To: Wellesley College Faculty and Staff
From: Courtney Coile, Provost and Lia Gelin Poorvu ’56 Dean of the College; Piper Orton, Vice President for Finance and Administration and Treasurer; Carolyn Slaboden, Vice President for Human Resources
Re: Addressing our budget challenges in FY26 and beyond
Date: June 16, 2025
With the start of a new fiscal year upon us, we write to follow up on our March message with an update on the FY26 budget and the College’s long-term budget challenges.
In early May, the board of trustees voted to approve a FY26 operating budget of $289.2 million. This was a break-even budget. However, the College needs to identify $2 million in reductions to operating expenses relative to budget requests in order to achieve this spending level. The Office of Finance and Administration will be writing to cost center managers to provide more information on any changes to the budgets submitted in February.
Additionally, the College relied on $4.2 million of one-time budget adjustments to achieve this break-even budget. These revenues and budget savings will not be available in future years. Accordingly, we have work to do to identify areas where we can make permanent reductions in our expenses to eliminate projected budget deficits in FY27 and beyond. These deficits are the result of long-term structural factors, as explained in our last budget message.
The College’s current temporary hiring pause will provide budget savings in FY26 as well as prompt us to think carefully about where staffing is most critical. In considering possible reductions to both staffing and non-personnel expenses, we must look at which elements are essential to producing an excellent education for our students and which aspects of our usual way of doing things are less critical and need to change. We anticipate that the Advisory Committee on Budgetary Affairs (BAC) will play an important advisory role in this work this year.
Beyond the structural factors, the College faces many unknowns related to the current challenges facing higher education. These include the possibility of an endowment tax of $30 million per year (10 times the current level of the tax), the loss of federal Pell grants and federal research funding, and reduced tuition revenue from international students unable to obtain visas, among other risks. We expect to have more clarity about these factors in the coming months. As communicated in our last message, we will have to seriously examine how we go about providing a Wellesley education if any or all of these events come to pass.
We wish to emphasize that despite the financial headwinds from structural factors and the uncertainty of the current climate, the College is committed to providing competitive compensation for both faculty and staff, which the salary increases for FY26 being communicated this month will reflect. To maintain this commitment moving forward, we need to be willing to identify places where we may need to work differently or do less, recognizing that we do not need to do things exactly as we have in the past in order to be excellent. We know peer institutions are providing an excellent education and student experience while using fewer resources, and there may be opportunities for us to learn from them.
We are grateful for your deep commitment to the College’s mission, and we remain confident in our collective ability to provide an excellent education with the resources we have.