SF State Joins Wave of CSU Campuses Making Deep Spending Cuts

San Francisco State announced Thursday that it will eliminate three sports teams at the end of the semester, making it the latest California State University campus to make deep spending cuts this year.

As schools across the system suffer from budget cuts and enrollment declines, UC Berkeley education professor Jennifer Delaney said that experts are watching “the rich get richer” both at the institutional and student level.

“We’re certainly seeing an increased stratification across institutions,” said Delaney. “We’re getting more intense clustering of low-income students at lower-resourced institutions, and then more intense clustering of wealthy students at highly-resourced institutions.”

SF State’s plans to eliminate men’s soccer, baseball, and women’s indoor track and field teams in July come after university President Lynn Mahoney declared a fiscal emergency last fall.

University spokesperson Bobby King told KQED in February that he expects the campus to have to make $25 million in reductions for next year due to declining enrollment, and even deeper cuts to account for Gov. Gavin Newsom’s nearly 8% cut to CSU budgets. SF State’s athletics program alone is projecting a nearly $400 million budget deficit and has raked up $1.2 million in debt on its scholarships account.

The school said that cutting three of its 13 athletic teams will save up to $1 million a year.

In a message to staff last fall, Mahoney said that the fiscal emergency policy allows programs to “be reduced, phased out, reorganized or discontinued,” and that the university was cutting back on hiring staff and administrators.

In December, a number of faulty lecturers were informed they wouldn’t be assigned classes this spring, and next year some general education courses like introductory writing will have significantly fewer class sections.

“While I know other difficult decisions lie ahead, I also believe we can do this work and ensure SF State continues to be a vibrant, expansive university with a mission that is essential to the success of our students and alumni, as well as the economic and social well-being of our region and state,” Mahoney wrote in Thursday’s announcement.

SF State’s enrollment has been decreasing since 2019, and this year, its freshman class is 20% to 25% smaller than anticipated. Tuition makes up a significant portion of the school’s overall budget.

Sonoma State, where enrollment is down nearly 40% from a decade ago, announced the largest cuts the system has seen so far in January, eliminating 20 degree programs, six departments and all NCAA Division II athletics.

Cal State East Bay is also considering cuts after 11 degree programs were identified for discontinuation at the beginning of the academic year and women’s water polo was cut last spring. In the last 18 months, 165 lecturers who taught part-time or up to four classes in a semester at the Hayward campus lost their appointments.

Cal State East Bay and Sonoma State officials have said they are prioritizing high demand and career-focused majors, which Delaney said marks one of the biggest growing divides in available educational experiences.

“We’re increasingly seeing a trend where it is those folks that perhaps come from wealthier backgrounds that can afford college that maybe don’t have to be so career-focused,” she told KQED. “Particularly at the undergraduate stage, they can engage in a broad liberal arts curriculum and other individuals that maybe need to work to support themselves or support their families get more directed at institutions or programs that are much more vocationally focused.

“They’re sort of getting a narrower education in that way.”

Mercedes Arenas is a first-year Sonoma State student. She is studying creative writing and hoped to double major in criminology before it got cut.

“I wanted a double major and I was really, really excited for that,” she told KQED in January. “Now the opportunity is going to be taken away from me, and I’m also the first generation to go to college, especially to a university like this, a liberal arts one. So I feel like I’m going to just lose all of it and then it’s just going to go to waste.”

Ryan Butler had his theater tech major at Sonoma State cut in January. He told KQED at the time that he was likely going to transfer because his goal is to study theater, but wasn’t sure where he would go.

“Either I can take a semester off and see where I end up or go to [junior college] for a year and then transfer to a CSU,” Butler said. “I can’t really afford [a UC]. One of my parents lives in Sonoma County and my dad lives in Solano County, so I don’t want to move too far away from either one of those places.”

Many students — including former Sonoma State basketball player Jaylen Wells, who now plays for the Memphis Grizzlies — said that without sports the school would be lacking a part of the quintessential college experience.

“Sports bring a certain energy and a certain pride to the university,” said Emiria Salzmann, who coached women’s soccer at Sonoma State for 14 years. “I always say, ‘I bleed blue.’ That will be missing. Human beings are creatures of community, and that’s what sports is.”

San José State is one of the few Northern California CSUs where enrollment grew this year and its future is markedly different from the others. It’s the only Bay Area campus that has Division 1 athletics and the school boasts more than 140 undergraduate majors, compared to the 77 that San Francisco State offers, 45 at Sonoma State and over 40 at Cal State East Bay.

SJSU spokesperson Michelle Smith McDonald said in February that the state’s financial outlook was challenging for the university, but that the school only expects to see a net reduction of 2.5%–4% in its budget. Over the last few years, it has gotten funding boosts from the state for meeting its enrollment targets.

But it’s also the most difficult to gain admission to of the four Bay Area schools — and the most expensive.

“The spread between the really well-resourced campuses and those that aren’t so well-resourced is increasing and the stratification among students within those institutions is also increasing,” according to Delaney from UC Berkeley. “And that’s a reverse trend from where we were with Baby Boomers and opening up education opportunities for women — there was much more of a democratization where there was more access across the sectors.

“Individuals don’t have control over when they’re born … and ideally, as a state, we don’t want to have these moments where we’re restricting access or reshaping individuals’ future trajectories just because we’re in a difficult budget moment.”