By Jena Emmert
Following a national trend, Edgewood College has begun downsizing, offering voluntary separation packages to full-time faculty members without replacing them.
Michael Guns, Edgewood’s vice president of business and finance, said 38 faculty members were eligible for the voluntary separation packages and six have accepted.
Edgewood’s goal is to reduce staff by 20 to 24 full-time positions, eliminating 10 to 12 unfilled positions and changing some full-time faculty to part-time, according to information collected by Denis Collins, an ethics professor in the School of Business.
He is writing a book tentatively titled “Helping Each Other Become Better People: Character Development at the Workplace.”
Edgewood College President Scott Flanagan sent an email to faculty and students in March.
“Over the past few weeks, members of Cabinet and supervisors across campus identified nearly 25 full-time equivalent staff positions that we believe can be reduced without compromising either our ability to deliver on our promise today or pursue our future,” Flanagan wrote.
Administrators at Edgewood College, following a national trend of low college enrollment, have been having serious conversations on how to adjust resources to fit the decreasing number of incoming students.
One of these changes is offering “voluntary separation packages” to faculty based on age and years of service, ultimately cutting down the faculty-to-student ratio.
According to data gathered from InsideHigherEd.com, the 10-year growth period of colleges and universities stopped in 2013. Many colleges, including Edgewood, however, continued to grow their resources even after this enrollment increase ended.
National college enrollment is expected to decline until 2023, with a small growth period from 2024 to 2026, then decline again from 2027 to 2032.
Collins said that ideally the packages will prompt enough faculty to retire, but if not, faculty are unsure if these offers will continue into next year.
According to data Collins gathered, Edgewood’s goal is to have a student to faculty ratio of 15:1. The current ratio is 9:1 because of a 20% decrease in student enrollment in the past four to five years without an adjustment of the number of faculty. Administrators plan to return the ratio back to their goal by 2024 by reducing courses by 10%.
“Demographic headwinds, increased competition, and a strong economy all pose challenges for colleges and universities as they set a course forward,” Flanagan said in the letter that accompanied the voluntary separation packages. “Edgewood College is not exempt from these and must respond responsibly in order to thrive both today and into the future.”
Collins declined the separation package he was offered but feels the packages are a good idea to offer a voluntary incentive before having to take serious action.
“Basically, we’re doing what a lot of organizations would do,” Collins said. “Instead of asking the young teachers to limit their classes, you look for the older people who are closer to retirement age. With the packages, there’s some incentive to leave the organization.”
By accepting the voluntary separation packages, retiring faculty receive one year of salary in addition to one year of COBRA (Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) payments for healthcare and dental equal to the of their current plan, according to the offer letter from Flanagan.
The packages were only offered to faculty that had a combined age and years of service at Edgewood that totaled 80 or more.
Collins, who is 63 with 18 years of experience, was offered a package at the beginning of last semester. He said younger professors with many years of service may have difficulty with the packages. “They’re still in their 50s, but they’ve been here for a while.”
The package focused on age and years of service alone, Collins said, rather than targeting departments that may be suffering from lower enrollments.
Collins turned down the package because of his financial plans to retire at 66. David Young, however, is a retiring English professor who had made plans with administrators to phase out his classes and retire by the end of Spring 2019.
While he had made his retirement plans before the voluntary separation packages were offered, he has found himself among many other retiring faculty members, many of whom have been leaders and ground-breakers at Edgewood.
“You have faculty that have been here for 20-30 years, many former chairs, people who have started programs, and all of them are leaving at the same time,” Young said. “It’s a really unusual situation. There are people who have really been leaders here, who are all leaving at the same time at the end of the semester.”
While Collins, who is a member of the Faculty Affairs Committee, said he knew about the separation packages before being offered, Young said that for him and many others, these quick changes were a shock.
“I think it was a bit of surprise for a lot of people when this came around,” Young said. “I don’t know that people foresaw that there was such a need to decrease the number of sections. There hasn’t been a five-year plan. I was not led to believe that this was a situation that was coming our way … I had no idea it was going to be so many offered the separation incentive.”
Young especially worries about the positions that will not be replaced. In his department, two tenured professors will be gone by Fall 2019, but only one position will be filled. For students, this may mean fewer classes and sections.
Still, Collins said these actions on behalf of administration are admirable.
When making decisions on how to resolve the high faculty-to-student ratio, Flanagan and Dean Pribbenow both asked for input from faculty. “In that at a lot of other schools where the president and the dean just say, ‘you 10%, you’re out of here,’ they were asking for our input,” Collins said.
For now, Edgewood administration has no further plans to change staffing for the 2019-2020 year, according to Flanagan’s email to students and faculty.
Collins said he grieves the loss of important faculty members. “We’re all family, so you’re losing family members. And when you lose family members, people grieve.”
And, in addition to losing pertinent members of faculty, Young worries about the fast changes. “I don’t think the college has ever had a transition so large before,” he said.
Among hard choices and fast change, Collins said he hopes the right decisions will help Edgewood push through these difficult times. “I think we have a solid foundation here. We’re doing the right things, specializing on social justice. We have our niche, our core values. We need to protect that.”
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