Brown is in crisis. For years, Brown has used a combination of tuition dollars, grants, and other funding sources to finance an increasingly wide array of services, employing armies of administrators and facilities staff to run everything from private shuttles to exercise classes. Suddenly, grants are no longer a given for even the top universities, and both students and elected officials have begun pushing back against record-high tuition costs across the country. All of this comes amidst one of the worst job markets in recent memory for new college graduates, throwing into question the promise of career opportunity that undergirds the entire higher education system in America. These factors have combined to produce a harmful cycle of poorly handled debt and overly optimistic expectations, seriously jeopardizing Brown’s financial health.
For decades, higher education in America has been underpinned on a simple transaction: students investing their money and time in a degree, and that degree getting them a high-paying job when they graduate. It is this promise of future earnings that has allowed schools to charge exorbitant amounts of money for their services — one oft-cited statistic is that the average college graduate will earn $1.2 million more than someone who only graduated from high school, according to the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities. For many students, these figures make college seem like an obvious choice, and lenders are more than happy to offer loans that make schools like Brown, which costs $97,284 (including room and board) for the 2025-2026 academic year, more affordable to middle- and lower-income families. Pell grants, scholarships, and financial aid lower Brown’s nearly six-figure sticker price down to an average net price of $26,723, which, while a considerable amount, is far more palatable for students and families. Nevertheless, the cost-benefit ratio does not favor Brown graduates as compared to their peers: on average, Brown University graduates earn less than those from peer Ivy League institutions, with median salaries 10 years post-graduation at approximately $87,811 compared to higher figures like $102,491 at Columbia and $104,043 at Cornell, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard.
One might expect that the vast majority of this money would go towards educating the students footing the bill, but that is hardly the case at Brown. Faculty ranks remain comparatively slim with only 866 regular faculty members, and their compensation accounts for only 17.1% of Brown’s $1.9 billion FY2026 operating budget. This imbalance is indicative of Brown’s continued expansion of its non-instructional workforce, causing resources to shift away from classrooms and educators in a process that weakens the institution’s core mission of teaching. This administrative overgrowth reflects national trends of skyrocketing overhead, diluted academic focus, and rising costs, eroding Brown’s teaching luster at a time when the promise of higher education is already under scrutiny.
Students, for their part, have come to expect Brown to provide amenities outside the classroom, with schools justifying annual tuition increases by offering non-educational services like healthcare and transportation. This puts Brown in a difficult position, as the cuts necessary to address deficit spending are difficult to sell to students whose tuition bill is only growing. For this reason, Brown has avoided addressing its budget crisis earlier, instead relying on a combination of deficit spending and tuition increases that only kicks the can down the road. As student expectations grow with every subsequent tuition increase, Brown now finds itself in an unsustainable cycle of spending with no end in sight.
For years, this cycle has been fueled by federal grants and endowments, but recent policy shifts have exacerbated the strain. Under the Trump administration, higher education institutions have faced significant budget cuts, including the freezing of $510 million in federal funding for Brown alone, funds that while reinstated remain under threat following recent threats from the White House. Compounding these financial issues are bad investments in illiquid assets within university endowments, forcing Brown and other schools to take out loans to finance operations despite having billions of assets on paper. This lack of liquid cash has forced Brown to prepare for “significant cost-cutting,” including staff reductions and scaled-back capital spending.
Brown’s current difficulties are caused by an expansion of its functions beyond the school’s core expertise of educating students. To address student expectations and justify tuition hikes Brown has ballooned its administrative staff in recent decades, and the school now employs 3,805 non-instructional full-time staff members, despite running a $29 million deficit in FY 2026. This administrative bloat includes roles unrelated to teaching, such as extensive DEI bureaucracies, which critics argue drive up tuition without enhancing academic quality. As a result, essential student services like housing suffer from maintenance failures and flooding, even as tuition approaches $93,000 annually. This nationwide trend of increased administrative spending is shifting resources from classrooms to overhead, leading some institutions to raise tuition up to 42% over the last decade, according to Crimson Education.
Despite significant investment in service areas and administrative staff, Brown has failed to perform its management duties well for years. As far back as 2015, there have been complaints about the wait times for mental health counseling, and recent reporting by the Brown Daily Herald uncovered a pattern of inappropriate behavior by officers in Brown’s Department of Public Safety. Moreover, Brown has mishandled labor negotiations with its staff, leading some labor unions to threaten strikes last November.
It is clear that Brown has expanded beyond its ability to deliver top-quality services, and the school will need to make difficult decisions in the near future on which services should be cut or outsourced to private contractors that actually have domain expertise. Brown can no longer pretend that it is an expert in all domains of student life: private companies can often deliver better results in hotel management, catering, security, and healthcare services. Other universities commonly outsource dining services to companies like Sodexo and Aramark, bookstores to Barnes & Noble College or Follett, and facilities management to specialized firms that use predictive analytics for maintenance. During the pandemic, approximately 300 new deals were reached between universities and for-profit online program managers, representing a 79 percent increase over the previous year. Brown would be wise to follow suit.
Brown recently took a step towards fiscal stability by laying off 48 employees and eliminating 55 unfilled positions to help reach a targeted $15 million in savings, according to the Brown Daily Herald. But these actions are unlikely to be enough. Even after these cuts, Brown will continue to run a large structural deficit, and further cuts will be a hard sell to students paying unprecedentedly high levels of tuition. However, the alternative is simply not sustainable: Brown can no longer afford to run its own sovereign state with a police force and healthcare system in a corner of Providence, Rhode Island. Instead, Brown should emphasize its core skill of education and take steps to reduce both tuition and student expectations. A failure to do so will see Brown relegated to history as yet another corporation that expanded beyond its means.