(bright music) (bright music continues) - After months of speculation, Bradley University recently finalized cuts to academic programs.

The cuts come after President Stephen Standifird said over the summer that the university was running a $13 million budget shortfall for fiscal year 2023.

Those cuts have left a lot of faculty and students confused and upset.

BU president, Stephen Standifird, joins us now to talk about these decisions and the future of Bradley University.

Thanks for coming in.

We appreciate it.

- Delighted to be here.

- I guess we should start with how did we get to this point?

How did we get to have that budget shortfall?

- Yeah, it's a great question.

Great place to start.

If you look, I mean there's probably some Bradley-specific things in here, but the reality is higher education in general is in a pretty challenging space.

And if you look throughout the industry, you receive reports every day of another university talking about its budget deficit.

And where that evolved is, there's a report that came out in 2020 done by Ernst & Young and the Lumina Foundation that I think highlights the challenge well.

In about 2010, the demand for higher education had, for the first time in our lifetimes, begin to flatten.

So demand had flattened.

And yet, in that same time period, the industry increased capacity by about 25%.

So almost any way you look at it, you can use different numbers and thinking about it in different ways, higher education is pretty seriously overbuilt.

and that's began to catch up to us.

When you combine that with some really interesting conversations nationally around the value of higher education, the numbers still support today the value of higher education, that's clear in the data, but the perception is a little bit different.

And so what you're seeing is you're seeing price pressures in the industry that we've never seen before.

It caught up to us, it's caught up to a lot of our colleagues and that's a lot of what led us to where we are today.

- And I'm sure COVID didn't help matters, you know, that was a few years ago.

What about enrollment?

How has that played a part?

- Yeah.

Oh, that is the part, right?

So there's two ways that the enrollment catches you.

And it's interesting, COVID created challenges and also masks some things in the industry 'cause there's a fair amount of federal aid that flowed into universities during COVID and quite frankly, we got trapped a little bit in this, it masked some underlying challenges.

And you'll see that at a lot of different universities where over the last couple years they looked like they were doing financially well.

That was being propped up a lot by federal aid.

And now it's catching up to us.

And where it catches up is in two places: one, is in just flat out number counts, right?

The number of people that show up.

And a lot of universities, especially mid-size private universities, the market in which we compete, is a really highly pressured segment of the market.

And in a lot of mid-size private universities, you're seeing enrollment challenges.

The other piece that really quite frankly undermines the finances more than anything else is what we call the discount rate.

And what's increasingly happening is students and parents are looking for financial aid that they've never looked for in the past.

And they're expecting that.

And part of the reason they're expecting it is there's a lot of universities that have empty seats and they're increasingly giving out aid as an opportunity to try to attract more students.

And what that's doing is it's compressing the prices throughout the industry.

And that's where a lot of this upside-downness you're seeing, there's a lot of universities reporting very significant deficits and it has as much to do with that discount rate as we talk about as anything else.

- What has enrollments, you know, this past fall been compared to previous years?

- Yeah, so we were down a bit.

I wanna go back and look at the exact numbers as a percentage, but it was not insignificant.

It was, you know, it was double-digit percentages.

We have reason to believe that it will stabilize moving forward.

But the other thing that the industry is facing, and this has been something we've been talking about for a while as an industry, is something we call the demographic cliff.

During the the Great Recession, there was a significant reduction in births.

And so we know where our clients are coming from, right?

They're all in high school right now, our clients over the next few years in high school, and the number of students in high school have dropped significantly so our pool is getting smaller.

And when you combine that with individuals increasingly considering non higher education options, those numbers are gonna continue to be challenging moving forward.

- I was gonna say, how do you compete with, you've got public universities, you've got trade schools, you've got kids that could go out and be social influencers on TikTok and not go to school at all.

How do you compete with all that?

How do you make Bradley the destination for kids in Central Illinois and all over the country?

- Yeah, yeah, it's a great question.

It's something we talk a lot about, right?

So what we've gotta do is we've gotta add value.

We've gotta do things that are different than what everybody else is doing.

How are we differentiating?

How are we offering both experiences and programs that are different?

And a lot of the program review has been a really challenging conversation around what do today's students want in a higher education experience and focusing on those programs that we think are gonna be things that are tracked and serve our students well moving forward.

A great example of that is we recently launched a cybersecurity major.

It's hot, it's super hot, the demand is hot.

