President Donald Trump’s campaign to remake the nation’s colleges and universities is upending the finances of not just Harvard but dozens of institutions nationwide.
Including here in Rochester.
RIT has seen upward of two dozen grants cancelled, translating to a net loss of about $5 million. Add to that a projected drop of 200 or more international students, an expected pause on one of its overseas degree programs, and a dramatic increase in expenses.
“Like many institutions, we are navigating a period of significant economic headwinds that require our collective attention and strategic action,” RIT President David Munson recently wrote in a letter to faculty and staff.
Munson spoke with WXXI’s Brian Sharp about these challenges this week. The following is a partial transcript of the conversation that has been edited for length and clarity. (Questions are in bold, followed by Munson’s responses.)
You recently sent a letter to faculty and staff outlining $15 million in increased operating expenses, listing reasons from health care to student bus transportation. Could you put that in context? What is the budget gap in a typical year, and why did all these — you said they were phased increases — why did they all hit at the same time?
“So this year, instead of, say, an $8 million gap or something of that range (which is typical), it's closer to double. And part of the reason is a number of increases in expenses just happen to be phased up at the same time.
"I would say in any year, we expect some increase in health care costs. But this year we also have a big increase that will come into play, I think January 1, on our electric rates. We purchase electricity. We have a contract that spans multiple years. That contract is up for renewal, so that's going to be a big increase.
"In the case of bus transportation, we had a contract expiring with the company that was operating the buses for our campus. These are buses that move students around on campus a bit, but also they go to outlying housing complexes, because we have a lot of students that live off site, and there's some major increases there. And in fact, we're going to end up having to purchase our own buses, which we weren't planning on.
"And then there are a number of software contracts coming up for renewal. I won't mention exactly which ones they are, but some of these are seeing really big price increases. And so a lot of this is all phasing up together and helping create that $15 million gap. Now, you know, in a typical year, we would close a fair amount of that relatively easily. This year, it's just a harder job."
What about workforce reduction? You wrote (that) RIT would reduce personnel compensation expenses by roughly 2% by not filling open positions. What does that translate to a number of staff, and where's that going to be felt the most?
“Well, so we have, I'd say, roughly 2,500 staff, I'm thinking, and so take 2% of that, and I guess we're talking about 50 staff, but we're not planning on laying anyone off. Instead, we have normal attrition. At any given time, we're typically searching for 100 or more employees, and so a lot of that searching will be slowed down, and we're also going to be doing a little bit of reorganization ... that will allow us to combine some responsibilities, etc.
“And the reason we're doing that is not just to close or help close that $15 million budget gap, but also because we're going to end up with a smaller student body. And with the edicts coming out from the federal government now, the U.S. doesn't look too friendly to international or prospective international students. Visas are very difficult to get, and of course now for selected countries, it's not even going to be possible.
"So we expect that we're going to be down a minimum of 200 international students in the incoming class, and who knows, the next year we might see that drop by another 200 and so if we're going to have a smaller student body, we need to be proactive in planning a slightly smaller faculty and staff."
That was my next point to go to. From what countries are you seeing the biggest drop-offs, and is that affecting particular programs more than others?
"The largest source of international students for our campus is India, and the difficulty there is very long wait time. So it's taking our prospective students a long time to get visas, and we fear that quite a number of students that were admitted and wish to come to study at RIT are not going to be able to do so. We're seeing the same thing in some other countries, but we're particularly concerned about India.
"And then if we look at the latest announcement where citizens of a select set of countries are no longer going to be able to enter the U.S., one of those countries is Iran. They're not a huge supplier of students to RIT, but a significant number. And so we're definitely going to lose a number of those students."
It looks like, I think, China was your second-largest ...
"That's right. China is the second-largest supplier of grad students, or actually students overall, international students ... and we're expecting some drop there as well."
If I'm not mistaken, the deadline for (student) deposits to be put down was the first of May. Did you see folks who you expected to come pull back?
“So the May 1 deposit deadline is for undergraduates, and we often accept some applications after that. What we saw among the undergrad international applicants was a pretty dramatic drop in the percentage of students that deposited. We actually, this particular year, made more than twice as many offers as we normally would to international students at the undergraduate level. And yet, the number of those students that accepted our offers declined rather than increased, and so the returns there are dropping."
RIT also has campuses in Croatia, Dubai, Kosovo, as well as a university partnership in China. Are you seeing effects on those operations and enrollment?
“We are not, for the most part. So our Dubai campus has been growing rapidly. We're very thankful to the Dubai government. They built a brand-new campus for us there, which is spectacular, and we're in the process of enlarging that. We have more than 2,000 students on that campus and expect to grow that number to something like 4,000 in the next five or six years.
"We have two locations in Croatia — one in Zagreb, the other in Dubrovnik, and that is a very healthy enrollment in those programs. Kosovo is a little bit smaller, but things are going well there.
"With the partnership in China, the only thing we teach there are two different programs in business, and we teach those ... on an international campus of Beijing Jiaotong University. It's located near a small city called Weihai on the East Coast. Personally, I'm fond of those programs. But there is legislation pending in Congress that would require any institution having an offering like we have in China to receive a waiver to operate that program. And we would be fine with requesting that waiver, but the waivers it looks like are going to have to be requested every single year.
"And so we're in a situation now where we're not sure that, in all good conscience, we can take in a new class for this coming fall in China, given that we're operating a four-year degree program there. I don't really want to be taking new students if we can't promise them that we can operate for four years."
And how many students are there?
“I don't have an exact number, but it's, oh, something on the order of 500 or thereabouts in China.”
