A swelling budget deficit has forced Sonoma State University in Northern California to eliminate and consolidate departments, cut faculty and staff, and discontinue its participation in NCAA Division II athletics.
The university, which enrolls nearly 6,000 students on its Sonoma County campus an hour north of San Francisco, has suffered budget deficits for several years.
“It is attributable to a variety of factors—cost of personnel, annual price increases for supplies and utilities, inflation—but the main reason is enrollment,” Cutrer wrote. “Student tuition and fees, combined with enrollment-based funding from the California State University [system], are the major sources of revenue in the university budget.”
Enrollment has dropped 38 percent since its peak in 2015.
To remedy the gap, the university has offered voluntary employee separations, cut staff, streamlined academic departments, and frozen hiring, according to Cutrer’s statement.
“Consequently, today, approximately 46 university faculty staff—both tenured and adjunct—will receive notice that their contracts will not be renewed for 2025-26,” Cutrer wrote. “Additional lecturers will receive notice that no work will be available in fall 2025. Four management positions and 12 staff positions also will be eliminated.”
Other departments will be merged.
For example, “the current departments of American multicultural studies, Chicano and Latino studies, and Native American studies will be consolidated into one ethnic studies department,” according to the plan. Electrical engineering and computer science will also become one department with a single chair.
Positions to be eliminated include dean of the library. Besides a hiring freeze on faculty, all tenure-track faculty will be required to teach a full workload of 23-24 units per academic year, the plan states. The school will reduce faculty employed in ethnic studies, modern languages, history, political science, and physics/astronomy.
Sonoma State also attributes enrollment declines to two large wildfires in the region in 2018 and 2019. “Drops were further exacerbated during the pandemic when most students chose to stay local,” reads a 2024 memo on the enrollment drop.
