In the next four years, Kent State will undergo “belt-tightening” measures to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. President Todd Diacon sat down with The Kent Stater editorial board to discuss how potential reductions in spending will impact students and programs.

Read the conversation with the president below. Portions of this transcript have been edited for clarity and length.

Q: The state capital budget when it was released this summer, what maintenance can students expect to see on campus using the allotted money?

Diacon: One thing is it’s the beginning of a multi-year process to replace the elevators in the library. It’s a crazy expensive to replace an elevator, it turns out. The library is the tallest building in Portage County, and if you really want to get good use out of the building, you need to have elevators, except that we spend a lot of time freeing people from broken elevators. Part of the capital campaign is to start replacing elevators. A lot of our buildings are all from the 60s and 70s, and they have original elevators in them. A healthy amount of the state capital funding is for that, and that’s really important, because for students with accessibility needs, if they can’t get on an elevator, how they’re going to get to their classroom, for example, so it’s really important. And then this is another round of funding that we’ll use for ongoing upgrades to White Hall. Massive heating and ventilation and air conditioning, HVAC work, other infrastructural upgrades that needed to be done in part to extend the power and chilled water lines to Crawford Hall. So those are some highlights of what we’d be spending our funds on.

Q: Do you know when we can expect elevator maintenance going on?

Diacon: I wouldn’t know that off the top of my head. Let me just say something about capital funding, it’s greatly appreciated. I have worked at universities and states that don’t have capital funding. It’s a challenge in Ohio because Ohio as a state, its university enrollment exploded in the 60s and 70s. Kent State University, if you include the regionals, we inaugurated 60 buildings in the 1960s and all of those buildings now are having to be either renovated or torn down. Capital funding is hugely important for us. We’re very appreciative of the state for providing it.

Q: In February, Kent State announced plans to cut spending by tens of millions of dollars over the coming years. What do you anticipate that student life on campus will look like with those cuts, and what the impact may be on students?

Diacon: So first of all, just a clarification, It’s not that we’re cutting, it’s that we are reducing the growth of expenses. That may sound like semantics, but it’s not. So, for example, our spending increases every year. But what happens is our expenditures are increasing even more because of inflation. The cuts are reductions in spending increases. Maybe at some level, the distinction is meaningless, but it’s not like we have $650,000,000 and next year we’re going to have $630,000,000. It’s that we have $650,000,000 and if we were going to increase spending to meet inflation, we would go up to $670,000,000 but instead we’re going to go to $657,000,000. Do you see the difference? In terms of its impact on students, if we manage it correctly, it should be a fairly soft landing for students. By that, I mean really trying to maintain great facilities, really trying to maintain and expand the highest in-demand enrollment by enrollment majors. I think we’ll see fewer total employees university wide, system wide. Then again we’ve had, particularly on the regionals, pretty dramatic decline in degree-seeking student numbers. So we would really want to adapt our spending to those different levels. So if we do it right, we’ll live up to our students first core value.

Q: Should we expect any changes in what that curriculum looks like from that range of program studies that currently have?

Diacon: I would encourage you to talk to Provost Tankersley as that’s really her area of work and expertise. Certainly, we want to be able to provide the majors that our students want and we want to be able to expand the capacity to accept majors in the highest demand areas. Now, curriculum and majors and our portfolio of majors, that just changes over time. I’m a historian, so this is the danger of having a professor as a historian. 150 years ago no university worth its salt would have called itself a university without requiring every student to take Greek and Latin, but we don’t require that anymore. What’s taken changes over time. I can fully imagine that what majors are offered 10 years from now might look different, but certainly it’ll be driven by student demand and the expertise of our faculty.

Q: Is it safe to say students should not be concerned about the current majors they are enrolled in?

Diacon: There’s no plan to eliminate any particular major at the moment. Even when any university, not just Kent State, when they eliminate a major, by national accreditation standards, you have to have a plan in place to teach out the currently enrolled students so that that’s always taken care of.

Q: In the coming years, would the university explore sunsetting certain degrees?

Diacon: I’ll give you an example. Since I’ve been here the last 12 years, when I first arrived here, we offered a major in something called American Studies. We no longer offer a major in American Studies. Well, why? Because every year, we were having one or two people majoring in American Studies. Over time, the portfolio of majors changes, but it’s a fairly slow change. Unless there’s a financial meltdown, and again we’re really trying to manage this so we stay out of a financial meltdown, that portfolio will change over time … We work for it to be a carefully managed process. I’m not familiar with any plans to eliminate any exact major at the moment … If that were to happen, anybody that’s currently enrolled will have a plan to teach those people out so they finish up in that major if they want to. And that’s just a requirement of accreditation which we would always follow.

