After a $10.3 million deficit last year at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, the SIU Board of Trustees will vote on Thursday morning on a proposed balanced budget for fiscal 2026.
The proposal has the university bringing in and spending nearly $341.6 million, according to university documents.
Along with the deficit came “really difficult decisions by the university,” said SIUE Chancellor James Minor, who’s led the campus since 2022.
“There's no question about that,” Minor said. “But I think, as an institution, we have to be clear eyed about how our academic programs are evolving and how industries are evolving.”
After reaching agreements with the faculty union, SIUE administrators have moved forward to phase out the physics major and minor and specializations and minors in bioprocess chemistry and medical science. Negotiations remain ongoing regarding French and German minors and the music theory and composition specialization. The art history specialization and minor will remain in place, according to the university.
However, Minor said greener pastures are ahead with recent news of an enrollment uptick for the first time in four years and structural changes that have driven increased revenue.
Minor spoke recently with St. Louis Public Radio Metro East reporter Will Bauer. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Will Bauer: SIUE is projected to bring in about roughly $14 million more in 2026 than 2025. What's changed?
James Minor: I think there are a couple of things that are noteworthy. When we recognized the $10.3 million budget deficit the previous year, we set out to devise a plan to reconcile it with the goal that we would present the next budget that would be balanced.
One is that we had better than projected enrollment, which obviously helps with tuition and revenue, but it also helps with auxiliary services, like dining and housing that are also attached to the number of students who are eating and sleeping on campus.
The second thing that happened is we made a lot of progress on campus with respect to retention. In other words, the number of students who were returning for their second year ticked up, which also helped us in similar ways.
And then I think we set out to really manage our operational expenses in a way that we hadn't previously. Some of that had to do with managing the personnel expense, operational costs for the university, which we were really focused on, and then generating revenue that we needed to balance our budget. All of this involved really difficult decisions by the university community, but I was very pleased when we were able to present a budget that was balanced for the first time since 2017.
Bauer: In the budget documents, I noticed two big line-item increases for revenue, and that was interest income and local/other grants. How much do those play into the proposed budget being balanced?
Minor: One of the really critical improvements that the university has made over the last two budget cycles is to modernize our budget processes and the technology used to have real-time budget information to make decisions along the way in the fiscal year — rather than at the end where you're trying to figure out what happened and reconcile lots of things in a fairly manual way.
You referenced the interest income, and it wasn't that we had some kind of windfall. It was a realization that we had historically underestimated the amount of interest income that the university was expected to receive. Now, one could call that a conservative estimate, but I think you can be so conservative that I think we slipped into the inaccurate category, meaning that we were just off.
Bauer: I noticed there was a line item for development initiatives that got cut quite a bit on the expenditure side of things. I wanted to note that you are actually still projecting to spend roughly $3.5 million more than the last fiscal year. But was there anything that had to get cut in some way to make this proposed budget balanced?
Minor: Yes. We have undergone a process to reassess our academic programs. We refer to it as academic prioritization, and it is simply asking what any responsible university should ask: What's the natural evolution of our academic programs?
When I was a student, cybersecurity didn't exist. Artificial intelligence didn't exist. Geospatial technology didn't exist and we have majors covering all of these emergent technologies and industries that we have to align our academic programs to prepare the next generation of graduates.
The question for an institution like SIUE: Can you invest in new programs while at the same time continuing programs in areas where you no longer have graduates or students enrolling in those programs? We have made the difficult decision to discontinue some of our academic programs, some of our minors, with the idea that that would allow us to invest in academic programs where we have opportunities to grow.
The second thing that we had to take a look at was our organizational structure. I make the argument that if you look at an organizational map from 1993 and you overlay it with an organizational map today, how similar or dissimilar should it look? And all of the things that we do as an institution have become much more digital. Technology plays a greater role, and so we've had to make decisions about how we organize human talent across the institution in order to be as effective as we can. I think we have taken a hard look at our organization to decide: Are we structured for today's environment? In some cases the answer is yes, and in other cases the answer was clearly no.
Bauer: As part of the academic reprioritization process, SIUE administrators had proposed phasing out some of those majors and minors — physics, music theory, some languages, to name a few. What did you all decide to do specifically with those after collecting feedback from faculty, students and staff?
