Top of mind this week is Douglas Belkin and Roshan Fernandez’s Wall Street Journal article, “Why Syracuse Can’t Attract the Students It Needs to Pay the Bills.”
Its title gives the story away. Syracuse is struggling to enroll enough students to support its budget. Minding the Campus readers will know that Syracuse is one of many universities struggling to enroll enough students as prospective students question the value of a degree and as falling birthrates shrink the pool of college-age Americans available to enroll. The enrollment dearth is so bad at some institutions that hundreds of colleges are sending acceptance letters to “kids who didn’t even apply.”
I have many notes on Syracuse’s predicament, but I want to comment on just two parts of Belkin and Fernandez’s article for now.
My first comment regards foreign students.
Belkin and Fernandez note that tighter visa policies under the Trump administration have contributed to Syracuse’s declining international enrollment. The pair describe foreign students as “a revenue stream on which Syracuse depends.”
That dependence was a choice, however.
We know from Higher Ed Dive’sreporting just how reliant Syracuse had become on foreign enrollment. International students made up 12 percent of its undergraduate class two years ago. Now they make up just five percent. Syracuse also missed its master’s enrollment target by 41 students, “largely due to the loss of foreign students.”
But foreign students should never have occupied so much space in Syracuse’s financial model that losing access to them suddenly creates a budget problem. The university should have spent more time figuring out how to make itself affordable and attractive to American students rather than treating foreigners like cash cows.
My second comment regards debt.
Belkin and Fernandez note that Syracuse had a long-standing housing problem. To remedy it, the university borrowed $458 million in 2025 to build new dormitories near campus.
Since the university cannot find enough students willing to pay the absurd, nearly $100,000 annual cost of attendance, Syracuse has quite the math problem on its hands. Declining enrollment makes servicing nearly half a billion dollars in debt considerably difficult.
What I think is important to note regarding this matter, though, is that Syracuse falls in line with many other universities whose leaders seem to have convinced themselves that they could borrow their way into prosperity.
I wrote about UChicago last year, for example, following up on Clifford Ando’s then-viral article for Compact, “The Crisis of the University Started Long Before Trump.” UChicago had accumulated $6.3 billion in debt, more than 70 percent of the value of its endowment.
Syracuse has not dug a hole as deep as UChicago, but, like UChicago and many other universities, it seems to have believed that it could borrow heavily today because the students and tuition revenue needed to pay the bills would definitely be there tomorrow.
For institutions run by people who so often fancy themselves the smartest people in the room, this is remarkably unserious financial stewardship.
You should read Belkin and Fernandez’s essay and make your own judgments. My own takeaway is that Syracuse is suffering from circumstances of its own making.
Syracuse chose how dependent it would become on foreign enrollment. It also chose how much to borrow.
Instead of asking how many more students it needs to attract to pay the bills, Syracuse might start by asking why the bills became so large in the first place.
Follow Jared Gould on X.
Note: A version of this article originally appeared in my weekly Top of Mind newsletter, which goes out to subscribers every Thursday. Sign up to receive it directly in your inbox.
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