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Utah’s house speaker is warning that the state’s 16 public colleges and universities could face 10 percent cuts when the Legislature meets in 2025. Mike Schultz, a Republican, told The Salt Lake Tribune on Tuesday that he’s asked leaders of the institutions to come up with the cuts in order to make college degrees more affordable, prepare for a demographic dip in enrollment and bolster “workforce alignment."
The budget slashing will come atop a 1.5 percent reduction in state appropriations for Utah’s eight four-year colleges and universities this past spring, which the commissioner of the state’s higher education system described as “pretty drastic.”
One of Schultz’s motivations in calling for deeper cuts, he told the Tribune, is preparing for the demographic cliff confronting colleges nationwide; a recent report from the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Institute found that enrollment growth in the state will slow starting in 2027 and begin to contract in 2032. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to [see] there’s this cliff coming” Schultz said, “and we’ve got to get ahead of it.”
The speaker cited rising administrative costs as a particular point of concern. “We work really hard as a state to hold our state agencies accountable and to make them run efficiently,” he said, “but nobody’s ever looked at higher ed.”
Some of the money saved could be reallocated to expand research at the University of Utah and Utah State University, Schultz said, and to focus colleges on workforce development. The speaker and other Republicans in the Utah Legislature have also been pushing to make some degrees attainable in three years.
