Building Resources for Our Future

Every student who comes to Penn State and completes the requirements will be able graduate with a Penn State degree. Beyond our meaningful commitment to the success of each of our students, we also are a Middle States accredited university and we will abide by those accreditation requirements related to teaching and degree completion across Penn State.

The University and every Commonwealth Campus is committed to student success and maintaining full support for our students both inside and outside the classroom. We will continue to provide a robust experience for our students from the time they arrive on campus during New Student Orientation to the time they graduate.

Our goal is to continue to provide all academic and support services to students in a seamless fashion. On campuses where staff and faculty involved in New Student Orientation and other critical positions for the fall semester participated in VSIP, campus leadership made decisions and established plans to minimize alternations to the student experience.

This summer we will be refining, seeking feedback, and working with remaining staff in implementing some of the organizational changes. We will work together to minimize potential service interruptions and appoint business area and regional leads to complete job function mapping. This effort will help finalize a structure based on previous work and align with OST initiatives.

The dollar value of salary and fringe expense associated with the 383 employees who are participating in the VSIP is $43 million, however, we will not know actual savings until later in the year when we know which positions need to be backfilled.

President Bendapudi has committed additional strategic funds of up to $20 million. This one-time infusion of additional funding, which is already accounted for in the overall University budget, will further ease the campuses’ budget deficit and give the University extra time — until June 30, 2026 — to fully balance the Commonwealth Campus budget. We will continue to streamline our operations to achieve excellence, which is aligned with the President’s strategic goal of transforming internal operations. As we address both structure and operations, we are identifying best practices to leverage our status as one university so that we can achieve efficiencies around purchasing and contracts, for example. This will allow us to continue to find cost savings.

It is premature to forecast until we spend time deeply engaging with our campus communities and the leadership team to define a sustainable future for the Commonwealth Campuses. Each of our campuses brings a unique element and value to our Penn State community, our structure and our students. However, a handful of campuses have experienced significant enrollment declines in the last few years and some campuses are spending significantly more than they bring in revenue; with our current stagnant funding level from the state, the current business model is unfortunately not sustainable. As part of our larger transformation of the Commonwealth Campuses, we will develop key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to create a transparent decision-making matrix for assessing success and making informed decisions about resource allocation.

We are in a difficult environment; all options are on the table, but closing a campus would be way down on the list. We are exploring creative avenues to keep our campuses vibrant, such as creating economic and workforce development hubs; applied research and community impact hubs; and establishing dual enrollment pathways. University leaders have begun a process, in collaboration with the chancellors, to identify the challenges some of our campuses are facing and together we are mapping a strategic plan and next steps. We are considering many approaches for our campuses as we consider the best infrastructure and vision to meet our institutional mission and student needs.

As we develop new organizational structures, we will evaluate employee levels needed to provide appropriate and consistent services across locations. Layoffs are always a last resort and any necessary reductions in personnel will first be addressed, to the greatest extent possible, through attrition. Contract renewals of non-tenure line faculty will be evaluated on our regular timeline, providing robust notice of any non-renewals.

We already work in a service area format. The campus groupings were selected based on alignment with existing regional opportunities, while considering campus size, location, regional needs and assets, and degree offerings.

The Office of the Vice President for Commonwealth is continuing an analysis alongside the Commonwealth Campus chancellors to define complex challenges and get to the root of what’s preventing growth. It’s important to understand that determining the appropriate strategy for each campus is a unique exercise. How we implement change will be fundamentally different across the commonwealth as we are individually analyzing enrollment, total facility costs, our physical infrastructure, our programs, our personnel, and our community engagement, to name a few. Some of the options we are exploring to offset costs may include what it would look like to partner with additional local community colleges and rent out our facilities for some of their programming; evaluating academic programs per campus and determining strengths to really lean into; and identifying where not to duplicate programming.

No. Demand continues to grow for University Park, and Penn State is in the process of exploring how to maximize programs with high interest in an effort to increase enrollment that will support the entire institution. The Commonwealth Campuses play an important role in their communities, and we are committed to maintaining access and affordability for our students — and bringing the resources of Penn State to our communities through our Commonwealth Campus ecosystem. For the 2025-26 fiscal year, the University is providing $31 million of strategic funds (referred to as subvention) to the Commonwealth Campuses to support strategic needs and priorities. University leaders have announced plans to streamline administrative leadership and support services for Commonwealth Campuses. The announced changes, in addition to savings from the recently competed Voluntary Separation Incentive Program (VSIP) and a one-time infusion of up to $20 million from the president’s strategic funds, will give the University extra time – until June 30, 2026 – to fully balance the Commonwealth Campus budget.

The University has provided additional activity-based allocations, reinforcing its commitment to fulfilling campus missions and addressing student needs by creating two new funding opportunities exclusively for the Commonwealth Campuses — the Presidential Public Impact Research Award (PPIRA) program and the Commonwealth Campus Undergraduate Community-Engaged Research Award (UCERA).

• Balancing the new student portfolio by undertaking efforts to attract and serve other market segments, such as adult learners, veterans, students returning to school to complete degrees, transfer students, and international students.
• Employing a strategic approach to managing yield (the number of admitted students who choose to enroll), to help more admitted students and their families say “yes” to Penn State.
• Making strategic investments in successful and high-demand academic programs at the campuses that align with the state’s workforce needs to prepare students for sustainable careers in Pennsylvania.
• Aligning financial aid and scholarship awarding criteria with enrollment priorities to create even more affordable pathways to a Penn State degree.
• Participating in an institution-wide Academic Program and Portfolio Review to make sure that Penn State is offering the right mix of residential, online and blended programs, at the right locations, to better align with evolving student preferences.

As student demand for the University Park campus continues to grow, University leaders also are planning to increase enrollment in the first-year class at University Park. Based on current housing capacity, University Park’s first-year class would increase from 9,175 to 9,500 students starting in fall 2024, with the goal of moving toward 10,000 students across the next several admissions cycles. As part of the plan to increase capacity at University Park, the University is looking closely at the investments that will need to be made, from housing and other physical infrastructure to additional faculty and staff, to accommodate a larger student body.

The University’s budget allocation model prioritizes research, collaboration and quality in several ways, beginning with a $28.5 million annual commitment that is distributed to colleges and campuses based on their research productivity and $10 million for the provost to allocate to faculty startups. The research budget allocation also grows annually as facilities and administrative costs continue to increase.

Strategic funds from the president’s and provost’s offices are frequently allocated to research and scholarly endeavors across the University. There also are significant funds in the University Libraries that support research in many ways as well as in the University Press, which promotes scholarly research. Additionally, central allocations to each unit are used at the discretion of the academic unit leader to promote research, encourage interdisciplinary collaboration through seed grants, and expand on research projects that have the greatest impact.