Top administrators announced actions to combat “profound financial challenges” in a statement to the Cornell community on Wednesday. These actions include downsizing staff as the University streamlines processes, consolidates operations and restricts hiring for the 2025-2026 academic year.
The statement attributes the financial challenges to federal funding cuts, including those to research, financial aid and medical reimbursement. Additionally, the statement notes that the school faces rapidly escalating legal expenses, an anticipated tax on its endowment income and rising costs of inflation. These financial challenges follow the Trump administration’s cuts to higher education funding, including $1 billion from Cornell, as well as the University’s legal retaliation.
“The spring semester was unlike anything ever seen in higher education,” the statement wrote. “We must immediately address our significant financial shortfalls by reducing costs and enacting permanent change to our operational model.”
The University plans to comprehensively review all programs offered at Cornell in an attempt to help “reduce duplication of work” and increase efficiency, according to the statement. In consolidating operations, the University will “deploy technology when appropriate,” as written by administrators.
Cornell will also continue its hiring freeze and restrict “discretionary expenditures” in the upcoming academic year, according to the statement. In other cuts to expenses, the University plans to review all research operations to make them “more cost effective and efficient.”
The statement explained that the plan will reduce Cornell’s workforce. While the administrators say the University will attempt to downsize by attrition, they “anticipate involuntary reductions in headcount across the university.”
“It is important that every member of this community understands both the scale of the challenges our university faces, and the seriousness of the risks,” administrators wrote. “While we are confident that we will weather this crisis, we will only do so by working together to make the difficult, but necessary, changes to ensure that Cornell will continue ‘to do the greatest good’ for many years to come.”
Dorothy France-Miller '27 is the Managing Editor of the Cornell Daily Sun. She is a sophomore studying communication in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
Zeinab Faraj is the assistant sports editor on the 143rd editorial board and a member of the class of 2028 in the College of Arts and Sciences. You can reach her at zfaraj@cornellsun.com.