Now, RIT has also seen what you describe as modest reductions due to grant cancellations, also reducing overhead revenue. Coupling that with what we've just talked about with the students, can you put a number on the financial impacts?
"Yeah, we can do that. So far we have lost 24 grants and contracts. Four of those have been reinstated at least temporarily, I think due to some actions within the courts. The total value of the lost grants and contracts at this moment in time is $10 million. But some of that work, a lot of that work was already underway, and so a fair amount of that $10 million has already been spent. If you look at the amount of unspent money there again, this isn't an exact figure, but it's probably something in the neighborhood of $4 million. And if we look at the indirect cost the university would have derived from those unspent funds, we're probably going to lose something north of $1 million.
“These are actually small numbers compared to universities that have medical schools where the research volume is a lot larger. And so, in the case of, say, the University of Rochester, I won't speak for them, or any school with a big medical operation and a lot of funding from NIH, quite possibly, they have lost a much larger volume of research and more indirect cost."
I found a report ... that RIT received more than $100 million in sponsored research awards in 2024 .
“That's correct.”
Significant growth from the National Science Foundation, NIH, Department of Defense. With the grants that have been cut or temporarily and then reinstated, where are those generally?
“It's interesting, and we've had grants cut in a number of different areas. Some of them were for our Image Permanence Institute, and I think those funds come from an agency or program within the government that tends to fund libraries and that kind of public infrastructure.
"When we receive a notice that a grant is being terminated, there are, I guess, a couple of negative things. One is that the termination just occurs immediately, without any warning. And if we have faculty, staff and students supporting those funds, then we've got a problem on our hands, because we have to somehow take care of those people, at least temporarily, unless, until we can get them reassigned, if it's possible to do that.
"But another issue is we're not really told why the grants are terminated, other than the work no longer aligns with the mission of the federal government. One of the grants we lost was particularly peculiar. It was, I believe, a National Science Foundation grant on the subject of deep fakes. And so it's really research on misinformation and disinformation, but it seems that the federal government no longer wishes to support research in that area."
Talking about the disruptions, one of the early turnabouts of this administration was on DEI.
"Yes."
And I'm wondering what has been affected for RIT with those directives?
“There was another memo that came out on our campus just very recently that I authored that discusses DEI and a number of other actions that we're taking on our campus due to what's been happening at the federal level.
"So with DEI, first of all, nobody has defined the term. We certainly have received notice that illegal DEI programs are banned, but nobody has defined what an illegal DEI program is, and so that kind of leaves us in a searching mode. We do know that prior to January 20, all of our programs were legal. Complaints occasionally get filed by outsiders, and we had looked at our programs and really scrubbed them very carefully. And I will say that all of our DEI programs, they're open to anybody, you know? So we know that what we've been doing is legal.
"But of course, laws can always be reinterpreted, and so we're trying to be careful about this. There are certain words that seem to be trigger words, and the DEI acronym is one of those triggers. So we have renamed our Division of Diversity and Inclusion. The board of trustees will be renaming their committee on diversity, equity and inclusion. We have a number of titles that are changing, some program names that are changing, and we're taking a really close look at our programs and how we operate to try to make sure to the best of our ability that they would be found to be legal, even if laws are reinterpreted."
Has that led to any substantive changes in how programs operate?
“Well, and again, everything we have been doing is legal, so no big changes yet in how we operate, and we don't foresee that happening. We actually feel that if the folks who are concerned about DEI, if they would actually stop by and visit and see what we're doing with our students, faculty and staff, they would say, these are great programs."
There was one program I saw — the U-RISE program supporting deaf and hard of hearing undergrads — and they have on their site, “Closed until further notice,” which, I don't know if that's related to this or ...
“Yeah, related. So we lost a couple of grants that were joint with the University of Rochester, one of which was oriented at creating pipelines for deaf and hard of hearing students into Ph.D. programs, and another was related to creating pipelines of deaf and hard of hearing students into medical school, and those had been operating very successfully, and those were terminated without warning.
It also raised the question of just how NTID is faring through all of this?
"Well, that's a great question, because NTID does receive a federal appropriation that forms the basis for their support every year. We're fortunate in that NTID, historically, has had very high, very high level(s) of bipartisan support in Congress. It's a completely apolitical organization. We're just serving the deaf and hard of hearing segment of the population. And so in the continuation resolution that carries us through this fiscal year, my recollection is that NTID was level-funded with the previous year. I know that in the so-called Big, Beautiful Bill, at least so far, I believe that NTID would continue to be level-funded, and maybe in the current climate, that's a good thing."
I'm wondering — level funding, though, with all the pressures that you have, what does that mean for NTID?
"Well, NTID is already doing a little bit of consolidation amongst their faculty and staff and trying to set aside some funds for the unknown. And if sufficient funding doesn't arise, we're probably not going to be modernizing facilities or creating updates where they're needed. But instead, just try to live closer to day-to-day. But so far, though, again, we have been receiving very strong bipartisan support in Congress, and so we're hopeful that things will turn out fine for NTID."
Is there anything else coming out of Washington that we haven't talked about that ...
“You're trying to get me into trouble? ... Well, another thing that we worry about a lot is that, in the proposed budget, of course, the Senate is working on that right now, it calls for — there's no other word to use other than ‘slashing’ the budgets of a number of the major research funding agencies. So NIH, NSF, the whole nine yards.
"And if our country is no longer going to invest in research at the levels we have been, it's really hard to see how we're going to compete with other nations in the world, and that will have a major effect on our faculty, on the size of our graduate programs, and ultimately, both the economic competitiveness and the national security of our nation. So we're very, very concerned about that, and we'll see how it turns out in the Senate. But you know, cutting research agency budgets by 40% or something like that, I don't believe is wise."
