Most clicked story of the week:
Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has donated $387 million in unrestricted funds to eight traditionally Black faculties and universities in current weeks. Every establishment described their donation as one of many greatest, if not the largest, of their historical past. Scott, who is basically out of the general public eye, doesn’t announce donation values until the recipients do.
Variety of the week: 900+
The variety of layoff notices the College of Southern California has issued since July. The non-public establishment’s management stated final week that it’s “on monitor” to get rid of its longstanding deficit by the top of the fiscal yr, following the numerous cost-cutting measures.
Cuts and Closures
- Trinity Christian Faculty, in Illinois, introduced it’ll shutter on the finish of the 2025-2026 educational yr, citing ongoing monetary points corresponding to persistent finances deficits and falling enrollment. Along with establishing teach-out and switch pathways, the non-public liberal arts school is permitting college students to go over course load maximums with the purpose of graduating as many as attainable earlier than closing.
- One other non secular school in Illinois, the College of St. Francis, is taking steps to handle budgetary points. The college has laid off 18 employees and directors following a $9 million deficit in fiscal 2024. It additionally notified “a variety of school” that it was not renewing their contracts, which Joliet Patch reported as affecting one other 18 staff.
- The College of Nebraska-Lincoln is dealing with pushback in opposition to its chancellor’s proposal to get rid of six educational packages. An inside advisory group voted to oppose ending 4 of the packages and raised issues with the strategies and tempo UNL’s management used to resolve which levels needs to be on the chopping block.
Steerage for school leaders
- Faculties present process vital restructuring have to be ready to “craft a optimistic narrative” about it and their involvement, based on the newest version of the common opinion sequence Merger Watch. All through mergers, acquisitions and even closures, school leaders must personal these narratives — or others will craft them as a substitute, writes Ricardo Azziz, a consolidation knowledgeable who pens the sequence.
- A federal choose on Thursday dominated the Trump administration should totally fund the Supplemental Vitamin Help Program throughout the federal government shutdown — a choice the authorities has already appealed. Given the authorized back-and-forth, it’s unclear when SNAP recipients will get their advantages, warned The Hope Middle for Scholar Fundamental Wants, a useful resource and coverage middle at Temple College. The middle is providing directors and campus leaders a toolkit to assist assist food-insecure college students throughout this “interval of uncertainty.”
Quote of the Week:
That is the top of an period. Even when issues settle out, the harm has already been executed.
Michael Lubell
Physics professor at Metropolis Faculty of New York
Underneath an August presidential order, Trump administration political appointees at federal companies now have the ability to make sure grant awards align with the federal authorities’s “priorities and the nationwide curiosity” and do not promote undefined “anti-American values.”
Lecturers and researchers like Lubell are elevating alarms that the change — one more vital departure from scientific funding norms — will erode U.S. analysis.
