Elena Pace left her world in North Carolina to pursue film production at SF State because she believed its online rankings could support her goals. If she had known the true state of the university, declining enrollment and campuswide downsizing, she could have avoided the life-changing dilemma she’s in now: staying or leaving. 

“It’s not what I expected,” Pace said. “They say they offer all these different classes and stuff, but it’s not even true.” 

In an effort to adapt to declining enrollment levels, 10.8% of courses were reduced in Spring 2025 compared to the previous year, and 615 lecturer faculty have lost their jobs since 2024. This upcoming school year, 15 programs will be gone. 

SF State administration obtained assistance from the Academic Senate-assembled Institutional Review Committee (IRC) and the externally-contracted Huron Consulting Group to identify cost-saving measures in 2024. Both groups produced recommendations for administrative leaders, but the next steps to alleviate budget constraints remain unclear.

The Initial Decline

Pace was an exception to a trend of underenrollment at SF State, especially among out-of-state students.

Enrollment began to significantly decline following the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Institutional Research enrollment data, 7,513 fewer undergraduate students attend SF State compared to a decade ago. 

Amy Sueyoshi, provost and vice president of academic affairs since 2022, says the university didn’t start addressing its shrinking population until the last few years.   

“It would have been great if we had been working on this 10 years ago,” Sueyoshi said. “But, you know, there’s a whole bunch of reasons that doesn’t happen,” citing faculty’s loyalty to their departments and people’s general aversion to change.

“Sometimes folks don’t realize that we need to change until we need to change quickly,” Sueyoshi added. 

Michael Scott stepped into the role of vice provost of academic resources in January 2025.

“We were still hiring faculty, and I wish we had slowed that number down,” said Scott, explaining that university hiring practices were no longer sustainable and that the university needed to address budget issues more seriously. 

A Quick Turnaround

SF State President Lynn Mahoney formally announced a financial emergency in December 2024. In accordance with Senate policy on fiscal emergencies, the IRC was established. 

Each of the university’s seven colleges elected two faculty members and one staff member to serve on the IRC. The president of Associated Students, and the deans of undergraduate and graduate education, also served on the committee. 

Within the Spring 2025 semester, the administration tasked the IRC with examining all academic programs and making recommendations that could save $15 million — which Sueyoshi said was equal to the university’s debt. 

“On one hand, we were tasked with trying to save money — we were given a sort of a random number, like, try and save this amount of money,” said Tony Sparks, professor of urban studies and planning and IRC member. He described the task as both “really vague and really huge.”  

Sparks explained that a typical program review assesses only one program and is a semester-long process involving the entire faculty. He said analyzing every program on campus was not feasible within one semester. 

Sparks added that the responsibilities of the IRC on top of a 40-hour workweek was not practical. “We have lives,” said Sparks. 

Concerns with limited time are reflected in the IRC’s final report, which states: “Given the starting date of February 2025, the IRC concluded that it was not possible to review every program in the time remaining (less than three months).”

“We knew that we would never be able to cover that entire number,” said Sueyoshi, referring to the savings target. “But we just need to get a process going where we engaged in shared governance, where faculty could also make decisions around where things could be reduced.” 

When Xpress relayed IRC concerns to Sueyoshi regarding unrealistic expectations given time constraints, Sueyoshi pushed back, reiterating that “they did have the entire semester.” 

According to some IRC members, another barrier they ran into during the first month of meetings was a lack of reliable data and financial expertise to make informed and impactful cost-savings judgements. 

“It was impossible to attack the problem from [a financial] standpoint because we simply didn’t have accurate-enough information,” said Nancy Gerber, biochemistry professor and the IRC’s elected chair. As a result, the IRC’s recommendations were “very general,” as Gerber puts it. 

Without financial expertise, assigning dollar amounts to complex proposals was challenging. 

“I can come up with all sorts of … creative and imaginative proposals about reimagining the structure of the university,” said John Logan, labor studies professor and IRC member. “But if you’re saying to me, how much money would they save? I have no idea.” 

Integration Without Representation

Concerns grew beyond logistics. Some faculty expressed that the College of Ethnic Studies had inconsistent representation at IRC meetings while the committee discussed merging ethnic studies with the College of Education.  

In March 2025, American Indian Studies professor and IRC representative Joanne Barker stepped away from her role, leaving Race and Resistance Chair Falu Bakrania and Gabriela Segovia-McGahan, a staff member for the American Indian Studies department, as the two remaining representatives.

Africana Studies Professor Mark Allan Davis — who is a Council for Racial & Social Justice representative within the California Faculty Association’s (CFA) board of directors — requested to fill the vacant seat on the IRC in the last month of discussions after learning about limited representation during merger discussions. 

“On paper it looks great,” Davis said, explaining how ethnic studies representation was inconsistent, despite the IRC website listing three College of Ethnic Studies representatives.

“I did not feel welcome,” Davis said, describing how he sensed tension upon joining the IRC because he was preventing them from barrelling through the merger. “Of course, the tendency is to immediately turn the person of color into the problem.”

Sparks agreed that there’s a lack of diversity within the IRC, describing it as incredibly “white-dominated.” 

“I was the only Black person on that entire committee,” Davis said.

Gerber, who chaired the committee, did not respond to a request for comment on concerns about ethnic studies representation and overall diversity.

Cha-Ching Con$ulting

In Summer 2024, SF State administration requested outside assistance from the CSU chancellor’s office in identifying potential cost savings, resulting in the CSU soliciting financial consulting proposals. The university eventually chose the Huron Consulting Group for their “extensive” experience and willingness to collaborate, according to Jeff Wilson, chief financial officer of administration and finance. 

Huron provides financial and operational consulting to clients across multiple sectors, including healthcare and education. The CSU Chancellor’s office paid $455,000 for Huron’s services. 

