Shortly after the announcement was made to shut down Cardinal Stritch University, TMJ4 News heard students' shocked reactions firsthand. But as our partners at the Milwaukee Business Journal first reported, the call to close actually comes after years of operating at a financial loss.
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Enrollment at Cardinal Stritch University has been declining over the past several years. That's a problem Milwaukee Business Journal reporter Sari Lesk says is not unique to the Fox Point school.
“If you've been following higher ed for the last several years, you know that enrollment, for many reasons, has been down at universities across the country,” Lesk said.
However, that nationwide decline impacted this school and its budget in a major way.
In 2013 there were 4,407 students enrolled at Cardinal Stritch. In 2022, there were 1,365. As enrollment numbers went down, tuition dollars did too.
“If you're just looking at revenue and expenses over the past several years, for the most part, expenses were outweighing the revenue,” Lesk told TMJ4.
Tax filings show that in 2015, the university's revenue was $50.8 million. By 2020, it was down to $32.4 million. During the same time, the school cut its staff by more than half, cut salary expenses by about 35%, and overall costs by about 27%.
“You can see if you're tracking the numbers here, the decrease in tuition, you can see the efforts made to cut expenses, the efforts made to cut staff among other things.”
According to those tax filings, the only year that the school's revenue overcame expenses was in 2020 and that was largely thanks to COVID-era loan forgiveness which gave the school $4.8 million in grants.
Lesk says as more is revealed by university officials, we'll get a better picture of what exactly caused the decision to end the school's tenure rather than search for other options.
“I think we're going to hear quite a bit of analysis of these financials in the coming days,” shared Lesk. “Perhaps when the University goes on the record we may hear more about the efforts to manage expenses.”
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