Drexel College plans to put off 60 workers members because it tries to stability its finances.
The cuts don’t apply to college and symbolize lower than 1.4% of the personal, Philadelphia-based establishment’s workforce, based on an emailed assertion from the college.
One other 155 workers have opted into the college voluntary retirement incentive program, based on Drexel.
“The choice to put off members of our skilled workers isn’t made calmly,” the college mentioned. “That is a part of Drexel’s plan for resolving an approximate 10% imbalance in its working finances as a way to guarantee resilience amid monetary headwinds dealing with the upper schooling sector.”
College officers signaled that cuts had been coming earlier this fall after enrollment got here wanting projections, one thing they blamed on the troubled federal rollout of the Free Software for Federal Pupil Help. Additionally they listed previous rising prices, elevated institutional support and spending on pupil assist companies as driving its finances woes.
A decline in first-year college students this fall, particularly, led to an extra $22 million hole in Drexel’s working finances, based on the college. In October, the college famous that first-year undergraduate enrollment, at 2,350 college students, was on tempo to fall about 17.5% beneath preliminary estimates.
Like many schools, Drexel has a large share of scholars depending on federal support, making it weak to the FAFSA debacle. Within the 2021-22 tutorial yr, 25% of its undergraduates acquired Pell Grants and 49% took out federal pupil loans, based on federal information.
The college mentioned in its assertion this week that it “stays well-positioned to navigate the shifting tides of upper schooling.”
“In service of its distinctive instructional mannequin, the College is within the course of of reworking its tutorial construction, together with shifting to a semester schedule, and implementing a core competency curriculum to higher put together college students to reap the benefits of their experiential studying alternatives,” Drexel mentioned.
