On Tuesday, November 25, 2025, President Kiss (pronounced Quiche) emailed the campus community about the college’s budget deficit and how college administrators are mitigating the impact and planning for the future. Concordiensis previously reported on a similar email sent to faculty last spring, and has spoken to Union administrators about the contents of the most recent email. This is the first email about the college’s financial situation sent to students, not just to faculty and staff.
President Kiss stated that the cause of Union’s budget shortfall has been a decrease in net student charges from tuition, enrollment, and fundraising contributions. “Our most recent incoming classes have been smaller than budgeted and more expensive to recruit. We also have seen a decline in gifts to the Union Fund over the past few years,” Kiss said in the email. Union’s first year class (the class of 2029) has 465 students enrolled, a 110 person decrease from three years ago.
“As a result, we entered the [2026] fiscal year, which began July 1, with an initial expected budget deficit of approximately $12 million.” The college operated on a $251 million operating budget in Fiscal Year 2024, according to its most recent public Form 990 filing.
President Kiss explained that the college’s senior leadership has been dedicated to closing this budget shortfall and provided specific actions they have taken. “In the spring, the Board of Trustees approved an additional $5.6 million withdrawal from our endowment for this fiscal year to cover a portion of the expected shortfall. This was approved with the understanding that the administration would identify cost reductions to close the remainder,” which consisted of compensation-related reductions previously reported by Concordiensis, totaling $1.9 million. President Kiss also stated that she and other senior leaders took a 5% pay cut effective September 1, 2025.
“The endowment draw and compensation savings reduced the expected fiscal year 2026 deficit to around $4.5 million,” Kiss said. “Over the past few months, the senior leadership team identified a path to closing that remaining deficit by holding non-compensation spending at fiscal year 2025 levels and through a series of additional actions.”
One of those actions being that, effective December 1, 2025, the college has limited hiring to essential positions, such as those involving safety or compliance matters. “This directive will not affect approved faculty searches, which have already been scaled back for this year,” Kiss explained. “We will continue to work with chairs, directors, and shared governance partners to examine and implement ways to lower the overall faculty salary budget in fiscal year 2027 and beyond.”
“Given the need to lower our expenses, to date we have been exercising more restraint when approving visitor hires, and we have asked some departments to delay tenure track searches.” Michele Angrist, the Dean of Faculty, told Concordiensis. However, Angrist stated that “we don’t anticipate a dramatic reduction in the percent of tenure-stream faculty at Union.”
President Kiss also reported that the college intends to increase the use of lecturer appointments. Angrist explained to Concordiensis that these are professors with teaching and service responsibilities who are hired on fixed-term appointments, which are renewable. Tenure track professors, by contrast, have research/scholarship responsibilities on top of teaching, and their appointments do not have end dates.
Despite these challenges, Angrist emphasized to Concordiensis that the college is committed to meeting student degree requirements and delivering the same high quality education.
To navigate Union’s future, “Our primary objective must be to drive enrollment growth by making Union more attractive to prospective students,” Kiss said. “To help us do that we have engaged an outside partner, Art & Science (A&S), which specializes in helping institutions determine which ideas for change are most likely to drive gains in enrollment and student revenue.”
Art & Science Group LLC is a consulting group that specializes in higher education, including enrollment marketing, research, and planning. The group is currently testing community-generated ideas with prospective students and high school counselors. “With help from a campus working group, Union Forward, and input from over 120 faculty, staff, and students, our A&S study is well underway and we will start getting initial data this spring, with the full results and recommendations available in the early fall.”
Union’s admissions office has also seen positive developments with recruiting the class of 2030. “Early numbers suggest that our ED1 class will be slightly larger than last year’s,” Jason Nevinger, the Interim Vice President for Admissions, Financial Aid, and Enrollment, told Concordiensis. ED1 is a binding first year application option, where students are obligated to enroll if admitted, thus virtually guaranteeing that those admitted students will attend Union.
“Across all application rounds at this point in the cycle, we have seen positive growth in domestic applications, while our international applications are down. The decrease in international applications is not unique to Union and is being reported nationally.” Nevinger said.
Concordiensis has reached out to several other senior faculty and staff members and is waiting for additional comments regarding President Kiss’s email.
