Last year, University Budget Committee members and San Francisco State University officials asked the Chancellor’s Office for help dealing with budget issues and shrinking resources as a result of declining enrollment. 

A committee of university stakeholders interviewed and evaluated many consulting group proposals, choosing Huron Consulting Group based on their experience and contract proposal, according to Jeff Wilson, vice president and chief financial officer of administration and finance. Huron is a strategy consulting firm that provides financial and operational advice to healthcare, higher education and commercial institutions around the globe. 

The Huron contract, which amounted to $455,000, was funded directly from California State University’s Chancellor’s Office in Long Beach. For most of the Spring 2025 semester, a group of Huron analysts worked alongside the Institutional Review Committee and Steering Committee to form a report of suggestions to solve the budget crisis based on academic, financial and enrollment data. 

Wilson recognized SFSU’s declining enrollment and said there needs to be changes made to the university’s operations on all levels. 

“For decades and decades, the CSU and San Francisco State had seen enrollment growth, and we had built our operations to support those enrollments. It was nearly 30,000 students at one time,” Wilson said. “As our resources declined due to lower enrollments, it was like, ‘Oh, how do we shrink?” 

Amy Sueyoshi, provost and vice president of academic affairs, mirrored a similar concern that the university needs to adjust to the declining enrollment and budget reductions. 

“We didn’t want to end up in a place where we were scrambling and then had to do layoffs,” Sueyoshi said. “We wanted to do this in a strategic and measured way, with as little damage to the institution. We wanted to do it in a way that felt more gradual.”

Huron’s final report made a plethora of suggestions, including consolidating complementary departments that have smaller enrollment numbers. 

“Let’s say there’s a department of nectarines and a department of peaches,” Sueyoshi said. “They are similar, but they are not identical. They have different peach and nectarine curriculum. But the department of nectarines only has 10 majors. The department of peaches has 100 majors. Potentially, you could combine those two departments and have a school of stone fruit, and then offer a degree in stone fruit.”

No specific departments were named in the report in regards to combining departments. 

The report also made suggestions to increase faculty workload and “redistribute” lecture courses to full-time faculty. According to the report, in Fall 2023 and Spring 2024, approximately 53% of tenure or tenure-track faculty had “teaching loads below Weighted Teaching Unit expectations.” 

WTUs are measures of weekly workloads that professors and lecturers take on. The current 3:3 WTU ratio means faculty are expected to teach three courses each semester. The Huron report proposed an increase of either 3:4 or 4:4, meaning tenure and tenure-track faculty would need to teach three courses one semester and four courses the next, or four courses for both semesters. 

The California Faculty Association is against this proposed increase in teaching load expectations. Brad Erikson, liberal studies lecturer and CFA’s SFSU chapter president, sent an email to faculty in opposition to the proposal. 

“The Provost’s attempt to trick ladder faculty into renegotiating their normative 3:3 teaching loads will not stand, nor will attempts to impose higher class sizes,” Erikson said. “Our contract and California labor law are on our side.”

The email also states under the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act, the university may not unilaterally change wages, hours or other working conditions, and doing so violates its obligation to meet and confer with faculty in good faith. The CFA is organizing a meet and confer before these changes can be implemented. 

Mari Hulick, a professor and the director of the School of Design, was concerned about Huron’s impact, as well as the cost of the project. While the contract was paid for by the Chancellor’s Office, there is still debate about the funds being used for consultants. 

“My main criticism is these pockets of money, where do they come from, and why aren’t they available for the students [or] the academic experience on campus?” Hulick said. “I think if we focus on that, we’re gonna start to make very different economic decisions.” 

Some class sizes in the School of Design have increased dramatically as a result of cuts. Hulick said increases in studio classes are “possibly beyond health, safety and accreditation standards.”

John Logan, professor and chair of the labor and employment studies department, also expressed concerns about Huron’s evaluations of academic departments. Huron consultants included a market demand analysis for majors to show which departments align with which growing industries. 

“What they are essentially doing is looking at the California economy and saying, ‘Where are jobs increasing in the California economy?’” Logan said. “I spoke with the Huron consultants when they came to the Institutional Review Committee. I know much more about the California labor market than they do, and my services are free.” 

Logan said the information Huron gave them about the labor market was “incredibly superficial.” He also described the labor market as being very volatile due to factors including artificial intelligence and the elimination of white-collar entry-level jobs.

Huron’s involvement with higher education institutions has not always been seen as making positive change to universities. Huron was founded by former executives of Arthur Andersen, an accounting firm responsible for fraudulently producing financial statements for Enron, an energy corporation. 

These financial statements contributed to California’s energy crisis in the early 2000s. Arthur Andersen was also guilty of destroying documents during a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation on the claims of internal fraud. 

In 2009, Huron got caught up in its own scandal with the SEC. The SEC charged Huron and two of its former executives with accounting violations for overstating the company’s income for many years. 

WORT, a community-based radio station in Madison, Wisconsin, reported that between the years of 2019 and 2023, the University of Wisconsin system paid Huron $51 million. In October 2023, 140 employees were laid off at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, just months after Huron provided an “institutional realignment” workshop to UWO. 

Sueyoshi said that nearly all of Huron’s suggestions are aligned with the IRC, which is made up of faculty who worked on a report reviewing all academic programs for a semester. 

“We want to make sure that this has as little impact on students as possible,” Sueyoshi said. “With that said, we know that it causes great anxiety and worry. But I do want to say we’re thinking about this super seriously.”