USC enacts hiring freeze and makes cuts over Trump threats to funding

The College of Southern California introduced a direct hiring freeze for all workers positions, “with only a few important exceptions” in a letter to college and workers on Tuesday.

The letter, from USC’s president, Carol Folt, and provost, Andrew Guzman, stated the hiring freeze was considered one of 9 steps to chop the college’s working price range amid deep uncertainty about federal funding – given sweeping cuts to scientific analysis, the reorganization of pupil loans, and an schooling division investigation accusing the college of failing to guard Jewish college students throughout protests over Israel’s destruction of Gaza following the Hamas assaults on 7 October 2023.

“Like different main analysis establishments, USC depends on vital quantities of federal funding to hold out our mission,” the college directors wrote. “In fiscal 12 months 2024, for instance, we obtained roughly $1.35 billion in federal funding, together with roughly $650 million in pupil monetary support and $569 million for federally funded analysis. The well being system additionally receives Medicare, Medicaid, and Medi-Cal funds – a good portion of its revenues – and the futures of these funds are equally unsure.”

The opposite measures embody: everlasting price range reductions for administrative items and faculties, a evaluation of procurement contracts; a evaluation of capital initiatives “to find out which can be deferred or paused”, a curtailment of school hiring, new restriction on discretionary spending and bills for journey and conferences, an effort to streamline operations, a halt on merit-based pay will increase, and an finish to prolonged winter recess launched throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.

Two weeks in the past, USC was considered one of 60 faculties notified by the Division of Schooling’s Workplace for Civil Rights of “potential enforcement actions if they don’t fulfill their obligations beneath Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to guard Jewish college students on campus”.

The newly introduced price range cuts observe a college assertion in November of final 12 months that knowledgeable workers that “rising prices require … budgetary changes”. In 2024, that assertion stated: “USC’s audited monetary assertion exhibits a deficit of $158 million.”

“Over the previous six years, our deficit has ranged from $586 million throughout authorized price repayments and COVID, to a modest constructive degree of $36 million in 2023,” USC directors wrote in November.

“Related deficits are being reported at many peer establishments because of rising prices that outpace revenues throughout all of upper schooling,” they added.