As Southern Illinois University leaders trumpet rising enrollment and record-breaking fundraising, the Carbondale campus is quietly trying to weather a budget shortfall that has left students, staff and small-business owners frustrated.
SIU Carbondale, which is one of two main campuses in SIU’s public university system, is projecting a nearly $9.5 million deficit in its 2025 budget, according to documents discussed at Board of Trustees meetings last week. In the same meetings, SIU Edwardsville announced a $10.3 million shortfall, and the SIU School of Medicine in Springfield projected a roughly $1 million deficit.
SIUC Chancellor Austin Lane told St. Louis Public Radio that more than $8 million of the university’s deficit comes from the school’s athletic department and more than $1 million is from SIU’s Student Health Services. There are also contributions to the deficit from other programs including University Farms and WSIU Public Broadcasting.
“We're able to really look at the efficiencies that we can create within the budget that allow us to do the $8 million in [raises],” he said. "We just got to continue to work efficiently going forward.”
SIU Carbondale has been millions in debt for years, according to records obtained by STLPR. But, it seems to be making progress against the debt since fiscal 2019, when the college reported a $19.2 million deficit.
Its 2023 budget projected a $14.2 million deficit for fiscal 2024, which ended June 30. A copy of a May 2024 financial presentation shared with STLPR shows Susan Simmers, SIU’s vice chancellor for finance and administration, projected the Carbondale campus to be about $12 million short for fiscal 2024.
A university spokesperson referred questions to Simmers, who declined to comment on the specifics of the campus’ finances.
The school’s current fiscal year budget shows significant reductions to expenses across campus, but it is unclear where the cost saving comes from at the department level. Some of the largest reductions include about a 25% cut to information technology services and a nearly 28% cut to university communications and marketing budgets. At the same time, the enrollment management department’s budget increased by about two-thirds, roughly $8 million.
The Carbondale and Edwardsville campuses each have just under 12,000 students enrolled this fall semester.
Lane noted that while some Illinois universities are facing significant financial and enrollment challenges, the Carbondale campus reported about a 3.8% overall enrollment increase this fall. "[Other schools are] laying people off. They're furloughing. They're sending people home. Their enrollment is declining. We're not anywhere near that."
SIUE Chancellor James Minor said increased operational expenses and stagnant or declining enrollment contributed to the deficit from the Edwardsville campus’ budget. The university reported a 1.26% decrease in fall enrollment this year.
Minor added the campus has used technology and modernized university processes to reduce operational expenses the last two years. “I think SIUE is in a very fortunate and fairly strong financial position going forward,” he said, noting the school has not dipped into its reserves.
Academia’s financial challenges
The financial challenges within the SIU system aren’t unique. Northern Illinois University is reporting a deficit of over $31 million this year, according to Crain’s Business Chicago. Western Illinois University is more than $20 million in debt, which resulted in more than 100 layoffs and contract non-renewals in the last year, Tri States Public Radio reports.
In the St. Louis area, Webster University’s 2022-23 tax filings show the school’s deficit ballooned to more than $39.3 million. Clayton-based Fontbonne University announced last March it would shut its doors next year after plummeting enrollment.
“We're in a better place than a lot of those institutions are,” said SIU System President Dan Mahony on Tuesday. “That being said, there's still financial challenges that we're having to deal with, and we're doing our best to work through them.”
Mahony pointed out that Moody’s recently upgraded the system’s credit rating from “stable” to “positive,” which he argued demonstrated that creditors have confidence in the system’s overall financial outlook. The system had approximately $216 million in outstanding debt as of the end of fiscal 2023.
“The credit rating is generally a reflection of a couple things,” he said. “One is certainly the increased state support. I think the improved enrollment in general — we're actually up as a system this year in enrollment — but also being conservative in our spending and building up cash reserves.”
Lane said administrators at SIU Carbondale have attempted to curb the university’s expenses by creating stricter budgets and imposing a campus-wide hiring review. As part of that, the school is considering eliminating or consolidating positions as they become vacant on a case-by-case basis, which he calls a “hiring chill” — not a hiring freeze — because the university hired more than 300 workers in the last year.
