The Vice President for Finance and Management at SUNY Cortland, Mark Yacavone ’94, hosted an open campus meeting on Wednesday, Feb. 26, in Sperry Center, about SUNY Cortland’s financial state and the university budget, with updates on campus reserves and allocation of resources.
During the meeting, Yacavone spoke about the school’s funds, its operating expense, budgets and reserves. One of the main topics of the meeting was student enrollment for each year and how this number is affected by social events and economics and can affect the school’s financial outlook.
At present, 24.2% of SUNY Cortland’s income comes from tuition. The school currently has 6,938 students (5,911 undergraduate, 1,027 graduates). These numbers, however, are considerably low compared to previous years. The enrollment number declined after the 2020/2021 school year, but it’s been steady since then. The reasons behind this decline are the demographics and the yearly birth rate in the country.
“The financial outlook of the institution is heavily reliable on the enrollments that we have,” said Yacavone. “The entering students’ enrollments right now and the picture that we currently have is that we’re probably going to go down a little bit just because of the demographics that are out, the number of people that are going to high school, and the birth rate.”
In an article posted at NPR at the beginning of this year, Jon Marcus explained that the demographic decline has been predicted since the advent of the Great Depression in 2007, when Americans started having less babies, and that the birth rate hasn’t recovered since them.
Marcus explains that the problem will arrive nationwide in the fall of this year and that it won’t affect only the enrollment of new students in schools but also the number of qualified people to assume jobs that require a higher level of education. The closing of more colleges is by itself a threat to the economy, and with nearly 4 million people working in higher education, should the number of qualified people necessary to assume those jobs not be met, there’ll be a loss of 265 jobs and $67 million a year in economic impact.
In the article, Marcus also predicts that the decline in high school graduates will happen more in the Northeast, Midwest and West of the country, where fertility rates are already generally lower.
Yacavone, however, said that although the changes in birth rate have affected SUNY Cortland because the majority of the students enrolled at the school are from Long Island, Rockland and the northern side of New York City, and the birth rate in New York is considerably less than it was, the numbers aren’t worse than it was in 2005 an that eventually these numbers should go up again. He also brings attention to the importance of investing in the school and making it attractive to prospective students and families.
“Cortland invests in its marketing, its brand and its outreach to students to show the value of who we are. That’s why we want to expand our resources in the right places and make sure our facilities are attractive to people. That’s what my team is working on, making sure that this facility looks as good as it can possibly look,” said Yacavone. “We have our students’ best interest in mind, they are the priority.”