We had a seminar that they were talking, the average starting salary for somebody in cybersecurity is well over a hundred thousand dollars so it's a great opportunity for our students and those are the kind of things we gotta start looking at.

And then as we do that, we also have to face the reality that there are certain programs that are no longer as relevant.

And that's obviously what we went through just now.

The other thing we have to think about is when students come to campus, what kind of experience are they looking for?

And one of the things we recently did is we're doing a partnership with T-Mobile and Apple to launch a digitally-connected campus.

So every student coming in, starting in fall '24, gets an iPad that's fully loaded, has unlimited 5G usage, and we've upgraded our 5G capabilities on campus to be able to serve that.

Our students have it, our faculty have it, and we're interacting with them in a way that is, that's how today's students interact, how they experience so much of their daily life.

And that's the kinda stuff we gotta start paying attention to.

And if we can do that in a way that others aren't doing it, we can be competitive in this increasingly challenging market.

- Let's talk a little bit about some of the programs that will not be offered anymore, we'll put up a graphic on the screen.

But let's go through these a little bit and give me some insight into how these decisions were made and why these specifically were made.

Actuarial science.

- Yeah.

- Business law, entrepreneurship.

Just tell me a little bit about, you know, why those didn't make the cut.

- Yeah, so it's interesting, there's a couple different pieces we were looking at as we were going through and assessing the programs.

The number-one factor is, is this something that today's students are looking for, right?

So we have trend data in terms of enrollment.

We would look at the enrollment demand over time.

In some cases we were very careful to be clearer around if this wasn't just a temporary dip, but there was a continual decline that we had reason to believe was going to continue.

So some of these programs just don't have the interest level in today's students as they once had.

So they're important part of our, we talk about it's an important part of our legacy, but not part of our future.

The example I often use is not one on the list, but you know, we started as horology, right?

That's how Bradley started.

That was our first program.

Canceled that in 1961 because the demand for it just vanished.

And unfortunately, that's what happened with a lot of the programs that are being discontinued.

Now, there are a couple cases, and you mentioned a couple of 'em right out the gate, like actuarial science and entrepreneurship, it's not that we're no longer doing actuarial science and we're not doing entrepreneurship, these are both cases where we had it happening in multiple areas of the university.

And increasingly we've gotta start making some decisions around what's the best way to do that.

So we will continue to do actuarial science.

It'll be in the business school.

We continue to have the Turner School of Entrepreneurship and the Turner Center, but we don't have the independent major in the business school as well.

So some of it is a little bit of a, just be more focused in how we use our resources to be as effective as we can be.

- And what's happening with the kids who are in those areas of study now?

- It's a great, very important question to us.

So one of the things we've been very clear about from the very beginning is if you are a student studying a major, one of these majors today, we will make sure that you are able to complete that major at Bradley.

So what'll happen is, while we've announced these programs discontinuation, there will be, the term we use is a teachout.

There will be a teachout with a number of these programs.

And how long that teachout goes depends on where the students are at in the process.

So if we've got, you know, there are a couple, we have a handful of students that are maybe juniors and seniors, but that's it.

The teachout will be sooner for that than one that has perhaps students throughout the process.

But we're committed.

If you're here today, if you're a student here today, we made a commitment to you to make it possible for you to complete your degree here and we will make sure that that happens.

- Just to mention some of the other ones, math education, pre-K through 12, administration and leadership, printmaking, professional sales, religious studies and statistics.

What about the programs that will no longer offer majors or concentrations?

Those are economics, French, mathematics, philosophy, physics.

Economics I was a little surprised at.

- Yeah.

So these are all of the ones you just mentioned.

All of these areas are important disciplines for us, right?

So, And you, you mentioned economics.

I'll also throw, for example, math and physics in the category.

Actually, any one of those topics could have been there.

But we have very strong STEM programs and so we will continue to teach math.

Math is a very important part of who we are.

What's different is if you look at the majors in math, there's a bunch of upper division courses taught in math for the majors that just don't have the demand.

There's just not the student demand in taking those programs so we'll phase out that aspect of it, but we'll continue to have faculty that teach in those areas.

Same for economics, same for philosophy, same for French, same for physics.

Because these are important parts of who we are, they're just no longer gonna be majors.

And that's a decision really driven by the fact that we just don't have the student demand for those majors that we once had.

- Well, speaking of demand.

