CSU Channel Islands laid off 13 people, part of a larger reduction in its workforce as the university tries to balance its budget in the face of declining student enrollment and likely cuts in state funding.
On June 12, the university notified 16 employees that they could lose their jobs, though only 13 actually will — three of the notified employees have enough seniority that they could choose to move into the jobs of less-senior employees, who would then be laid off.
Including those layoffs, CSUCI eliminated the equivalent of 79 full-time jobs or 9% of the university’s total workforce. The 66 positions cut without layoffs were spots left open by people leaving or retiring.
The university offered an early retirement incentive to some employees, and 16 people took that offer, according to a fact sheet on CSUCI’s website regarding its budget cuts.
The people who were laid off include groundskeepers, office administrators, library workers and classroom support personnel, union officials said. CSUCI did not lay off any full-time, tenure-track faculty members. It did reduce its teaching staff, though, by cutting the workload of part-time adjunct professors.
The university is likely to eliminate four more positions by the end of July, in management and other non-union roles, its fact sheet states.
CSUCI administrators refused to answer questions about the layoffs and other staffing cuts.
“This is truly a difficult day on every imaginable level, and one I sought to avoid,” CSUCI President Richard Yao wrote in a June 12 email to campus employees. “However, with these hard decisions made, I have confidence that we are now on a more sustainable path forward.”
These cuts have been foreshadowed for years, as CSUCI has struggled to attract students. The university’s enrollment is down more than 35% since 2019, from a peak of about 6,400 full-time students to around 4,150 when the 2024-25 school year began.
CSU Channel Islands facing budget deficit
Due mostly to the declining enrollment, CSUCI has been operating in the red for the past three years. With general fund revenue of a little under $140 million, the university had a $5.7 million deficit in 2024-25.
The deficit was expected to get much bigger in the coming year unless CSUCI made significant cuts. In December, the university estimated that $17 million in cuts would be necessary to balance the budget for the 2025-26 school year, which would mean eliminating as many as 116 jobs.
That figure was recently revised downward to $14 million because CSUCI expects a smaller cut in state funding than it was originally anticipating. The jobs eliminated June 12 don’t get the university all the way there but will account for about $10.4 million in savings this year.
CSUCI has been spending down its reserves to plug the holes in its budget. Total reserves have gone from about $40 million in the 2021-22 school year to about $22 million this year.
This is the second year in a row with major budget cuts, though in 2024 there were no layoffs of full-time employees. During the 2024-25 school year, CSUCI cut $11.3 million in spending, in part by eliminating 7.6% of the classes it offered.
Only a few CSUCI employees took early retirement package
The university wanted to minimize layoffs by offering early retirement packages to some employees. Sixteen people accepted an early retirement deal, the university said. Most were professors.
The package offered to faculty members was generous, said Greg Wood, a physics professor and the president of CSUCI’s faculty union. It started at 80% of a year’s salary, and went up to 90% if more than 10 people took the deal, he said.
The university offered the deal to about 90 faculty members, all of them 50 or older, and said funding would be available for 50 of them to take it, Wood said. The only ones who accepted were much older than 50 and almost ready to retire anyway, he said.
“It’s not very likely that someone who is 50 years old would take this offer right now,” Wood said. “It’s kind of a bad time to look for a job in academia.”
The university planned to offer early retirement packages to all of its full-time employees, but it could not reach an agreement with the union that represents most non-faculty staff on the terms of the deal.
The California State University Employees Union represents about 300 career staffers at CSUCI. Andrea Skinner, the chief steward of the campus’ CSUEU, said the university proposed offering the early retirement incentive only to selected employees. The union wanted everyone to be eligible or at least everyone over a certain age.
“The program they proposed to us would have violated our contract,” said Skinner, an academic programs and planning analyst at CSUCI. “They were not willing to change anything in their proposed early exit program. We were prepared to negotiate.”
The CSUEU was also skeptical of the program because the university could not guarantee that it would prevent layoffs, Skinner said.
Her union also doesn’t think the June 12 layoffs complied with the current contract, and she said the CSUEU plans to negotiate with the university to have them reversed.
“We want to make sure that the people who are laid off were laid off correctly,” Skinner said. “In our contract, there’s several items that need to be checked, such as seniority, and we want to make sure these are all in compliance.”
‘Everything hinges on enrollment’
Both faculty and staff union representatives said they don’t think CSUCI’s leaders have tried hard enough to find budget cuts in their own offices.
“We as the staff always get the brunt of the cuts. They always go to us first,” said Krisha Algoso, a support technician in the biology department and the president of the campus CSUEU chapter.
Wood said the cuts to part-time faculty have resulted in a reduction of almost 50% in the total number of courses offered over the past five years, a period in which enrollment has declined less than 40%.
“Our class sizes are going up, and our class offerings are getting smaller,” he said.
There’s only so much the university can do through budget cuts, Wood said. The only way out of its downward spiral is to get enrollment growing again.
“Everything hinges on enrollment for us,” he said. “If enrollment continues to decline, it’s just unclear what the viability of the campus is.”
Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tbiasotti@vcstar.com. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation’s Fund to Support Local Journalism.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: CSU Channel Islands lays off 13 employees amid declining enrollment, state cuts
Reporting by Tony Biasotti, Ventura County Star / Ventura County Star
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