Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
Plans to cut 113 faculty positions at Wright State University over the next several years are meant to keep the university on par with a problem Ohio’s higher education institutions are facing — dropping enrollment.
Wright State President Susan Edwards recommended the faculty positions be cut due to declining student enrollment that has occurred over the past five years and is projected to continue at least two more years. The university says it is cutting faculty to align with projected enrollment declines.
Greg Lawson, a Research Fellow with the Buckeye Institute, an independent think tank that works on higher education in Ohio, said Ohio universities were already facing enrollment challenges and those were made worst by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wright State, and all other schools, were already facing a competitive landscape. Students are looking hard at their choice of schools and asking whether attending them makes sense economically.
“You hear a lot about the student debt crisis, and of course now with COVID, and with some of the enrollment challenges that universities are having as a result of that, you know it’s not surprising that folks are looking to find out if this is really where they’re going to get what they want,” Lawson said.
Wright State has seen about a 30% decline in enrollment overall in the last five years, according to the university. But attracting first-year students has been a particular problem: First-year undergraduate student enrollment has declined by 53% since 2015.