Q: How will budget cuts be made in an equitable way?

Diacon: It’s the reduction of increased expenditures. What we’re really working to do is to reduce expenditures across the board in a way that just makes us more efficient and effective. So I’ll give you an example from right before [COVID-19]. We did a study and we figured out that we could save about half a million a year if we pulled printers out of every professor’s office and each department then had a centralized printer. So my predecessors under that desk always had a printer, and I don’t have a printer now. Like everybody else on this floor, I send my print jobs to a centralized printer. Collectively as a university, that saves us nearly $500,000 a year. So when the question is, how do we manage cuts equitably? I guess we’d have to discuss what equitable means, but really we’re trying to reduce expenditures by becoming more efficient. So for example, if we haven’t brought it online yet, we’re very soon to bring on a new collection of solar panels right on the edge of campus which will help us with our energy consumption. That’s how we look at it, how we’re going to reduce our expenditures primarily by becoming more efficient.

Q: How big is the enrollment cliff? 

Diacon: We talk about a demographic cliff. It’s noticeable for Ohio, and it’s especially noticeable for Northeast Ohio. I think the studies that you look at would suggest that in the next decade, we’re going to see something along the lines of a 20% decline in the number of high school graduates in Northeast Ohio. We’re a Northeast Ohio institution, that’s going to impact us.

Q: Will there be more of an effort to attract out-of-state students?

Diacon: Right now, we’re about 20% out-of-state and 80% in-state. We are particularly successful in Pennsylvania and western Pennsylvania … We really like all of our out-of-state students. So I think over time, you might see the mix change … but we’re always going to focus on our in-state students, but we really appreciate our out-of-state students.

Q: Do budget cuts have any impact on faculty and staff members?

Diacon: You’ll hear me refer a lot over the coming year to a soft landing. I tend to define a soft landing as we don’t run annual budget deficits, and we reduce our expenditures in a way that doesn’t mean that we have to very quickly eliminate jobs and occupied positions. I don’t have the crystal ball. I always say I’m a historian, I’m really great at predicting the past, but not the future. I don’t want to say categorically that we don’t see that coming, but we know we’re going to have to reduce expenditures. Now the goal with a soft landing is to do a lot of that through attrition. So people leave, they take a job elsewhere, they retire, and then we have to be really careful about hires in that scenario.

Q: During the 2023 fiscal year, you had written that there was a $684,000 decrease in the state share of instruction when you expected a $1 million increase, attributing it to “a shift of funding from access funded institutions to more selective institutions that experience better enrollments and degree completions,” along with a decrease in course enrollment and completion at regional campuses. What does the decrease tell you about the success of regional campuses and what the future of their programs look like?

Diacon: One of the crucial oddities of state funding in the state of Ohio is that it is a fixed pie. A lot of states, including two previous states in which I’ve worked, your funding as an institution is based on your enrollment. Ohio, seven, eight years ago, adopted what is essentially a 100% performance-based funding. So you don’t get your money at Kent State, because you have 15,000 students, and the state gives you $5,000 for each student. You get your funding when students pass a course, and then you get funding when they graduate. So if students aren’t passing courses, you don’t get that funding, and if they don’t graduate, you don’t get that funding that comes when the student graduates. It’s a fixed pie, meaning the amount statewide that’s available is a fixed amount and how it’s divided changes. In that scenario, Kent State could actually graduate more students and lose state share of instruction. That’s what’s happening because coming out of [the COVID-19 pandemic], particularly two universities, dramatically increased the number of freshmen that they enroll: The University of Cincinnati and Ohio State University. If you look at Ohio State, they went from freshman classes in the 7,500 range to 9,000. That means that they have more students passing classes and more students graduating. So a bigger share of the state share of instruction will go to those institutions. Typically, those institutions, particularly Ohio State, have a different academic profile for many of their students, so they have a higher graduation rate. That’s why that was written that way in that report.

Q: We mentioned earlier in the interview, a 50% decrease in enrollment at regional campuses, and many of them are College Credit Plus students. There’s things in the media questioning the effectiveness of CCP programs for universities. Does that make you take another look at the regional campuses, their operations and their future?

Diacon: Well, let me say very clearly, I like CCP programs. We fully embrace College Credit Plus, we like it. About a third of students who enroll first as College Credit Plus students will then enroll on one of our Kent campuses. We like College Credit Plus, but the funding mechanism for College Credit Plus comes from the state, and it caps the tuition that we charge those students at roughly a third of what we charge our degree-seeking students. And so the point I am trying to make is, if you see that our regionals enroll 8,000 students, and you say, ‘Well, tuition is this amount, so I’m going to take 8,000 times that tuition,’ that will be an incorrect calculation, because a third of those students on the regionals are CCP students who are paying a third as much tuition. So, that’s why I’m always calling attention to that distinction. So, you’re right. When you have a decline of roughly 50% the number of degree-seeking students, that impacts the amount of state support that you get, based on the formula, absolutely.

