UMKC to spend $65M to boost hiring, enrollment and job placement, dump some courses
After a year of lost revenues because of COVID-19, the University of Missouri-Kansas City on Thursday announced it will spend up to $65 million over the next five years to redirect its mission and hire more top professors.
That will mean the elimination of some courses. The plan promotes community engagement and recruitment efforts, starting with a program that brings high school students to UMKC and exposes them to college rigor and campus life. And it will pour money into better preparing students to get jobs after they graduate.
“There were no victories in COVID,” Chancellor Mauli Agrawal told The The Star in an interview prior to the university’s public announcement. “But when COVID-19 hit, it became very clear to us that UMKC needs to change and needs to change now.”
Since UMKC “does not have access to any new sources of funding,” Agrawal said, it intends to pay for all this with enrollment growth, refocusing spending, grants, new investment and donations from private entities. The school is counting on increasing research funding to generate revenue too.
As part of the investment, Agrawal said, UMKC intends to spend an additional $5 million over three years to hire tenured and tenure-track faculty. And he said there will not be “mass layoffs” as a result.
The university will also dump some courses that Agrawal said have not pulled in students and don’t align with the new direction.
On the chopping block are some courses in the Bloch School of Management, the Conservatory of Music and Dance, as well as courses in education, law, nursing and arts and sciences. Under review for some change are courses in the dental school, pharmacy, economics, architecture and urban studies.
A committee of students, faculty, administrators and community leaders worked for a year to design what’s known as the UMKC Forward plan, focusing on five areas: student success, investment in faculty, research, career development and community engagement.
“Higher education has been grappling with the need to change for years now,” Agrawal said. COVID-19 may have just forced schools like UMKC to act sooner rather than later.
Schools that react first “will be best positioned for an inclusive recovery,” Marc Hill, president of the Civic Council of Greater Kansas City, said in a January commentary in The Star about UMKC’s plans.
“If we do this right,” Agrawal said, more students will choose UMKC, they will stay and graduation rates will improve.
He said students will be surrounded by faculty and staff who help them zero in on a career goal and lay out a step-by-step path to landing a job. They plan to embed students more in the community through internships, community service for college credit and mentoring with local business and industry.
Agrawal expects this program to especially help first-generation college goers and minority students, who make up 70% of UMKC’s enrollment.
Also, a new certificate program will be available for working folks looking to improve skills for career advancement.
“We need to connect students to their dreams … and to well-paying jobs,” Agrawal said.
He said the new direction is not reliant on tuition increases, although revenue from tuition is key to covering the cost. Agrawal is not promising that tuition won’t go up. He said that will be up to the University of Missouri Board of Curators. Missouri tuition cannot be raised more than any increases in the consumer price index.
Agrawal said UMKC has not calculated its total revenue loss from COVID-19, but the school has taken hits since March 2020 from a drop in enrollment, refunds to students for unused housing and dining plans, new safety measures and significant cuts in state funding.
Over the past year, 22 states have cut a combined $1.9 billion, or 3.8% in funding for higher education for the fiscal year that ends in June, according to the Center for American Progress.
“To absorb those cuts and other revenue losses, public colleges and universities have already laid off 304,600 workers,” that report said. “Undergraduate enrollment has gone down 4 percent with community colleges seeing the largest decline at nearly 10 percent. And a number of public colleges have declared a financial state of emergency that allows them to lay off tenured faculty and close academic programs.”
Along with UMKC, the other three campuses in the University of Missouri four-campus system have all dealt with big cuts in the past year.
They made sweeping campus layoffs, furloughs and other cuts when departments had to squeeze their budgets by up to 12% at the University of Missouri in Columbia and up to 17.5% at UMKC.
In May 2020 the university system including UMKC announced salary cuts for nearly 400 employees, including chancellors, to save the system $2.3 million of a $36 million hole in the budget created when the state cut funds because of the coronavirus pandemic.
This story was originally published March 18, 2021 at 5:58 PM.
