Skidmore cutting costs, freezes hiring

PHOTOGRAPHER: Lee Coleman

Facing a budget deficit of $9 million over the next two years, Skidmore College is cutting spending and instituting a hiring freeze.

College President Philip Glotzbach said Tuesday the recession gripping Wall Street and the nation has reduced college revenues well below those projected late last year.

“From January 1, 2008, to September 30, the college’s endowment lost 12 percent of its value,” Glotzbach said in a statement to the Skidmore community.

“It will be worse than that after November,” Glotzbach said in a telephone interview later. The college’s endowment was at approximately $257 million in September.

But the private, liberal arts college of 2,400 students is “not planning on layoffs at the moment,” Glotzbach said.

Gifts to the college’s annual fund are running well behind projections and “short-term investments are yielding just a fraction of their returns compared to six months ago,” he said.

Glotzbach said colleges and universities across the Capital Region and United States are facing the same difficult economic pressures as Skidmore.

“First and foremost, Skidmore must maintain the integrity of the core educational experience we offer our students — both academic and co-curricular — and our commitment to academic excellence,” Glotzbach said.

Glotzbach said the college also wants to be responsive to the “economic realities facing our students and their families by minimizing any increase” in the college’s comprehensive fee.

The comprehensive fee at Skidmore, which includes tuition, room and board and other costs, is just under $50,000 per year per student. The college raised the comprehensive fee 5.5 percent for the 2008-09 academic year.

Glotzbach said Tuesday the comprehensive fee will not be increased this much for the 2009-10 school year in light of the difficult economy.

“We must do all in our power to minimize negative financial consequences of budget reductions to our regular, full-time employees,” Glotzbach said. Skidmore employees nearly 800 people.

Glotzbach said this relates both to employee benefits, such as maintaining the present health insurance cost-sharing policy, and to wages.

The college raised pay to most employees between 3 percent and 4 percent during the 2008-09 academic year. Glotzbach said Tuesday college officials are working on the 2009-10 budget and have not determined whether pay increases will or will not be included in the new budget, which goes into effect in June 2009.

Glotzbach said the college must develop a balanced budget for the new school year. To do this the college is instituting a “strategic hiring freeze,” among other measures.

Glotzbach said his cabinet will review all open positions and will authorize hiring only for those positions deemed to be of “critical, immediate and strategic” importance.

The college is also implementing a 2 percent reduction in all discretionary departmental budgets this school year with another 10 percent reduction in the 2009-10 school year budget. Glotzbach said this would be a total of 12 percent in reductions relative to the approved 2008-09 college budget of approximately $126 million.

“An exception will be made in the case of budgets directly supporting the delivery of the academic curriculum,” he said. “In these cases we will seek an additional targeted reduction of 5 percent for a total of 7 percent” relative to the approved 2008-09 budget, he said in a statement.

Overtime will be limited and must be approved in advance, travel and related expenses will be reduced and the college will limit and/or eliminate the use of outside consultants and contractors.

“We will examine every capital project currently planned but not yet started to determine which can be postponed or eliminated,” Glotzbach said in his message to college faculty, support staff, students and their families.

Construction of the $33 million Zankel Music Center near the college’s main entrance on North Broadway will continue, Glotzbach said. This 800-seat state-of-the-art performance center and music department building is expected to open in late 2009 or early 2010.

Glotzbach said the construction costs for the music center are funded, but most of the $12 million endowment planned for the building’s operation has not been raised.