Minnesota State University, Mankato. Hannah Yang | MPR News

Minnesota State University, Mankato, the second largest college in the state, is planning to cut 60 jobs across all departments at the school in order to address a $22 million budget shortfall.

MSU Mankato President Edward Inch told MPR News that the deficit was exacerbated by rising operating costs due to inflation and stagnant state funding. A nearly four percent drop in international student enrollment contributed to the deficit as well.

Inch said cutting staff is not something he considers lightly but is necessary because employee compensation makes up about 75 percent of the university’s general fund budget.

“They’re not easy, and there are people involved,” Inch said, “which makes them painful. But they are choices that I believe need to be made now to offset worse choices later if we waited another two or three years.”

The budget proposal calls for 17 employees to be laid off, the rest of the job cuts would come through early retirements and by not filling vacant positions. Those affected will be notified the week of Aug. 24.

There will also be cuts to discretionary spending that includes removing 21 graduate assistant positions, freezing professional development funding for administrators, and ending the lease for space at the Hubbard Building.

The big budget cuts come a year after MSU Mankato began refining its academic portfolio and eliminated 87 degree and certificate programs.

MSU Faculty Association President and professor Jim Dimock told MPR News that some budget cuts were expected but he added that the job cuts will still hurt.

“It’s not like we didn’t sense that something like this announcement was going to be coming,” Dimock said. “And we’ve [the faculty and other employee unions] been putting a lot of energy into working together.”

“For the first time in years, actually, the presidents of the biggest unions on campus are all meeting together regularly,” Dimock said. “We are probably in the best place possible to really organize and push for alternatives to what President Inch is proposing.”

As for the people being laid off, Dimock said at least four of them are faculty members.

“They moved here, they brought their families here, they had every intention of doing their best work here,” said Dimock. “And now they’re going to go.”

But Dimock noted that other employee groups, including maintenance staff, will be hit harder by the layoffs.

“One of the real questions that we have for President Inch is, how did you make these decisions? Why did you elect to cut from these programs and these administrative units and these support services? What was the rationale?” Dimock said.

The university said the number of students enrolled remains steady, but Inch said changes in federal policy and visa processing has created additional challenges to international students who want to enroll. MSU Mankato has about 1,800 international students from more than 100 countries.

International students tend to pay much higher tuition, and Inch said there is a 3.9 percent drop in international student enrollment for the incoming class, which amounts to about 200 fewer students than last year.

Inch said these cuts will help eliminate a good chunk of the deficit and that the university is “financially stable.”

“Whenever you’re talking about people who live in your community, have families in your community, none of these decisions are easy,” he said. “I wish we were not in a place where we had to make these decisions … it’s challenging to go through this process, even though in the long run, it’s the right choice.”

Nonetheless, faculty association president Dimock said there’s a need for greater accountability from the university’s administration, and he questions why the same issues persist despite similar challenges being faced by other institutions.

“This is something that, frankly, we hire a president of a university to deal with exactly these kinds of things, and so we want to know why this is still happening? Why are we still cutting?” he said. “And what is it that we’re going to do to get out of this? And who ultimately, is going to be held accountable? What we seem to have from our perspective is a lot of top-down decision making and then bottom-up accountability.”

Home

MSU Mankato to cut 60 positions to close $22 million budget deficit