The National Education Association analyzed Trump ‘s proposed budget and finds that it contains deep cuts and massive support for privatization by promoting vouchers and charter schools. The proposal mirrors Project 2025 by turning Titl 1 for low-income students and IDEA funding into block grants that can be converted to vouchers. The overall goal is to undermine public schools and cut funding.
FY2026 Budget Request Slashes Education Funding, Shortchanges Students
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President Trump’s FY2026 “skinny” budget request to Congress, released on May 2, cuts non-defense domestic spending by 22.6%. The Department of Education sustains a $12 billion reduction, a cut of approximately 15.3%.
! Since the President’s budget does not list specific funding requests for every federal program, the 46-page document is a “skinny” budget. Congress ultimately has the power of the purse, but the proposal is a clear signal of the White House’s priorities: a massive 24 percent cut to U.S. domestic spending, and, privitazing our nation’s public education system.
The narrative says the budget “maintains full funding for Title I,” but the numbers tell a different story. Title I and 18 unidentified programs are combined to create a single block grant, dubbed the “K-12 Simplified Funding Program,” then that block fund is cut by $4.535 billion cut.
All seven Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) programs are combined to create a single block grant called the “Special Education Simplified Funding Program.” The approach perpetuates the current shortfall—the federal government now covers 13% of special education costs, far short of the 40% Congress promised when the law was passed.
Programs slated for elimination include English Language Acquisition (Title III) and the Teacher Quality Partnership, which addresses the teacher shortage through deep clinical practice.
The budget shifts costs to states and institutions of higher education to reduce the federal investment in today’s students—our nation’s future leaders and workforce—as much as possible.
Regrouping specific, separate programs into block grants, in theory gives states more flexibility on how the money is spent. In reality, block grants usually lead to less funding and less accountability for our most vulnerable students. As the strings attached to the funding are cut, many states could maneuver block grant funds over to private school voucher programs.
Amidst these cuts, the proposal calls for investing $500 million, an increase of $60 million, to expand the number of charter schools across the country. Charter schools, along with private school vouchers, drain scarce resources for traditional public schools.
Every year, by May 15, the governor has to revise his proposed budget, and this is when the budget season really kicks off.
So, just as individuals are concerned about personal finances, retirements, the impacts of inflation, and uncertainty about government services, the state is facing those same sorts of uncertainties. And in this case, uncertainty really rolls downhill. There’s national uncertainty, which is causing state revenue uncertainty and budget uncertainty, which then impacts the state’s education budget decisions, that will then impact what school districts are facing as they head into adopting their budgets by the end of June.
So, we know that the revenue outlook for the current year that ends June 30 looks pretty good, so will that protect us?
I’d sort of hoped that they would, but the short answer is no, and that’s because of some nuances in how Prop 98 works. A lot of those extra revenues that have come in are actually going to count against last year, the 2023–24 fiscal year. And in that year, the Legislature actually suspended the constitutional guarantee for a year. So even though there are extra revenues, none of those revenues will go to schools.
As we look to the future, to the 2025–26 school year, the forecasts are looking much more pessimistic. The Legislative Analyst’s Office just came out with a projection of revenues for next year being down around $8 billion. That would trickle down to schools getting about $3.5 billion less compared to what their current programs receive.
I would expect schools to get the program that’s in place for the current year, plus a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA), which is currently expected to be about 2.3%. That probably seems pretty low to most folks, especially given some of the costs districts might face—salary increases that have already happened due to inflation, the rising costs teachers are facing, plus pensions and other obligations. So, the costs districts are facing may be going up more than the 2.3% COLA they’re getting.
Faculty, staff and students at four campuses in the Cal State system said they’re starting to feel the impact of belt-tightening in the early weeks of the 2024-25 school year, saying this fall has brought heavier workloads, larger class sizes and fewer course options.
University officials at select campuses acknowledged plans to reduce costs this school year. They said they’ve opened additional course sections where there’s demand and remain committed to supporting students so that they’re on track to graduate, even as they reel in budgets to match shrinking student enrollment on some campuses.
Cal State system officials said in July that the system could experience a $1 billion budget gap in the 2025-26 school year, a forecast driven by uncertain state funding, enrollment declines and rising costs. Trustees said they expect many campus leaders to reduce their overhead this year while also looking for creative ways to raise money going forward.
“It’s extremely difficult to get a hold of the classes that you want and/or need,” said Ashley Gregory, a Cal State LA student who works with the group Students for Quality Education through an internship program funded by the California Faculty Association. “It’s really disheartening.”
Cal State LA
California State University, Los Angeles, which has a $32.4 million deficit, is directing all divisions to cut their budgets by 12.4%.
The university is budgeting with the assumption that enrollment will come in 5.3% below the target for in-state full-time equivalent students it receives from the Cal State system, the school’s interim chief financial officer, Claudio Lindow, wrote in a Thursday email to the campus. Lindlow said there are signs that actual enrollment will reduce that gap.
