by James A. Bacon
In anticipation of shrinking numbers of college-bound students, the University of Lynchburg has taken proactive steps to reduce its cost structure. A small private institution affiliated with the Church of Christ, the university has announced that it is cutting employee headcount by 10%, with further reductions over the next three years.
Staff positions will be eliminated immediately; faculty positions will be phased out through retirements and reassignments, reports WSET News.
“Lynchburg is closing 12 undergraduate programs and 5 graduate programs, impacting a total 4.5% of students,” the University said in a press release. “Currently 70% of undergraduate students are studying in eight majors, and 95% of students are in 21. The university offers 51 majors.”
Everyone in higher education knows that the demographic tsunami is coming. Everyone knows that competition will heat up for a smaller number of students. Everyone knows that pressure will intensify to admit less-academically-qualified students and students with greater financial need. Institutions that freeze with indecision about what to do will find themselves burdened with unsustainable overhead and bleeding financial reserves. University of Lynchburg leadership was wise to make the hard decisions before encountering a fiscal crisis.
It is often said that colleges and universities should be run like a business. Some observers scoff at the notion, arguing that higher-ed has a higher calling that makes comparisons with the profit-maximizing private sector problematic.
But all institutions, for-profit or non-profit, are enterprises that must match revenues and costs over the long run. All institutions make decisions about how to allocate their resources to generate the greatest returns. An institution can defy that logic in a growing market subsidized by massive federal student lending, but it won’t survive in a contracting market.
University of Lynchburg President Alison Morrison-Shetlar gets it. “We can reallocate these resources to where the students want to have experiences and enhance that experience,” she told WSET. “And that is definitely what we have been doing, we’ve been doing those types of things for quite a few years, but now we’re in an opportunity to really look critically and what’s working and what [sic] not working.”
Every university needs to conduct a hard-nosed evaluation of where they excel and where they fall short of the market competition, and then pivot towards its strengths.
In terms of enrollment, the university has held its own over the past decade, a period in which many smaller liberal arts institutions have lost ground. According to State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) data, full-time-equivalent enrollment stood at 2,698 in 2012-13 and lost only a smidgeon over the succeeding decade. Enrollment was 2,685 in 2022-23.
To maintain enrollment, however, the college admitted 95.9% of applying students, up from 92.4% ten years previously, essentially accepting all comers.
SCHEV data indicate that entering students have greater need of financial aid than in the past. The percentage of students entering the university who received gift aid was 34.3%, up from 23.4% in 2012.
The sticker price for tuition, fees and other costs of attendance was $35,540 in 2024, according to College Tuition Compare.com. That’s higher than for almost all of Virginia’s public universities. But adjusted for financial aid, the net cost of attendance is $23,876.