleges and universities like SU have a major impact.
An established university like SU that already has fixed financial expenses — including maintenance facilities, faculty and staff and buildings — struggles more significantly when facing a sudden drop in enrollment, he said.
“If you’re more dependent exclusively on tuition, and the enrollments are falling, you’re much more likely to be in a situation where it’s going to be an ongoing structural issue,” Rothbart said. “The next question then also is if you do see a decline in enrollment, you have to determine is this a sort of one-off thing or…does it seem like this is a sign of things to come.”
While SU faces some budget issues, the university has not reached what experts describe as a structural deficit.
John Vitali, principal at Daval Consulting, which serves universities focusing on strengthening their financial and business operations, described a structural deficit as when recurring revenue can no longer support your recurring operating expenses.
An operational deficit, by contrast — which the university is currently experiencing — means that some of the approved assumptions, “particularly on the revenue side,” whether it’s enrollment or retention, are missed, he said.
In his June 11 email, Haynie wrote that enrollment in U.S. higher education institutions has “meaningfully declined.” The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education also predicts that the total number of high school graduates peaked in 2025 and will steadily decline through 2041.
“There are too many institutions and not enough students,” Vitali said. “The competition is fierce, and the impact of that competition is felt differently depending on the size of the school.”
SU will also offer an early action application option for incoming applicants, allowing prospective students to receive an earlier admissions decision without being legally bound to attend the school. SU had previously only offered early decision as an early application option. Students who apply early, “tend to matriculate at higher rates,” according to C2 Education, boosting a school’s yield.
Many institutions nationwide expanded capacity in the past few years to accommodate larger classes of college students and are now feeling the strain of a smaller number of college-age students, Rothbart said.
Taylor explained that the reasons for deficits can vary across institutions, such as public funding or research-related struggles. The University of Arizona dealt with a prominent $177 million deficit due to financial mismanagement, first revealed in 2023.
In his email, Haynie wrote international student enrollment is also “down significantly,” due to visa difficulties, geopolitical pressures and federal policy disruptions. There are 111,000 fewer international students at U.S. colleges and universities in the upcoming year, according to NAFSA: Association of International Educators.
In their statement, Castillo-Melean and Lachut said the deficit is “a serious institutional challenge, not an emergency.” The pair also shared that they’ve heard student concerns, the most consistent one being costs of attendance and the possibility that the deficit means students will personally have to make up the difference.
“Syracuse’s financial position remains stable and structurally strong, and the 1.5% operating deficit, is one this institution can and will manage without disrupting the student or faculty experience or reducing financial aid,” SU’s spokesperson said.
Transparency is an important way to address concerns, Rothbart said. He explained that it’s important for an institution to be “honest and forthright” with faculty about its planned course of action, as they’re important stakeholders and an important voice for the core mission of colleges and universities.
However, Vitali warns that while transparency is important, it sometimes causes unintentional panic. He said that no one he’s ever worked with, including himself, deliberately wants to withhold information, but the information can very easily be misunderstood or misconstrued.
“Transparency is a two-edged sword,” Vitali said. “The information that’s released to people is only as valuable as their ability to understand it.”
Taylor also explained that on a broader scale, financial health and public trust are directly connected and have implications for the “mission-related, social and moral health” of higher education. He said if more people begin to doubt the value of higher education, it has a cascading effect on enrollment and it becomes harder to convince people to pay high tuition rates.
For public universities, this connection is direct, Taylor said, but for private universities like SU, it’s also very present and necessary to address, “even if you have to take sort of a step along the way to get there.”
Castillo-Melean and Lachut encourage students to reach out to SGA to express their opinions and concerns regarding the deficit via email, SGA’s No Problem Too Small initiative and by attending their weekly assembly meetings.
“Your concern is legitimate and you shouldn’t let anyone talk you out of it. But concern isn’t the same as helplessness,” Castillo-Melean and Lachut wrote. “This is a 1.5% deficit at an institution with real financial strength behind it — Syracuse has the resources and the time to get this right.”
