Lillia Perez, a transfer student from Foothill College studying public health, is not starting her semester at San Francisco State University as she had originally planned.

“Everything was full,” said Perez. “Major core classes I need to graduate and to move on to the upper division classes…nothing. I literally could take nothing.”

Perez shared the same fate as other SFSU students due to university-wide budget cuts made less than a week before the first day of the fall semester.

On August 23, 21 sections of classes were canceled across all colleges — 17 of them being in the College of Liberal and Creative Arts, according to Bobby King, SFSU’s director of communications. 

Perez says she feels like she’s been left out of the loop. 

“There was not any explanation,” said Perez. “There was nothing available. I’m hoping it’s different next semester because I’ll be a continuing student.” 

After a not so helpful fall orientation, Perez was left to find a solution. “I could register earlier and hopefully get, you know, the classes I need.”

In LCA, the political science department got the most cuts with four classes canceled — some being core requirements for political science graduate students. 

The canceled political science graduate program courses cannot be offered in the spring for “various reasons,” according to Chair of Political Science Nicole Watts, but the students enrolled in those courses were redirected to an alternative class.

“This semester, given the continued decrease in enrollment, some cancellations came later than usual, but we tried to assist students in finding other classes,” emailed King. “The late cancellations were almost exclusively low enrolled classes — with fewer than eight enrolled students.”

The recent changes in schedules are leaving students scrambling to find alternatives for their classes on top of bulking up the workload for remaining lecturers.

“A bunch of our lecturer faculty were completely let go over summer,” said Angelina Moles, the LCA Coordinator for the Metro College Success Program and a Communications professor. “A lot of us have now either double, tripled our workload in trying to make up for that without any increase in salary.”

Losing the funding for retaining professors is altering the timelines that many departments have laid out for their students from previous years’ roadmaps. Upper-division classes that were once offered throughout the year are now consolidated into one semester.

“There’s a lot of system changes and merges that they’re not really telling students,” said Malay Castillo, a student assistant at the Undergraduate Advising Center. “A lot of these classes, instead of being cut, are only being given at a certain semester. It makes it a lot harder for students to plan out their semester and graduation.”

The loss of thousands of students at SFSU year after year has been credited to the class cuts across the university, according to a story by Golden Gate Xpress in 2023. SFSU’s three-year budget plan shows that the university will suffer a 20% budget cut by the 2026-27 school year, according to a document provided to Golden Gate Xpress by a staff member who wished not to be named.

Shabnam Piryaei, a Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts professor, says her BECA 752 pedagogy class was one of the last-minute cuts.

“It makes me sad because I was really excited to teach the class,” said Piryaei. “The other part of it that’s unfair is that while it gives me a mandatory lighter load this semester, it makes it so that I might have to teach four classes, which is an extra class over the load, next semester.”

The canceled pedagogy class would have taught graduate students the tools on how to teach BECA. To Piryaei’s knowledge, there was no alternative class for students.

It is unclear if BECA 752 will be back on the schedule for the spring semester because class cuts are determined by student demand, according to King.

“It’s like a loop is happening,” said Piryaei. “People aren’t getting the classes they need and then we lose students leading to more cuts in classes and so I don’t know what can remedy the loop.”