Q: Is that something you’ll be taking a look at within the next few years as you try to make this soft landing?

Diacon: The regional campus administration is a prime example of our attempt to engineer a soft landing. And that is where we are centralizing functions so that, say, for example, and this has already been implemented, instead of each one of our regional campuses having a budget director, now we have a centralized office with a budget director and two assistants. So you go from roughly eight to three. You’ll see actions like that at the Kent Campus too coming up, but that’s already been implemented on our regional campuses. That’s what I mean, referring back to something I said earlier, that’s what I mean when I say that our goal then is just to be more efficient going forward. So instead of having eight directors or seven directors, or however many directors of IT on each one of our campuses, maybe we have for the regionals two. That’s just an example of efficiency when I talk about that.

Q: You talked about demographic changes in Ohio that could possible mean for many institutions lower enrollment. How does Kent State adjust its programming to entice students who may be wary of college?

Diacon: A 2019 PEW Research survey, the results of that were that I think it was 39% of respondents think that colleges and universities are harmful for the United States. I’d have to unpack why that is, but it gets to what I think is part of your question. Look, I understand that college isn’t for everyone. I totally get that. I spent a year building railroad tracks after I graduated from college, which made me understand that maybe, maybe I didn’t want to build a railroad track for the rest of my life, because that is a damn hard job. But I get that college is not for everyone, but all the surveys show that increasing numbers of people think that college isn’t for them. A lot of that has to do with the cost of a university education. It has to do with availability, and we just have to work on, and it’s not going to be one thing, but we have to work on making Kent State the university of choice. So, how do we go about that? Yes, it’s the majors that we offer. Yes, it’s having, say on each of our regional campuses and on the Kent Campus, an extraordinarily attractive campus environment. And I was out this summer at what we call preview days. We hold two preview days. This is where, maybe you all went to them, this is where rising high school seniors come to our campus. And the number of parents that pulled me aside and said, ‘Look, this is, we just are blown away at how pretty this campus is,’ that’s really important. So it’s a mix of programming. It’s excellence in our academic programming. It’s the majors that we offer. We have one of the country’s best fashion design and merchandising programs. So it’s really paying attention to that to attract students at a time when we’re facing this kind of double challenge in Ohio: declining numbers of high school graduates and then an increasing skepticism about the desire and need to have a college degree.

Q: What would you say is the most important reason that someone would need a college degree?

Diacon: There’s a wonderful new book out, and I would encourage you to interview him, by Paul Gaston. Paul Gaston, for years, was the provost of Kent State University, and then he was the University Trustee Professor of English. He notes this dynamic, maybe it’s even a dilemma, which is we know from all the longitudinal national studies that college graduates earn more — and substantially more — over time than people who don’t have a college degree. And we know through national surveys that their happiness, their levels of happiness as shared in surveys, is higher than people that don’t have a college degree, and they pay more taxes than people that don’t have college degrees. They tend to run for office more than people that don’t have college degrees. There are all kinds of indicators, absolutely solid indicators, for the benefits of earning a college degree, but the dynamic, or maybe even the dilemma, is when you explain that energetically, can generate even more pushback from people that don’t have a college degree, and that then leads to these results in these surveys of people that are skeptical of a university degree. So, it’s at the same time that you can show very readily the positive impact of getting a college degree, it’s as if you’re rubbing it into the face of people that don’t have a college degree. And that can generate increasing levels of skepticism and ill-ease and mistrust. How do you help? How do you attract people that aren’t going to get a four-year degree to come to your institution for credentials that will improve their earning power and the like. So, for example, 18 months ago we introduced a certificate program in the business side of marijuana. Well, why? Well, because now marijuana is legalized in Ohio, and presumably people that are in that business need to understand the business side of things. And do you need a four-year degree? Maybe not necessarily. So how do we attract people that in that scenario?

Q: Is there just one sentence to kind of summarize our conversation today about what you want students to know about the concerns that were raised when we first heard this news that the university would be kind of being more thoughtful about spending moving forward?

Diacon: We have core values at Kent State University, and it’s not just words on a page. Two particular core values we’ve talked about a lot are kindness and respect and freedom of speech, but the number one core value is students first. Now, does that mean that we’re always going to do things that every single student agrees with? No, but I can guarantee you that what it means is that every big decision we make, we will never make that decision without being fully informed about and understanding the impact on students before we make that decision.

Michael Neenan is a newscast reporter. Contact him at [email protected].