Emails obtained through several public records requests show that John Horvat, the SIU School of Medicine's associate provost for finance and administration, was concerned about retaining nonunion nursing staff and administrators without pay raises.
“Right now our budget targets have no raises for [non-union staff] for FY25,” Simmers responded to Horvat’s inquiry in a June 19 email. “We have reduced expenses a great deal attempting to get a balanced income fund budget.”
Last week, the SIU Board of Trustees passed a 3.5% pay increase pool for civil service workers at the School of Medicine. AFSCME Local 370, a union representing more than 600 SIU School of Medicine employees — and hundreds of nurses — ratified a contract last May that provided the same 3.5% salary increase on July 1.
Historic budget woes
The Carbondale campus is also reeling from an aggressive attempt to pay back what Lane says is approximately the remaining $9 million of a roughly $38 million internal campus loan. It was taken as a result of a 2015 Illinois budget impasse between the state’s Democratic legislative majority and former Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, crippling higher education for years to come.
“When people [felt] like the institution is in a bad fiscal position, they stopped sending their kids to our university, or they stopped attending themselves,” Mahony, the system president, said. “That definitely impacted enrollment […] across all of the Illinois institutions and particularly at SIU.
In 2017, then-SIU System President Randy Dunn alleged the Carbondale campus had “blown through $80 million in its reserves and the reserves of the Springfield medical school in an attempt to keep itself afloat.” Dunn was removed from office after it was revealed he was working with Metro East legislators and some then-members of the SIU Board of Trustees to dissolve the SIU System.
Subsequently to Dunn’s comments, the SIU Board of Trustees approved a cross-campus loan of up to $35 million. But Lane said Carbondale never took a loan from Edwardsville. Instead, SIUC tapped its own reserves for $38 million.
“Every year we contribute something to it,” Lane said. “The beauty of it is it's paying ourselves back. So it's not like it's a mandate from the governor or anything like that. It's just fiscally being responsible and trying to get to a place where we build a healthy reserve.”
Jeff Harmon, SIU Carbondale’s chief communications and marketing officer, said there is no official mandate or exact timetable for repaying a deficit or building up the campus’ cash reserve.
“Our goal is to assess our state allocation and tuition revenue generated each year and budget accordingly to best support the activities of the university,” he wrote in an emailed statement. “If we can address the deficit, we do.”
But some on the Carbondale campus have said the swift reductions in budgets to balance the ledgers — compounded with years of financial troubles — have been detrimental to the university and broader community.
Community impact
The SIUC School of Theater and Dance shared a plea for donations Wednesday, saying a “catastrophic budget cut" had left the department scrambling.
H.D. Motyl, the school’s director, told STLPR it would normally receive more than $75,000 in state funding to cover costs around various expenses such as show production, recruitment, retention and student jobs. Faculty and staff salaries are paid through another budget line.
Motyl said he and other directors from the College of Arts and Media were asked to participate in a budgeting exercise with the provost’s office to create “pie in the sky” budgets that would help their programs succeed. But afterward, the college's dean informed Motyl his state funding was reduced to $0 for fiscal 2025 and likely the same for fiscal 2026.
“We’re told sometimes that [budget cuts] are because of this loan that happened during the Rauner years, and we’re paying back this loan. Then, we were told this year that ‘well we have to do the cuts to pay faculty salaries',” Motyl said. “Why are we having these huge cuts? What specifically is it? We never get a really clear answer.”
Motyl said his head started spinning when he learned of the news, which he realized meant he had to fire his student worker.
Ian Campbell, a third-year student in SIUC’s aviation technologies program, had a similar experience.
He said his work study in the sheet metal lab was cut after the first week of school. An administrator’s assistant told him it was a cost-saving measure resulting from the budget shortage. Campbell said his supervisor wasn’t informed of the change before he was terminated.
Now, Campbell said he's relying on his savings while navigating the rising costs of college and living expenses.
"It's a lot of frustration, a lot of anger [...] about where the money's coming from or where the money's going,” he said. “It’s very difficult for us.”
There has been a downward shift in morale on campus, especially after stringent budget cuts were announced last July, said the Rev. Joseph Brown, director of SIU’s School of Africana and Multicultural Studies.