In the press release it was said students majoring in these programs represent less than 3% of the Bradley student population.

- Correct.

Yeah.

- So that's something that folks might be interested in hearing about - By the way, and if I may.

- Sure.

- We put that there for a reason.

And one of the things that had often popped up, it says, "Well, does that account for if it's a second major or a third major?"

'cause sometimes the students will be, you know, computer science and math, blah, blah.

It does.

So that's if you count any major accounted in any way, it's still less than per 3% of our overall student population.

- Okay.

Let's talk a little bit about, along with these reductions, there is a reduction of jobs at some departments.

Tell us a little bit more about that.

- You know, one of the things, it's interesting, in a world of higher education, I'd say 10 years ago, and then we're just, the industry has a tough time with change so we haven't dealt with some of these issues, but it's been a while where the demand for higher education continued to increase.

And as a result we did not have to be as careful in our thinking about how we deployed our resources.

And so most universities, I think what you'll find, is there just hasn't been the discipline in really looking at, you know, is this something we really need to be doing?

Are these positions we really need to have?

And the world has changed in higher education.

That's something all of us are gonna have to do.

We've done that on the faculty side, we're also doing it on the staff side.

There are certain activities that we have to look at and say, is this, and the punchline for us always is how is this adding value to our students?

Is this enhancing the student experience?

Is this an important part of the student experience?

Is it a key piece of what we do?

And if it is, we'll find a way to do it.

And if it's not, we have to have a tough conversation around whether this actually makes sense for us.

- So with the reduction of faculty, is Bradley running on a skeleton crew or do you have enough people to give enough attention to each of the students on campus?

- Yeah, so it's interesting.

If you look at where we're making the reductions, it was an area where there was just not sufficient demand anyway.

And those areas where there continues to be demand, we have our nursing program, for example, is very strong, we have a very large nursing program and we have a very well-positioned, highly-competent staff supporting that.

So in those areas where the demand is there, we're continuing to fuel.

I mean, in fact, one of the things that we're trying to be very thoughtful about as a university is the landscape in higher education is changing so we've gotta make some adjustments.

But part of that is both being honest about areas that are no longer in demand like they once were, but then also making investments in new areas.

So we are actually expanding in other areas as well because there is demand.

The cybersecurity area is a great example.

That's a relatively new program.

It's a hot program.

We'll continue to invest in that program.

We haven't made the investments yet that I think we need to make, for example, in the area of artificial intelligence but that's gonna have a huge impact in a lot of areas.

And areas that may not be really obvious.

There's a lot of work on the impact between, for example, artificial intelligence and healthcare.

Huge implications there.

We've got some very strong healthcare programs we probably need to beef up in that area to really understand more how that would work and how that would impact.

So the staff is there, it's just readjusting the complexion of who we are and what we do to better respond to what the market is telling us it needs today.

- Well, I don't have to tell you this, that a lot of upset students and faculty members that this is going on.

- Yeah.

- Explain to me why a lot of people, especially on social media, have been saying, "Well, why is there a reduction in classes and faculty?

How come there's no reduction in the sports budget or other things like that?"

- So Bradley's done what a lot of universities have done over the past is it's easier to make some changes than in other places.

And universities are not particularly adept at change anyway.

But to the extent that we have made reductions, we have been making reductions in other areas.

And in fact, you alluded to earlier in the conversation, we actually made some staff reductions at the beginning of the summer.

So that is happening as well.

Right now I'm engaging in conversations with my colleagues all across campus and talking about, are we staffed the way we need to be in all areas?

And so we are continuing to look at, are there other areas where we should be doing reductions as well?

And that's something we're, as an industry, we just gotta get way more disciplined at.

And we are doing that.

It isn't as obvious because when we make changes on the academic side of the house, it tends to get a lot more attention because specifically it tends to impact faculty and students who are, rightfully, have concerns and are expressing those concerns publicly.

But it isn't that we haven't made changes elsewhere.

They just haven't been as noticed.

- Sure, well going back to the athletic part of it, you know, people, they love their colleges, they love their college athletics.

But there's a perception out there that college athletics these days are trumping academics.

So I guess people out there are wondering why we still have sport X and sport Y but we're getting rid of, you know, French and mathematics as majors.

- Yeah.

So this comes up a lot, as you can imagine.

It happens on campus, it happens all over the country right now.

