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In February, University of North Texas President Harrison Keller warned that the institution was facing a $45 million budget deficit for the current fiscal year. He cited a dual decline in state funding and international graduate student enrollment, calling the university’s shortfall “structural, not just temporary.”
The public, 44,000-student institution has since moved to cut over 70 low-enrolling academic programs, from certificates to master’s degrees. It is also eyeing major organizational and academic restructuring, which leaders hope to be completed by next fall.
Higher Ed Dive spoke with Keller about adapting to lower state funding and tuition revenue, working with faculty amid academic restructuring, and budgeting in the face of uncertainty.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
HIGHER ED DIVE: UNT is facing some significant financial challenges right now, as are many institutions in the higher ed sector. How did the university get to this point?
HARRISON KELLER: For context, we’re in a very sound financial position — we’re in good shape in terms of our cash flow and our reserves, and our credit ratings have just been reaffirmed. But we had projected a $45 million structural budget deficit, and we knew we needed to get in front of it.
Harrison Keller, president of the University of North Texas
The image by Karen Ann Simsen is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
That deficit has been driven by two primary factors. The first is that we lost about $16 million in appropriations through the state’s formula funding for instruction and operations in the last legislative session.
The other factor — and more significant factor — is the loss of international graduate students.
We had planned for some decline. But we did not anticipate that, in this past year, there would be such a steep drop in the number of students who were able to secure visas to come and study at UNT. We admitted about 2,700 master’s students who were not able to attend.
We did have a couple hundred more undergraduates than we projected, so we netted about 2,500 fewer international students than the previous year. Each of those students would have brought between $20,000 and $25,000 to the institution. That’s a significant hit.
Right away, we made some changes — slowing down on hiring, for example, and looking for other places that we could improve efficiency. We’ve been able to reduce the projected deficit from about $45 million to about $35 million already, and there are more steps we need to take.
By fiscal year 2028, we should have resolved the deficit. That’s other things being equal, of course. We live in interesting times. Between now and then, we have a legislative session in Texas. There are a lot of variables.
Some of those cut costs have come in the form of closing or consolidating dozens of academic programs. UNT also announced it will merge two departments, effective in the fall. Is more academic and organizational restructuring under consideration?
Academic affairs is the largest part of our central funds, at about 80%. When we’re trying to reduce our spending, that’s disproportionately going to impact academic affairs.
One lever we’re pulling in an effort to drive new enrollment revenue and reduce costs is a systematic, large-scale course redesign effort.
We’ve learned a ton over the last two decades about how people learn and about how to redesign courses effectively using technology. We also have experience at UNT with our own faculty who’ve done this sort of work. So we put a call out to faculty and the deans for potential course redesign projects.
We got 44, an incredible response from our faculty. We would not be moving so fast if we were not able to work in close partnership with our faculty.
The other thing we did that has gotten some attention is the provost and I directed the deans to begin moving away from traditional departments and towards interdisciplinary schools and divisions.
With the faculty in the College of Science, we are standing up a new college — the School of Mathematics and Science Foundations — that will have responsibility for the entry-level courses in math and science. That shifts that primary responsibility from the traditional departments into an interdisciplinary school. Another project like that is a new School of Applied Liberal Arts within our College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.
We currently have about 60 academic departments at UNT. Some of these are very large, as you might expect at a large public R1 institution, but some are very small. There are some operational efficiencies in moving away from smaller departments into larger organizational structures.
But there’s a deeper reason to do this work, and that is that the disciplinary structures that served us well in the last century don’t necessarily map onto the kinds of problems and scholarship that we’re called to address.
These are complicated issues, and we need to be deliberate in how we’re sorting through them. Our charge to the deans was to begin a process with the aim of completing it and implementing new structures no later than fall 2027.
How is UNT working toward ensuring long-term institutional reliance amid a shifting state and federal landscape? How do you budget amid, as you say, interesting times?
One of the important changes we made this last year is we moved from incremental budgeting to more strategic budgeting at UNT. Instead of having a one-year budget with adjustments around the margin, all of our units are asked to put together a five-year budget.
We also adopted a performance-based funding model for a portion of the budget that goes to the academic units. It’s based on how many students are served by the colleges, how many complete their programs, and how quickly they complete. You receive more for a student who graduates in four years than for a student who graduates in six years. There’s also some additional funding for Pell-eligible graduates.
That gives the deans a clear line of sight between the decisions they’re making to help students succeed in their programs and the resources that their college receives.
For example, we have just given each college their number for this next year that they need to plan against. If they don’t like that number, and they can outperform these projections in their enrollments and completions, we will actually make a midyear adjustment to their budget and they can receive additional funding. If they underperform, we won’t cut their budget midyear. But they’re on notice that they should right the ship or be prepared to absorb potential budget reductions in the next cycle.
That change gives a lot more transparency to the process, and it also gives the deans a lot more autonomy and agency.
Amidst this wave of change, UNT has also launched an initiative to evaluate and broaden its criteria for promotion and tenure. What prompted that reconsideration and what does the process look like?
In the context of promotion and tenure discussions, faculty will be doing interdisciplinary work, or they might, for example, be securing grants in a field where it’s not as common for faculty to secure grants. The traditional structures and systems struggle to address and honor that work.
In this process, we’ve done some benchmarking with other institutions and convened design sessions with our faculty. We should be on track to have at least the new draft institutional criteria for promotion and tenure by the end of the summer. Those criteria would then need to be further specified by unit and by department.
What are the operational benefits of broadening your criteria for promotion and tenure?
We’re able to acknowledge a broader range of the work that we need faculty to do to advance our mission and our public responsibilities at UNT.
If you look across our current departments, some have criteria for considering a broader range of scholarship, grants and other kinds of contributions that faculty make to the institution or the community.
Other departments are fairly narrow and very traditional, to the point that they might prioritize how many pages you published in a certain kind of journal and discount some of these other considerations.
Our institutional criteria should make clear that we need faculty to be excellent in their scholarship, advancing our sponsored research, and our broader research mission. We are also interested in producing scholarship and creative contributions of public value, so it makes sense for us not to discount the transfer of technologies and insights into the marketplace.
We need faculty to be educational innovators, to lean in on these ambitious projects, to modernize our curriculum and redesign courses. We also need faculty to contribute to the direction and leadership of the institution and our community.
As I said, we are moving incredibly fast across multiple fronts. If a year from now, when we come around to promotion and tenure, we say none of that counts? Then all the creative energy is going to go out of the system, because we would have betrayed the commitment of our faculty to the institution.
What advice do you have for other institutional leaders who are in a similar situation or may find themselves here in the future?
You need to confront the brutal facts — don’t budget off your hopes. This is also a time when I think it’s a mistake to be too conservative in the kinds of changes that you’re considering implementing.
However, you do need to be conservative in budgeting in one important sense. You need to build enough contingency into your budget so that if your international enrollments swing significantly worse than you anticipate, you can address that loss of revenue without losing momentum