“When people leave — quite often, because of what they think are inequitable salaries, [and] cost-of-living discrepancies — they're not replaced,” he said. “So many of the little day-to-day requirements of running a smooth and efficient office are not being done because there are not enough people to do them in a timely fashion.”
Brown said the cuts to the department's budgets and staff have caused frustration among the campus community because they were decided unilaterally by administrators.
“People don't feel that they have a voice in how they can actually continue to function in a positive way,” he said. “We've got to find ways to have more people who have experience and who, in a lot of ways, look like the students were bringing in.”
The school’s financial troubles are also impacting local businesses.
Sarah Lavender-Brashear, owner of Murphysboro bakery “One Hot Cookie,” said SIUC has been one of her biggest clients. Her business has been a preferred caterer at the university for more than a decade, but getting paid has routinely been a challenge.
“We know there [have] always been rules and regulations,” she said. “Sometimes you have to get four signatures and a blood smear to get paid with certain departments.”
This summer, some departments she contracted with told Lavender-Brashear they were now restricted from using university purchase cards because the school did not want to pay credit card processing fees because there wasn’t a budget line for them. University payments, which used to be expedited, were now delayed for as long as three months because of short staffing.
“There’s a lot of jobs that I've even turned down because, you know — I'm paying them to use my product,” she said. “It probably costs me three times as much to run my business now, without even doing a deal with anybody, than it did two years ago.”
Deficit raises
Lane said SIU Carbondale is working to reach campus-wide pay equity by 2030. His hope is a university-wide compensation study contracted through CBIZ, a Cleveland-based financial advisory firm, shows the administration’s commitment to raising morale.
"What hopefully [people] are seeing, in addition to our CBIZ study, [is] $8 million worth of money going right back to employees because we know they're our most valuable resource," Lane said. "If you just look at the data, it will clearly [...] show our commitment to moving that needle for our employees."
SIU Carbondale’s Faculty Association, the union which represents about 400 tenure and tenure-track faculty, signed a contract last month that will give more than $5 million in raises for its members in the next four years.
Harmon, the university spokesman, said the funding for the faculty union’s contract will come from “being efficient with our resources, state appropriations, and tuition revenue generated.” He added the university will “look at the big picture and prioritize [its] budget accordingly.”
Meanwhile, the SIU Board of Trustees voted to cap Carbondale’s salary increase pool at 1%, according to financial documents presented to the board. Edwardville’s salary increase pool has been zeroed out for three fiscal years, the same documents show. The campus unions bargain their members’ contracts, and their subsequent raises could be different than what is reported.
Last July, the SIU Board of Trustees approved an $115,000 performance-based bonus for Mahony. OpenPayrolls reports Mahony’s 2023 base salary was $452,580.
In the same meeting, the board and Mahony approved a $65,000 performance bonus for Lane, citing improving the Carbondale campus’ enrollment, enacting budget reductions while growing net tuition revenue and leading the four largest fundraising years in the school's history. Lane’s salary was $353,760, OpenPayrolls reports.
The SIU Foundation, the Carbondale campus’ fundraising arm, paid for the incentive-based bonuses for the two administrators. Matt Kupec, the foundation’s CEO and vice chancellor for alumni relations and development, did not agree to be interviewed for this story.
In the weeks that followed, the foundation — which broke its fundraising record last fiscal year — began construction of a new building to house campus events and its growing fundraising staff with the help of a $6 million naming rights deal.
Some say seeing a new building go up hasn’t helped heal the frustrations on campus amid SIU Carbondale’s financial woes.
"This has made me really look at SIU [in] a very different light," Campbell, the aviation technologies student, said. "You see the big fancy buildings on campus that they're building [...] and all of our stuff is from the '60s. It's just really demoralizing."
Editor’s note: Brian Munoz was a member of SIU Carbondale’s Alumni Association National Board of Directors until Aug. 14. He is the current president of the school’s alumni band.
Corrections: A quote by SIU System President Daniel Mahony has been updated to fix a transcription error. It now reads: "I think the improved enrollment in general — we're actually up as a system this year in enrollment — but also being conservative in our spending and building up cash reserves."