But this purchase isn’t an isolated case. From August 2024 to February 2026, the CSU database portal on purchase orders and contracts shows that the CSU has spent more than $138 million on consulting groups, including $25 million on Huron.

SF State spent more than $3.4 million of the university’s budget on consultant services from 2022–25, according to a University Budget Committee meeting presentation from September 2025. Consultant services can include administrative recruitment, enrollment marketing, communications strategy, technology support and other contracted advising or project-based professional services.  

But some faculty questioned Huron’s academic credibility.

“I think CSU is addicted to using outside consultants who offer very little of value to the university,” said Logan, adding he could see consulting being useful for managerial tasks like procurement. “When it comes to academic programs, I’m deeply skeptical of any advice that they have.”

Wilson acknowledged faculty’s skepticisms about Huron.

“Working with consultants is sometimes questionable because, of course, we have to use resources to do that,” said Wilson. “We wish that we could do it internally but we just don’t always have the expertise or experience on campus to do this.” 

James Martel, political science professor and CFA tenured/tenure-track faculty vice president, believes Huron works under a capitalist framework, which undermines the university’s educational mission. 

“The way I summarize this is that the CSU has become a private equity firm with a side gig as a public university, and they’re not even so sure they want to do that anymore,” said Martel. “That’s to me what is going on 100%. And Huron Group is going to help them achieve that.” 

Finite Findings

Huron analysts assessed areas across the entire university for cost saving during the Spring 2025 semester. Ultimately, they published an Institutional Resilience Report in September 2025, listing broad ranges of hypothetical savings tied to university projects. 

Sueyoshi said she believed increasing class sizes and reducing lecturer faculty would solve the university’s budget woes. However, Huron analysts informed her that wouldn’t be enough. Based on their data analysis, one of Huron’s suggestions was lowering the number of tenured faculty per department. 

One way the university has attempted to address this is through the Voluntary Separation Incentive Program (VSIP) — a one-time severance payment maxed at $110,000 intended to encourage retirement-eligible tenured and tenure-track faculty to voluntarily resign. 

However, the administration is adamant that the Huron report had little influence in the decision-making process. 

“We used Huron as a guide on where we could save money and how to proceed, but it did not dictate the pathways at all,” Sueyoshi said. “It’s really the IRC, through the Senate, that dictated many of the things that we’re doing.”  

The IRC’s final report was released at the end of the Spring 2025 semester. The report gave a list of recommendations, including reorganizing certain curriculums to apply across multiple majors and reworking course caps on a program-to-program basis. 

Sparks said the IRC’s recommendations were misapplied. He gave the example of raising the 25-seat Graduation Writing Assessment Requirement (GWAR) course capacities. Instead of analyzing where some classes could benefit from a couple extra seats to create fewer course sections, the administration didn’t account for different department sizes, resulting in decisions that had limited savings, he added.

“It’s not that I don’t think that people who interpreted and implemented the report didn’t have students’ best interest,” Sparks said. “I think they took an easy path and just said, ‘We’re going to do this across the board.’”

Davis believes the administration is using the IRC as a “front” to offload responsibility.

“The committee was an expedient means to provide plausible deniability to the administration,” Davis said. 

An Unknown Fate

Sueyoshi said university administrators are working to offer the VSIP to part-time lecturers, as well as tenured faculty in the Faculty Early Retirement Program (FERP). This follows previous VSIP efforts failing to reach projected savings.

Scott assured Xpress that taking the buyout wouldn’t interfere with FERP’s faculty retirement benefits. He also explained that the buyout payment would depend on how many years an individual had left on their contract. 

When asked what would happen if buyouts underperformed again, Scott emphasized that administrative leaders are doing “everything we can to avoid layoffs.” Still, he didn’t rule out tenured and tenure-track faculty losing their jobs.

Scott said the state budget will decide whether avoiding layoffs is possible. However, he did add that the university is currently below enrollment targets. 

“This year, we are facing a 5% reduction in the state allocation,” Scott said. “So we do know that this year we are getting a budget cut.” 

Sueyoshi said forming the IRC was the right thing to do, although she acknowledges it was a painful process for faculty. “No faculty member ever wants to be on a committee where they have to figure out, sort of, how to reduce expenses,” she said.  

Some IRC faculty expressed similar sentiments.

“No one honestly served on that committee because they thought, ‘I want to cut this program or cut that program,’” said Logan, explaining how he never intended for the report to instruct layoffs. “If jobs have to be cut, then someone else can make those decisions.”

Logan says the university administration employed shared governance more than other schools, pointing to CSU Dominguez Hills as an example of where administration was “more top-down.” 

“[SF State administrators] do deserve some credit for having a more consultative process, setting up the IRC, getting them to come up with recommendations,” said Logan.

Crappy Reality

Beyond addressing tenure density, Sueyoshi said the administration has set student retention goals for academic deans to meet. Mentorship programs in the College of Business, and making the campus “stickier” so students stay longer, are examples Sueyoshi gave for increasing retention.

“We never used to have, like, a soda and chip vendor in the library, but now we do. So students can stay in the library and study,” Sueyoshi said. “I like to say we’re throwing all the pasta on the wall to see what sticks.”

However, for Pace, these efforts are not enough. She’s applied to five UC schools and doesn’t plan to return this fall, adding to the 32% of students leaving SF State in their second year. When Xpress told Pace that Sueyoshi voiced a desire for students to promote SF State via social media, Pace gave a sardonic smile.

“Whenever I see an SF State TikTok pop up from the official account, I comment ‘SF State is butthole,’” Pace said, laughing.

Editors Note: After initially entering as a cinema major, Elena Pace changed her major to Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts with a minor in photojournalism. She has no affiliation with Xpress Magazine or our staff reporters.