WSU Spokane considering up to 15% cuts amid university financial uncertainty

Washington State University leaders are preparing for cuts, particularly at their campus in Spokane, as they face federal grant freezes, a state budget deficit and lagging enrollment.

University leadership on Thursday announced directives to all 44 WSU units to draft several proposals to cut budgets by 1%, 3%, 5% and 10%, with the Health Sciences unit in Spokane directed to plan reductions of up to 15%.

Just three days on the job, WSU President Elizabeth Cantwell warned cuts were coming, though it remains unclear which college or campus will be hit hardest. She said the best option is to plan for different scenarios.

“Then we come together at higher and higher levels, around what are the really important things? What can we give up?” she said.

There will be no across-the-board cuts. But Cantwell did not speculate as to what the priorities will be, deferring to the units to present proposals to the board of regents at upcoming meetings before the board approves WSU’s budget, expected May 21.

“I think all our campuses will want to look at the very specific infrastructure needs that we have right now and potentially stretch out those needs over a longer period of time,” Cantwell said. “We definitely want to make sure that the demand signal that we are getting from our students with regard to what they want to be trained in, what they need for purposes of getting a job, and the demand signal from here, our Spokane community, regarding the jobs we need filled with the students you are producing will be really, really important for us.”

While the entire university is grappling with financial woes, its Spokane colleges, including medical school, nursing and pharmaceutical sciences, are facing “financial pressures specific to that campus.”

WSU Spokane underwater

The colleges in WSU’s Spokane campus have an annual budget of approximately $82 million a year, WSU Spokane Chancellor Daryll DeWald said in a February board of regents meeting. More than half of the cost comes from the medical school. As of that meeting the Spokane campus was projecting a $2 million deficit in 2025.

To address budgetary concerns at the Spokane campus there will be “program optimization,” DeWald said.

“We will look at opportunities to increase efficiencies where we work more closely with the colleges and how we support them,” he said.

WSU’s Medical School has been in debt since its inception. But that is in part by intention, WSU Chief Financial Officer Leslie Brunelli said.

“My predecessor put a memo into place to essentially absolve the College of Medicine of that debt by agreeing to have the college pay their $22 million debt down over time with a portion of their tuition each year. Now the length of time that it takes to actually clear is longer than the rest of my lifetime,” she said.

WSU Spokane’s College of Pharmacy has lost the most students over the past five years of any WSU academic unit, Brunelli said. Previously at a high of 600 students, enrollment in the college is down more than 50% since the 2019-20 school year, she said.

“When you take these three colleges and the Spokane administrative unit combined, we’re facing a significant budget shortfall on an annual basis,” Brunelli said of the Medical School, College of Nursing and College of Pharmacy.

DeWald said he expects pharmacy school enrollment to improve.

“It’s a nationwide trend that has honestly perplexed me because our students do very well. They usually have multiple offers and they are compensated well when they come out of our program,” he said.

Each academic unit has reserve funds that cannot be used to make up for budget shortfalls.

Pullman’s reserve balance is the largest, hovering around $120 million, followed by the WSU Vancouver campus reserves of $30 million. Unlike the other five campuses, the Spokane campus is $20 million in the red and has been for five years.

Each campus besides Pullman, Cantwell said, has a “localized obligation” in meeting the needs of the community in which they’re based. In Spokane, that means a focus on community medicine and expanding access to health care.

“A Community Medicine construct doesn’t bring with it the classical dollars that a traditional medical school does,” Cantwell said. “On the other hand, we’re all in a moment where our job is to envision the future and figure out how to get there without necessarily all the old constructs. So it’s a bit of an opportunity for us to really look at the future of medicine delivered to individuals. Not cancer, not heart disease, some of the really big modalities of human pain that have a lot of money associated with them and do some visioning about what does that mean?”

Research cuts

President Donald Trump’s freeze on federal grants have been temporarily halted by federal courts amid legal challenges, but WSU is planning for fewer federal dollars going forward.

Cantwell does not believe the federal government will “fully give up” on funding research at universities like WSU.

“Research at the scale that we do it in the United States makes us economically great,” she said.

WSU primarily relies on outside sponsors to conduct its research. Over the past 10 years, the medical school received $175 million dollars in grants and manages over $92 million in grants and contracts. Research at the medical school has focused on addiction sciences, behavioral and mental health, neuroscience and behavior, community, and health disparities, sleep and human performance, and nutrition and exercise physiology.

While federal funding is in doubt, state-level cuts to higher education are also anticipated. WSU spokesperson Phil Weiler estimates between 4-6% cuts from their state level funding as the state faces its own budget deficit to the tune of $16 billion.

“I worry that some of the most impactful, community focused work that we do will be labeled DEI because of the way the research was constructed in order to get the award in the first place,” Cantwell said. “But these are kind of fundamental support systems for Americans. And I think we’ll, we’ll come back to that construct.”