There's a conversations that's happening at a pretty high level and one of the things that I have maintained from day one, day I arrived, a well-run athletic program is an asset to the university.

Key on that is well run.

And we've seen a lot that are not, (chuckles) and that can actually create some real challenges for the university.

I won't talk about any university specifically, but you've seen 'em in the news.

Universities that are really struggling and have gotten a lot of negative press from how they operate.

I would argue that we have one of, if not the best, run athletic department in the country, I think it's because we've got one of, if not the best, athletic directors in the country in Dr. Chris Reynolds, he's phenomenal, does a phenomenal job.

And because of that couple things that we know about our athletic department, its graduation rate is higher than the university average.

Its GPA is higher than the university average.

The success of these students is phenomenal.

And that's partly because of their engagement.

The other thing that we spend a fair amount of time thinking about and looking at is bluntly, what's the return on investment in athletics?

And one of the things you can look at when you're thinking about athletics is, it is a window into who we are.

It's not why people come here, but it may cause them to look, right?

So I'm not gonna come here because Bradley's basketball team did X, but I may hear about Bradley and think about it and start looking at it because of that.

And then those solid academic programs that are really meeting the needs and interests of today's students are what closes the deal.

But you don't close the deal unless they look and the athletic program does that for us.

So one of the things we did, knowing that there's a lot of questions and concerns about the value of athletics, we did an analysis on, the term that my colleagues uses, ad equivalency.

Based on the public relations, based on the media attention we get, what would be the ad equivalency of that?

It's not just eyeballs, it's what is the genuine ad equivalency.

Over the last three years it's averaged $21.3 million from athletics and that's a phenomenal return on investment.

And you look at that, and I say that's part of why we do athletics.

Part of it is the student experience.

Those students have an amazing experience.

They are very successful.

The athletics program does a great job of running that and it creates a window into Bradley in a way we could not do otherwise.

The other thing is, by the way, never lost on me, and this is a Bradley unique thing, I believe, and highly support the idea that our athletic teams, men's basketball perhaps being the most obvious but other great, you know, soccer and women's basketball and volleyball and such, these are not just Bradley Sports, these are Peoria sports.

And this is a value we add to Peoria as well.

So we are, I would say, we are to a large extent, Peoria's sports teams and there's value to that that sometimes is difficult to quantify as well.

But it's something that I think really adds value to the community, which is important part of what we wanna do as well.

- Well, before we run outta time, you know, again, looking at the media reports and Facebook, university's gotten beat up a little bit these last few months.

And you yourself have, being the face of the university.

What does Bradley do in the future to A, make sure we don't end up in this spot again?

And B, put a better image on the university's name.

- Yeah, yeah.

So boy, this question of how do we never get here again is so, so important.

And one of the things that I would argue is that higher education is not, this isn't a storm, it's a change in landscape.

That's different, right?

We're not just riding out a storm.

The landscape has changed in higher education and it's changing for everyone.

And I guess the message I would say is the question isn't whether or not your university is financially stressed right now.

They all are financially stressed.

The question is, do you have a plan?

Do you have a plan moving forward?

And we do.

And that plan really includes a couple key pieces, making really tough decisions like the ones we just made, but gotta do it, it's gotta happen.

Then, what are you putting in place to make sure you never get here again?

And one of the things we'll be doing is we're gonna make sure my colleagues have information, have really good data on knowing how they're performing so we can catch those challenges early on.

So if there's a program is struggling, we know it long before we wait, you know, 10 years to make a decision.

We see it today and we start working on, "Let's work on that.

Let's make sure we're getting that moving in the right direction."

And then, if it's not, then we've gotta make some tough decisions again.

But let's support our colleagues in really understanding how we move that and are we making investments in areas that matter.

And so if you look at our overall strategy, it's a combination of cost reductions and new investments and we're making new investments as well.

- Well, we all hope Bradley does well, not only for the university and the students and the faculty, but for our whole area.

It's an important part of our region, that's for sure.

- Thank you.

- President Standifird, thanks for your time today.

- My pleasure.

Thank you.

- Appreciate it.

Our Phil Luciano spoke with some Bradley students to get their reaction to these academic cuts.

- [Phil] As Bradley University addresses a budget shortfall, students see the school as shortsighted.

Sarah Hirsch is a sophomore elementary education major from St. Louis.

She chose Bradley for its education program, but BU's academic cuts, especially in math, make her think the school doesn't value teaching as much as she does.

