Guest commentary: Securing the future of our students and our university
By Richard Yao
Since 2019-20, CSU Channel Islansa has experienced a 35% drop in enrollment — from 6,406 full-time equivalent students (FTES) in 2019 to 4,154 this Fall.
As Ventura County’s only four-year public university, we have lost more than a decade’s worth of growth in just five years, having contracted back to our enrollment of 4,152 FTES in 2013.
It may go without saying that the landscape of higher education is fundamentally different than it was five years ago.
Shaped by the pandemic, climate anxiety, and financial, social, and political uncertainties, students are understandably assessing their futures in different ways than those from previous years.
What remains constant, however, are the benefits of a four-year degree (go.csuci.edu/ppic).
Considering greater earnings as just one such advantage, these are increasing, not decreasing, over time.
According to a 2024 report by the California State Auditor (go.csuci.edu/csa), a Californian with a bachelor’s degree earned an average of 62% more in 2021 than one with a high school diploma (with that advantage being closer to 90% for those with a graduate degree).
This is a marked increase since 1990 when a worker with a bachelor’s degree earned 39% more than a high school graduate.
Findings like this make enrollment declines at CSUCI and other CSUs threatening not only for universities themselves,but for the people, communities, industries, environments, and economies we exist to serve.
I invite leaders across all sectors to do everything we can to ensure a clear pathway toward the goal of a bachelor’s degree for all who aspire to it. Students and their families must understand the negative impact of graduating from high school without completing the requirements for enrolling in the CSU and UC systems (go.csuci.edu/cde).
Community college students, the great majority of whom intend to transfer to a university, must understand that only one in five — or fewer — typically do, as the Auditor’s report noted above indicates.
We can collectively do better to support them in beating those odds.
To ensure our own future, however, our immediate fiscal imperative is that we align the size of our budget to the size of our student body.
We already navigated an $11.2 million reduction to our budget this year.
Given enrollment decline and a 2025-26 outlook anticipating state-imposed cuts and CSU reallocations, a structural deficit of $17 million remains.
A useful benchmark for rightsizing is campus data from 2013. Since then, our workforce increased by 163 full-time equivalent employees (24%), a logical expansion while our student body was growing.
This growth also reflects our commitment to comprehensively supporting students inside and outside the classroom, expanding support for basic needs (e.g., food pantry, emergency housing, emergency financial grants), mental health, academic advising, peer-to-peer support, and more.
With this context in mind, our way forward is clear.
We will be pursuing a number of strategies to accomplish fair and transparent workforce reductions, beginning in Spring 2025, ensuring that our budget reflects enrollment realities.
Beginning with voluntary early exit and early retirement incentives, along with a series of other cost-reduction strategies, we aim to mitigate layoff procedures to the greatest extent possible.
Equally important is our concurrent evaluation of organizational structures. While contracting our workforce, we must also ensure efficient, effective resource allocations that align with our strategic priorities.
A common phrase in times of financial hardship is, “We must learn to do less with less.” I prefer to frame the challenge differently.
At CSUCI, we are responding to our precipitous drop in enrollment after years of comfortable growth by learning to do less, better.
We must be disciplined in establishing our top priorities, using them to identify what we can no longer do, and then delivering on our priorities exceptionally well.
This is the focus of our planning and resource allocation efforts, emphasizing the distinctive features of our educational experience, and focusing on interdisciplinary, experiential learning opportunities that embrace the place-based assets unique to our campus and region.
This involves integrating our academic programs directly into our communities through applied undergraduate research, service learning, internships, and community-based research.
We have provided academic excellence and a powerful student experience at this size before, and we will certainly do so again — while simultaneously implementing our aggressive plan for rebounding enrollment.
Information about CSUCI’s Budget Planning for 2025-26 can be found at go.csuci.edu/budget25-26
Richard Yao is the president of CSU Channel Islands, a position he has held since 2021.