Minor: Ten years ago, the university underwent the exact same exercise to assess its academic programs, to ensure that we were making our investments in all the right places and making the very best use of the resources provided to the university. For whatever reason, the decision was made not to go forward with discontinuing some of the academic programs, minors or specializations.
Fast forward 10 years, some of those same programs are still on the list. So the idea that this somehow was an irrational, rushed decision to cut is not accurate in this case. This is probably 10 years overdue in some cases, and so we have decided very carefully what programs should be on the list. It is done in a very comprehensive way, involving lots of different stakeholders across the university. It was no surprise to us that the same programs, many of them that were on the list 10 years ago, are still on the list with too few graduates and accommodating or requiring resources that might be better used in other places.
My expectation is between now and the end of the academic year we will have made progress on discontinuing those programs. Now what that means is that we won't enroll new students. If there are students who are currently in those programs, we will teach those programs. Students who are currently enrolled will be able to finish their academic program.
Bauer: You mentioned the comprehensive process that you undergo when you're making or considering these types of decisions. How much does that feedback from students, faculty and staff play into your decision making?
Minor: It's critical, but I have to say the decisions must be informed by data, not emotions attached to a particular program. I think it is true in every university community that no one wants to see the academic program they know and love be discontinued, right? I think we have to listen, but I also think we have to be clear eyed about the data that is in front of us regarding these academic programs, these minors, these specializations, and make decisions that are in the best interest of the university — not a particular individual, not a particular constituent group, not a particular department.
Bauer: With the budget looking better than it had, would this ever prompt you to reconsider some of these changes?
Minor: We can always add or subtract. An institution has the ability to do that. These are university wide decisions. When we make the decision to offer a degree program in cybersecurity or surveying and geomatics, it's not one individual. It's an entire university community making a decision to move in an intended direction. If we're going to bring back a program, or we're going to continue in a particular way, it's a university discussion.
The north star has to be: Is this in the best interest of the institution? Do these academic programs map onto what is being asked of industry or current or future employers? And that there's a recognition that you can't do all things, right? There are some difficult decisions. There's no question about that. But I think, as an institution, we have to be clear eyed about how our academic programs are evolving and how industries are evolving — and make sure that there is sufficient alignment.
Bauer: SIUE announced that fall enrollment had gone up for the first time in four years. Enrollment grew almost 8% from this fall compared to last fall. What's changed?
Minor: I think we have been able to make the argument about the value proposition of earning a high quality, affordable degree. When I go into high schools, one of my messages is that a college graduate will earn a million dollars more over their lifetime compared to a high school graduate.
The second thing is that we had to rebuild our enrollment management machine. It was built for a different time and a different era.
Today, the almost universal use of the Common Application means that students are applying to probably a dozen or more institutions at a time. Today, you have to say, ‘Congratulations, you've been admitted to SIUE,’ and you have to stay with that student the entire cycle until they show up on your campus. That is a different level of engagement from the university to students and their families to keep them on the path to your particular campus. That is far more digital. It's far more strategic.
There's a lot of data science that now comes into play in terms of recruiting new students, and so I think we have done a better job at being much more strategic and amplifying our ground game as the population continues to decline and the competition intensifies.
Bauer: Finally, the uptick at SIUE, and that some other schools are seeing at this moment, comes as there's a drop in international students. What do you think has led to that?
Minor: Without question, the complications and questions around visa status had a tremendous impact — chilling effect, quite honestly — on the international student population not just at SIUE, but I think we're going to see this across higher education.
Our international enrollment is down a little more than 20%, which is an interesting counterbalance. We're suggesting that we're up 7.7% overall. I can only think about what that percentage would be if we didn't have the decline in our international student population.
Beyond the numbers, I want to make this point very clear. I think there's something else that will be lost on college campuses across the country, and that is the global element of our undergraduate and graduate programs. There is something to be said about classrooms that have students from East St. Louis, Springfield and Nepal or China or Nigeria — pick the country.
I think there is something to be said about what is lost educationally with such a dramatic decline in the international population across our campuses.
