Penn State offers buyout to employees at its Commonwealth campuses, following a steady decline in enrollment

Faced with dropping enrollment at its 20 Commonwealth campuses, Pennsylvania State University is looking to reduce the number of full-time faculty, staff and administrators there through a voluntary buyout offer sent to employees Wednesday.

Campuses affected in the Philadelphia area include Penn State Abington in Montgomery County, Penn State Brandywine in Delaware County, and the Great Valley campus in Chester County. The main University Park campus is not impacted.

University officials declined to say how many employees they hope take the buyout, which closes May 31 and offers one year of salary in a lump sum and six months of health insurance at the current rate.

“We don’t have a target,” said Margo DelliCarpini, vice president for Commonwealth campuses, during an interview.

» READ MORE: Penn State board increases longer-term compensation for president Neeli Bendapudi

The buyout, typically something for the most seasoned employees, was open to even some of its newest employees.

It appears that many of the campuses’ 3,288 full-time employees — though DelliCarpini said she couldn’t say how many — would be eligible. Those eligible include full-time employees hired before April 1, 2023, who are not represented by a union and who do not fall into certain exempted groups, including nursing faculty; those in their final year or on limited contracts; and employees in human resources.

In 2016 when the university offered a buyout, those eligible had to be at least 60 with 15 years of service.

She declined to say whether the university would also consider layoffs if enough employees don’t take the buyout, or if campus closures or consolidations would be considered, saying it was too premature to speculate.

“We know that we are not meeting our budget challenge without significant changes to our staffing,” she said. “We have to be responsive. We have a different market.”

Enrollment at the campuses has been falling for years — it’s down 30% since 2010, to about 24,000. That’s in sharp contrast to Penn State’s main campus at University Park, which has grown to more than 42,000 students.

» READ MORE: Penn State expanded its branch campuses decades ago. Now, some say that’s one reason state universities are struggling.

“With the challenges facing all of higher education, our entire institution needs to evolve in order to continue serving the residents of Pennsylvania,” Penn State President Neeli Bendapudi said in a statement. “We are currently working to identify every opportunity to strengthen our Commonwealth Campuses and achieve our budgetary objectives.”

Earlier this year, Bendapudi announced that the university in 2025-26 would be cutting $94 million from its 2025-26 budget, more than half of it at the Commonwealth campuses, to address a deficit. The $54 million cut at the Commonwealth campuses represents about a 14.1% decrease in funding. DelliCarpini said Wednesday the number to be cut has since been reduced to $49 million.

In January, the university said while seven of its 20 Commonwealth campuses were projecting enrollment increases for next year, others were in decline, with only a few hundred students enrolled at some of the campuses. DelliCarpini said at that time that 10 of the campuses were facing really challenging conditions.

On Wednesday she said those facing the greatest struggles are in areas where there have been losses in business and industry. Because of the large population of potential students in the Philadelphia area, those campuses have not been hit as hard, she said.

“They really have continued potential to grow,” she said.

The Commonwealth campuses, the university said in January, were exploring partnering with community colleges and renting out facilities for some of their programs. They also were evaluating academic programs to determine which ones to focus on and “where not to duplicate programming.”

Penn State is far from alone in its enrollment struggles. Temple University is continuing to try to stem a 24% decline since 2017. La Salle University recently announced steps to deal with a 28% drop in enrollment since 2019. The Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, which includes 10 universities around the state, has lost more than 30% of its enrollment since 2010.

Cabrini University in Radnor will close in June after financial struggles and dropping enrollment. Many other colleges are struggling, too, with the number of high school students nationwide projected to drop again this decade.

It was the late 1990s when Penn State added bachelor’s degree programs to its branch campuses as part of an expansion. About one-third of students who start their degrees at the Commonwealth campuses finish their degrees there, the university said in 2021.

Wednesday’s buyout isn’t the first Penn State has offered. There was the university-wide buyout in 2016 and one for eight of the university’s western Pennsylvania campuses in 2014, DelliCarpini said.