06/10/2024
By Joanne Yestramski

I want to say thank you for the warm welcome I’ve received since my return to UMass Lowell in February. While some things have changed, it was incredibly energizing to find the same broad commitment from faculty and staff to students and to creating the strongest education and research experience we can.

One of our biggest challenges remains the financial impact of COVID-19 as the university works to graduate the smaller student cohorts that entered Fall 2020 and 2021, and continues to replace them with larger incoming classes to bring the overall enrollment back up to pre-pandemic numbers.

This effort is working. Despite concerns stemming from the federal government’s “FAFSA fiasco” that delayed universities nationally from providing students with financial aid packages, we’re cautiously optimistic that our undergraduate population this fall will meet our budgeted estimates.

Thank you to our financial aid and admissions teams, our faculty and our marketing colleagues and to everyone who has played such a key role in demonstrating to our students the benefits that come with a UMass Lowell degree.

But until total enrollment increases, and with increased salary, fringe benefits, inflation costs, and board of trustees required financial assumptions and parameters, we continue to face budgetary challenges. While the gap is much less acute than this year’s, UMass Lowell will face a $15.4 million shortfall (roughly 2.7% of our total budget) that we need to close in the coming fiscal year. Some of this gap comes from the need to replace one-time state and federal funds that helped close FY 2024’s much larger budget gap with permanent, recurring funding.

Our approach to closing this gap will be a little different this year. Executive Cabinet has already completed budget hearings for all administrative areas and colleges. While some similar measures from last year will be pursued, university leadership is not looking to repeat an across-the-board budget reduction.

This year’s approach will continue to be guided by the 2028 Strategic Plan and include investigating (but not limited to):

  • Leveraging Current Use Gifts: Most philanthropic gifts to the university are placed in our endowment and the interest is used to fund initiatives and scholarships in perpetuity. In addition to these, our Advancement colleagues are actively pursuing current use gifts that can be fully spent to support our financial objectives.
  • Space Optimization: Reduce or repurpose our physical footprint, both leased and owned, by consolidating, selling or leasing out space on campus.
  • Administrative reviews to improve services, enhance revenue, lower risks: Review targeted revenue and service areas across the campus to gain efficiencies, as identified by independent administrative reviews and recommendations from Budget Hearings.
  • Regionalization of Transportation: Explore opportunities to regionalize transportation services for greater efficiency.
  • Workforce management: The university is continuing our stringent position management through the Essential Hiring Committee.

University leadership will consider strategic reorganizations and will look to the expertise of our employees for ideas, including through the collective bargaining process and during open forums planned for early September. I fully recognize that our current student-to-staff ratios make us lean when compared with our peers.

In the months ahead, we will offer phased retirement opportunities for faculty, including commitments to offer retiring faculty a continuing role in the UMass Lowell community. More details on that to come as we work through details with our union partners.

After several painful budget years, I know it can be hard to see a light at the end of the tunnel. But we have larger student populations enrolling each year. Our research investments, including private and state investment stemming from the Lowell Innovation Network Corridor (LINC) are surging and generating new revenues. We have concrete plans to reduce our physical footprint and generous donors giving at unprecedented levels of generosity.

Thankfully, capital expenditures for annual call, deferred maintenance and “catch up” projects (such as Olney Hall renewal) will continue due to the availability of capital funding from the State, bond financing and positive operating cash flow designated for capital projects.

Our choices now will set us on a path for future opportunity and growth. Thank you for your expertise, your ideas and your dedication to our shared mission.