- It's frustrating 'cause I come here to change the world.

The reason I wanted to go into teaching is to change our future and our future is the students.

And if we're not teaching our students to be proud of who they are and their math and how they perceive math, then that's upsetting as a whole.

- [Phil] She says she wants to teach math to students of all ages, but because of Bradley's academic changes, she won't be able to be a high school math teacher.

- Math has been such a negative thing that students say, "Oh, I hate math, I hate math."

But my job as a future educator is to tell them how fun it can be and how amazing math is, especially, put into engineering.

It can build amazing things like skyscrapers and I teach my students to think of it as such a positive thing.

And unfortunately, what Bradley is doing is by saying, "We're gonna cut math," it's saying to us as students, it's not important anymore.

- [Phil] Kullan LeBlanc is another sophomore from St. Louis.

Leblanc, who is majoring in advertising and public relations, says he could have gone to school for far less money in his home state.

He thinks staffing cuts at Bradley will devastate one of the campus's biggest draws.

- I came here because of the personalized connection between each of the professors and the students I have.

I love all of my professors.

I think my professors here have done tremendous things for me and I don't think I would be standing here where I'm at without a lot of them.

And I feel like part of that is because of how small the class sizes are and the fact that we are able to have such a personalized education.

- [Phil] After Bradley, LeBlanc wants to become a lawyer, but he thinks the Bradley cuts will cheapen his degree and make it harder to advance his education.

- I would love to go to law school, but it is very hard to apply to law school whenever the recruiters have identical stats to someone else and then looks at my programs and realizes that the ones that I am in, or I was in, are no longer even offered anymore.

- [Phil] Senior economics major Alex O'Shaughnessy also worries that cuts will hurt the reputation of the school as well as his degree.

- I see a college degree as more than just an education.

It's also an endorsement that this individual can go through four years, can do the work, can get what they need to do.

And it proves to the just outsiders that hey, this individual can do what they need to do.

And having the university, its name, being worsened off in the future could like really hurt that endorsement, I think.

- [Phil] O'Shaughnessy, who grew up just a few blocks from campus, says the downsizing will also hurt the reputation of the city of Peoria.

- Things that would be like seen as like ideal for like a university are no longer being taught at the university in Peoria could like hurt both the Peoria name as well as just the school's reputation in an academic field in general.

- Welcome back.

Phil Luciano joins us and I guess in the sake of transparency, we should say that you have taught at Bradley for a while.

- Oh my, I've been there 26 years.

Part-timer.

And one of the advantages I have is I teach freshman comp, the same composition class everyone takes when they go to college so I meet a lot of freshmen.

And one of the upsides to all this stuff that's been going on is, in addition to talking to those students we had on just now, is talking to students and they're very, very thoughtful about all this stuff.

And maybe that isn't surprising, I guess it's not, but I know when I went to college, I really didn't think beyond that day or that weekend, particularly that weekend.

But they really are thinking about this and what an education means and what the school means to them.

And I talk to these kids and I'm like, "Wow, that's just, that's some really thoughtful stuff you got going on there."

- And I think they realize that either themselves or their parents are going to be paying off this education for a long time so it's probably been ingrained in this new generation of kids that hey, you better study, you better get good grades because the tab on this is gonna follow you for a while.

- Yeah, I don't think it's gonna be much of that seven years of college down the drain type thing where you just go on and on.

"Van Wilder's" gone.

- Right.

Yeah, those days are over.

Well we will see what happens with Bradley in the future and hopefully President Standifird is right and they can see problems much sooner and try and do something about 'em.

Let's transition now to our favorite show, besides this one, (Phil laughs) "You Gotta See This," which is coming up in just a few minutes.

- Got quite a few interesting stories, but one of 'em I wanna point out, and it's about in the middle of the episode, is on a new Lebanese restaurant.

And I love Lebanese food and the thing that's kinda peculiar, I think, about the Peoria area is, there's a lot of Lebanese people, but not a lot of Lebanese restaurants.

I know there's a lot of great Lebanese cooks, but they're mostly just cooking at home.

And here's a story about a couple people who said, "Hey, we're doing it at home, let's do it in a restaurant."

So you'll wanna check this place out.

- All right, that is coming up in just a minute.

We appreciate you joining us and you can always check us out at wtvp.org and our WTVP Facebook and Instagram pages.

Have a good night.

(bright music) (bright music continues)