By Kathleen Moore
Albany Times Union

ALBANY — The state university system is on track to stop running a deficit in a decade — and only if it keeps increasing its enrollment by nearly 3% each year, according to its latest financial report.

SUNY released the report Sunday. It details which SUNY campuses are now in the black, and the progress of cost-cutting as well as increasing enrollment.

“Following a third year of systemwide enrollment gains, and historic levels of sustained State funding support,” the SUNY system will be in the black by the 2034-2035 school year, the report said.

Nationally, enrollment is down due to the declining birthrate. Some colleges have pivoted to attract more adults, since there are fewer 18-year-olds graduating high school every year. Socially, young people are also questioning the value of taking on debt to get a degree. Liberal arts colleges have reported struggling to attract students, and some have closed — including the College of Saint Rose in Albany. But community colleges are seeing a Renaissance with the societal focus on education for career-specific skills.

Billion-dollar deficit

In 2024, SUNY projected that in a decade, it would be spending $1.1 billion more than it received.

SUNY Chancellor John King Jr. told university leaders that they needed to cut back. Majors that only had a handful of students might need to be closed.

SUNY Potsdam and SUNY Fredonia cut French and Philosophy, among other majors, due to a lack of students. Both are now on track to have a balanced budget in two to three years. SUNY Maritime and SUNY Delhi, which were highlighted in the 2024 report as being in deficit, are both now in the black, the report said.

King called campus cuts “efficiency measures,” saying that campuses needed to right-size to their current enrollment levels. Some campuses had lost 40% of their students over the last decade, but hadn’t cut back accordingly.

The state Legislature also increased funding, which helped. The state is now providing more support than it has in at least 50 years, the report said.

Every four-year college received at least a 30% increase in state funding, and community colleges received two consecutive funding increases for the first time in decades, the report said.

Now King is focusing on enrollment — and retaining the students who enroll, which has been a problem at many campuses. He’s told campus leaders that retention is an enrollment strategy — while the number of new freshmen is important, the total number of students enrolled is key, especially at four-year schools.

SUNY has rolled out a program called ACE to help bachelor’s degree students complete their degrees. So far, students in ACE are slightly more likely to stay in school — 6% to 8% more — than other students, SUNY officials said.

For the first time since 2007-2009, enrollment has increased for the last three consecutive years. SUNY highlighted that in the new report.

From the fall of 2023 to the fall of 2025, SUNY enrollment increased 6.5%. Community colleges were up 9% in that same time frame, while four-year schools were up 4.5%.

The state is paying for free community college for adults without a degree who major in programs that lead to high-demand jobs. That brought in 5,600 students in the fall, the first semester it was offered, according to the report.

That’s a drop in the bucket for the university system, which had 387,446 students last fall. But King expects an increase in the number of adults returning to community college as the program grows and is more widely known. Gov. Kathy Hochul has proposed expanding the eligible majors to include preparing students for careers in logistics, air traffic control and transportation, and emergency management.

To meet the projection of a balanced budget by 2034, SUNY needs enrollment to keep increasing at a rate of 2.9%, the report said. That’s how much enrollment increased, overall, last fall.

In addition, SUNY must continue its “commitment to fiscal discipline,” the report said.

And the balanced budget relies on continued state funding increases — but only for one specific expense.

The state must increase funding to cover any increases in collective bargaining agreements and other essential costs, the report said.

As an example, the report said, “if the State approves a collective bargaining agreement with a 3% increase in 2026-27, that would result in an additional $175 million State operating aid allocation for SUNY.”

SUNY is also asking for an increase in funding for other reasons. The report described a $10 billion backlog in “critical maintenance.”

The SUNY Board of Trustees has asked the state include $1 billon in critical maintenance funding in this year’s budget.