Facing a budget deficit and decreasing number of high schoolers graduating in Connecticut, leaders at the University of Connecticut are questioning how far the school can expand its enrollment without compromising its ability to serve students.
Administrators have laid out plans to trim the system’s budget, but they also need to raise revenue. Neither will be simple.
In a message to colleagues on Monday, President Radenka Maric said the university and the UConn Health system were facing a $134 million budget deficit over the next two years, driven mainly by a shortage in funding from the state. She warned that the university would need to take steps to reduce costs, including hiring freezes and potential layoffs or non-renewals of temporary employees.
The university had faced a $72 million shortfall for the coming year, but higher revenues from tuition and dining have pared that back to $38 million, Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey Geoghegan said at a meeting of the Board of Trustees on Wednesday. That's still a significant gap to be mitigated.
University leaders said they see enrollment expansion as a potential way to close the gap. About 57% of UConn’s revenue comes from tuition.
Nathan Fuerst, Vice President for Student Life & Enrollment at UConn, told Board of Trustees that the university had increased its student body by 2,000 students over the last decade. In order to continue and boost that growth, he said, the school would need to enroll more out-of-state and international students, in part because the number of high school graduates in Connecticut hasn't been growing.
Out-of-state and international students also bring in more revenue because they pay more in tuition. The university has a goal of increasing enrollment from about 25,300 students as of fall 2024 to 28,000 students by 2027.
Out-of-state enrollment at UConn has already been trending up. According to data from the university, the percentage of students at UConn from outside the state has increased from 16% in 2021-22 to 26% this coming year 2025-26. Maric said that 2025-26 will be the first time that the percentage of students from Connecticut will fall below 70% — to 68%.
The percentage of international students, however has remained relatively stable over the past five years — around 6% or 7%. And Maric raised concerns at a Tuesday meeting of the financial affairs committee that actions by the federal government could lead fewer international students to enroll. She referenced the federal government’s recent pause in scheduling visa interviews, which was lifted last week.
Fuerst told the board Wednesday that the university received 64,000 applications for its freshman class last year. The incoming class numbered about 6,500 students across the campuses.
He added that the university is developing a plan for enrollment that focuses on more than just bringing in first-year students. For one, he said, the university wants to increase its retention rate for first-year students from 92% to 94%.
He said while students continued applying to UConn because of the positive experiences they had, the experience wasn’t uniform across the university. “[Students] come here, they have a good experience and they graduate on time and they're successful in finding good jobs — high-paying jobs. But that's not a universal experience. Our Pell [Grant] students don't experience that same rate of success. Our underrepresented minority students don't experience the same rate of success. Our regional campus students don't experience the same rate of success, and so we need to acknowledge that,” Fuerst said.
Provost Anne D’Alleva said the university was also looking at expanding its offerings to meet demands of graduate and nontraditional students, with programs offering online graduate certificates, microcredentials and specific professional development skills training.
Maric said the university had managed to retain 600 students this past spring who were planning to drop out, either because of academic struggles or the inability to afford tuition. But to do so cost the university $1 million.
More enrollment, more challenges
At Wednesday's meeting, the trustees cautioned against increasing enrollment without ensuring that the increase aligned with the university’s goals and its ability to serve those students.
“[Increasing enrollment] is extraordinarily important because of the budget situation. But it's not so clear how we're going to achieve that without decreasing student quality,” said Timothy Folta, a professor in UConn’s School of Business. “We’ve got increased competitors. We've got increasing alternatives to education, declining population of the high school graduates. So it’s not particularly conducive to the strategy of increasing.”
Board of Trustees Chair Dan Toscano agreed, saying that growth needed to depend on capacity in the classrooms, housing and student support services.
“I, for one, keep thinking about what is the purpose of growth,” said Toscano. “Growth is frequently a sign of a healthy organization. But you can also manufacture growth that's actually quite damaging … I think the further you get from this campus, the easier you think, ‘We’ll just take another thousand students,’ or ‘Take more out of state students, and that brings you more revenue,’ ‘Take more international students.’ And I just think we have to be a lot more thoughtful of those topics.”
Chris Vials, a professor of English at UConn and president of UConn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, expressed skepticism about the university’s strategy of increasing enrollment as a way to raise revenue. He said that if the university did not plan on hiring additional professors, the increased class sizes would diminish the quality of classes, making it difficult to hold discussions and discouraging students from speaking.
“I don’t really see a plus to just bigger class sizes, and most students don’t either,” he said.
Housing shortages have also been a sore point recently at UConn, with the university announcing to students this spring that it would no longer guarantee housing for upperclassmen. The university has been attempting to expand its housing options for students across its campuses.
Fuerst said during his presentation that the university needed to ensure that enrollment growth was matched by the capacity for the university’s programs to serve students.
Maric said in order to mitigate the budget for 2025-26, the university had elected to close the deficit using one-time payments out of the university’s fund balances. Governor Ned Lamont has urged the state's higher education institutions — particularly the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System — to use their reserves to shore up any holes in their budgets.
Rob Blanchard, a spokesperson for Governor Ned Lamont, said in an email that the legislature had increased the block grant amount for UConn and UConn Health by 20% in 2026. He said the university was warned that federal Covid-19 relief funds and one-time state surpluses would not continue. He also said that UConn and UConn Health had $468 million combined in reserves.
“These funds now enable UConn to be on a strong glide path, by using such reserves, to make any changes to deal with structural financial challenges,” Blanchard said.
But Maric warned in her message to colleagues Monday that much of that funding had already been earmarked for specific things and was scattered in accounts across the university.
“Using these funds to close short-term deficits will create new financial problems that didn’t exist previously and new unmet needs throughout the institution. And if these one-time funds become exhausted, they do not automatically replenish, and structural deficits will remain,” Maric wrote in her message.
Maric said that budget reduction strategies in the future could include things like freezes in hiring, layoff or non-renewal of temporary workers, restrictions in travel or events spending and changes to service contracts.
The University has also been hit by the federal government’s cuts to research grants. Geoghegan warned that the amount the university receives in new grant funding in 2026 could drop as much as $200 million below 2024 levels. Maric said the university already had 48 of its research grants cancelled, at a cost of $32.5 million. She said they had been successful in getting 21 of those grants reinstated through an appeals process.
“We are very hopeful, but hope is not a strategy, so we are very persistent,” she said.
This story was originally published by the Connecticut Mirror.
