Sacramento State faces a $37 million deficit. How will it address budget cuts?
Sacramento State President Luke Wood shared an early version of the plan to help the school survive the budget cuts at a Faculty Senate meeting earlier this month. The plan includes cutting the budgets of each of the university’s departments and reorganizing its seven colleges into four.
The budget cuts come as the school is working to build a new stadium and eyeing state-owned buildings for a downtown expansion.
The university is looking at a budget deficit of $37 million — $8 million less than the figure Wood announced last month. More than half of the budget gap ($20 million) is the result of the state Legislature’s decision to shrink the 2025-26 California State University system budget by 8% to help address the state budget shortfall. The remaining $17 million in cuts are due to inflationary costs and staff raises, Wood said.
Most university departments will average a 22% cut, except for academic affairs, which will be cut by 17.5%. Wood said that they sought to reduce the financial impact to academics by focusing on trimming the other departments, but as the school’s largest department will still lose the largest sum of money — $24 million.
“We’ve looked at every single way in order to be able to get to where we need to be, and we’re essentially, through this process, going to be gutting a lot of other other divisions in order to try to preserve as much as we can of academic affairs,” Wood said.
One of the most significant cost-saving measures affecting academics will be moving from a seven college model to four. Wood said a single dean will have operational control over multiple colleges as an interim solution, but noted that actual consolidation via the formation of larger schools could come further down the line.
The Faculty Senate will vote on how colleges will be combined by the end of the semester. Wood said that he is “agnostic” to the final decision as long as it aligns with the four college model they’ve budgeted for.
Other cost-saving measures include reducing faculty release time to work on special projects and reducing faculty through attrition.
Tension over cuts as stadium moves forward
Some faculty members are concerned about the labor implications of the proposed cuts. California Faculty Association Capitol Chapter President Anne Luna-Gordinier expressed concern about how the combination of increasing enrollment, the reduction of release time and consolidation could impact a faculty that is already stretched thin.
Wood said that no determination has been made about faculty layoffs, but Luna-Gordinier is worried that college consolidation could force out faculty members anyway.
“When we consolidate these programs it’s likely that the most recently hired folks, lecturers in one-year contracts in particular, will end up losing courses and won’t be able to meet their entitlement. They could lose benefits,” she said. “I don’t know that (budget cuts) will outright lead to layoffs, but we will lose faculty one way or another.”
As conversations surrounding the cuts progress, student groups have voiced concern about what they say is a lack of transparency surrounding the plans for its 25,000-seat stadium. University officials announced plans with little detail about the university’s share of the cost and how it would obtain the rest of the funding.
In a recent interview Wood estimated that the school would pay between $95-$100 million for the construction of the stadium. He did not share a total price tag but confirmed that the rest of the funding would be funded privately.
Instead of a complete demolition and new construction, the stadium will be rebuilt in three phases, the first of which beginning this fall. He said that fans could expect to see $5 million worth of improvements, like new lighting and ribbon boards, after this “pre-build” phase. Major structural changes will come in the following two phases, according to Wood.
The university’s share of the cost will be in part be funded by recently increased student fees for intercollegiate athletics. Wood took to Instagram last week to clarify that these fees are earmarked specifically for athletic investment and cannot be reappropriated to help address the budget gap.
This story was originally published February 26, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
