California Lutheran University announced layoffs, position reductions, and future goals in a Town Hall meeting for faculty and staff on Aug. 9.

The Town Hall followed an email sent to staff and faculty on Aug. 1 from the Office of the President, in which it was stated that six employees had been laid off ahead of the fall 2024 semester. The email also stated that layoffs, other voluntary separations, and the strategic elimination of vacant positions has resulted in the elimination of 34 staff positions across the university.

In a press conference following the Town Hall, Interim University President John Nunes, said many of the changes made in the last few months reflect an evolutionary period in Cal Lutheran’s history. Nunes also said the decisions made now will prevent even more difficult decisions in the future.

“I’m happy to be here because California Lutheran University is well-positioned,” Nunes said. “We still have resources that are strong, and we’ve got a runway. But we have to make some hard decisions now in order to avoid making heartbreaking decisions later.”

Nunes said he and his cabinet have prioritized finding creative solutions to the problems plaguing the university, something he feels was accomplished by the decision to layoff a total of six employees as opposed to a projected 40 plus.

“At one point, the board thought, ‘well, it’s going to require a layoff of like 40 plus people to get the numbers right so that we work our way towards the budget numbers that we’re aiming for,’” Nunes said. “The creative and humane ways in which this team puzzled was to work to find alternatives to impacting people. It’s still really painful for those six and their families. And for us, as their colleagues, to lose colleagues, that’s not easy, but it requires this sort of leadership.”

Nunes said he and his colleagues wanted to make the difficult decisions as early as possible, and that there is currently no plan to make another decision of the same kind through the rest of the 2024-2025 academic year, barring something “catastrophic.”

Nunes said the combination of layoffs, early retirement programs, eliminating vacancies, and reallocating job duties all helped the university reach its ideal budget numbers. Regina Biddings-Muro, Vice President for University Advancement said university administration has been carefully monitoring that balance to ensure employees are not taking on more than they can handle.

“It’s been this balance of not piling too much work on the people who are here so they, too, would then say, ‘this is too much,’ yet, tending to the budget so we remain fiscally strong. That constant evaluation is almost daily or weekly,” Biddings-Muro said.

Vice President for Enrollment Management and Student Success Matt Ward said there were multiple different factors that reflected the decisions made over the past few months, including issues pertaining to low enrollment. Ward said the university’s peak enrollment has dropped by about 20% since 2018, and follows the trend of other universities as they experience shifts in demographics.

Ward also said low enrollment and demographic loss has been impacted by the simplification of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Ward said the recent simplification of the FAFSA created many problems for both families and institutions, especially in regards to financial aid packages being sent to admitted students in April of this year; two months past the usual date in February.

Ward said the majority of students affected by the FAFSA simplification belong to the Hispanic and Latinx communities, many of whom are first generation college students eligible for Cal Grants and Pell Grants.

“This year, those students were impacted by their ability to know what their financial aid looked like,” Ward said. “So that was something that contributed to this year’s decision making about our budget.”

While these decisions reflect back in large part to the university budget, Ward said the university is still in a good financial position.

“Our balance sheet is in great shape,” Ward said. “We’ve put a lot of money in the savings account through the years to be able to address a year or a phase like we have been, where the checking account doesn’t quite balance because we’ve been hit with challenges that require us to dip into our savings account.”

Ward said the university is currently focused on balancing that out, and remains “mission centered and market smart.”

With that goal in mind, Nunes said the university is focused on investing in programs and positions that will help the university evolve with changing demographics, including investing in the Presidential Seal of Exelencia; a national certification that recognizes institutions that demonstrate a strong commitment to serving Latinx students, and restructuring of the university’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice initiatives by adding  a “B” to emphasize “Belonging.”

“The student impact of everything that we were puzzling, as President Nunes described, is really at the center,” Biddings-Muro said.

Nunes said he and his cabinet made decisions with the consultation of both the faculty and staff senates, and said “the number one guiding principle for new positions is the student experience and how students are impacted.”

“You try to get as many voices as you can, as much expertise as you can,” said Nunes. “And then you’ve got to make a decision. You’ve got to implement the decision.”

Nunes said he is hopeful that constant collaboration with students, faculty, and staff will yield positive outcomes for the university as a whole, both fiscally and socially.

“I mean, who knows? No one knows what the future is, and it’s rapidly changing,” Nunes said. “We’re trying to create an environment in which we’re listening and learning, so as much as we can continue to have these conversations, that’d be great.