Gregory said she’s already feeling the consequences of budget cuts on her major and minor fields — history, Pan-African studies and Latin American studies.
“I’m constantly having conversations with other students regarding, ‘Oh, this class is no longer available. This professor is no longer here,’” Gregory said.
A university dashboard showing enrollments by course lists fewer total courses in each of Gregory’s three departments this fall compared with the same time last year. In the history department, enrollment was down from more than 1,800 students in fall 2023 to fewer than 1,700 students this semester.
Juan Lamata, the faculty mentor to Students for Quality Education and a member of the California Faculty Association Los Angeles Executive Board, said he’s observed fewer electives in the English department, leaving a more narrow range of classes available to students.
“We’re changing what an English major means at Cal State LA, because now students will not have the opportunity to take classes in things they’re interested in or things that they don’t know they’re interested in,” he said. “We’re reducing what they can even be curious about.”
Cal State LA spokesperson Erik Frost Hollins could not confirm whether the number of courses offered by the university has declined but said course sections are down almost 7% compared with last year. The universityis not experiencing longer waitlists for fall courses as a result, according to Lindow’s email, but rather has lower waitlist numbers than in the past.
Cal State LA has gone from overenrolling students in excess of the target it receives from the Chancellor’s Office to experiencing an enrollment decline post-pandemic, President Berenecea Johnson Eanes wrote in a July letter to the campus.
Each condition strained the campus in different ways, Eanes wrote. When it was overenrolled, the university absorbed the costs of additional students without receiving additional state funding, she explained, which “had an adverse impact on the experience we can provide students.” But declining enrollment “feels like a budget reduction, because of the lost tuition, even though our funding per student is up,” she added.
“The greater risk lies in falling below enrollment targets, losing both tuition and state/system support,” Eames wrote. “This is why we need to focus on reversing enrollment declines and push to meet our enrollment target every year.”
Cal State LA headcount enrollment in fall 2023 was 24,673, up 6% compared with a decade ago, but below a pre-pandemic peak of 28,253.
Cal State East Bay
Another Cal State campus is reckoning with how to make sure it offers the courses students need while adjusting to a yearslong slide in enrollment.
Cal State East Bay enrollment has fallen almost 26% from its peak in 2016 to fall 2023. Explaining a decision to cut staff and administrator positions last year, officials said the university had not fully adjusted its budget to match those declines and also anticipated that its health insurance, utilities and benefits costs would rise, contributing to a structural deficit. President Cathy Sandeen, in a July message to the campus, said the school “must continue to explore all means to further reduce our expenses.”
A longtime faculty member said she worries that in trying to reduce overhead, the university is cutting instruction unnecessarily.Jennifer Eagan, a professor at the campus since 1999,said the university deferred dozens of eligible applicants to its Master of Public Administration degree program rather than expand the program to accommodate them this year.
“We have enrollments that we could be capturing, like classes we could be filling, cohorts of master’s programs that could be underway,” said Eagan, who served as the statewide president of the California Faculty Association from 2015 to 2019. “But the enrollments now are being artificially depressed, in my view.”
Cal State East Bay’s instruction expenses fell 11% from 2021-22 into 2022-23, according to the university’s two most-recent financial statements, tracking a year-over-year decline in enrollment.
Cal State East Bay spokesperson Kimberly Hawkins said in a statement that the university is “navigating a period of lower enrollment with a continued commitment to meeting students’ needs through strategic course offerings.” Hawkins said that, though there’s been a slight increase in waitlists to get into classes, the university has opened additional sections for certain courses. “Even as enrollment trends shift, our focus remains squarely on providing our students with timely offerings that fulfill their degree objectives,” she said.
Rin Anderson, a Cal State East Bay student interning for Students for Quality Education, said they see signs of tight budgets outside of academics, too. They said the university’s Student Equity and Success Center, which provides counseling for students from historically underrepresented communities, is underfunded and understaffed.
“The people that work for the university, who are in charge of these affinity programs, they’re overworked,” Anderson said. “They have so many different responsibilities and hats to wear.”
CSU Monterey Bay students move into campus dorms in August 2021.Credit: Monterey Bay/Flickr
Cal State Monterey Bay
After a pandemic-era slump, Cal State Monterey Bay’s enrollment is showing signs of recovery.
The Central Coast campus saw a 15.6% increasein enrollment this semester compared with fall 2023 — an increase so big that the Monterey Herald reportedthe school is moving students into staff housing and modifying some dorms to fit an extra student in an effort to whittle down its waitlist for housing.
But Monterey Bay has also reduced its budget. A university official said in a statement the campus opted to trim costs at the beginning of this fiscal year to balance its budget and doesn’t anticipate any additional cuts later in 2024-25.
Meghan O’Donnell, a history lecturer at Cal State Monterey Bay and co-president of the school’s California Faculty Association chapter, said her department has lost seven faculty members; some departed through a voluntary separation program last spring, and others left because of frustration with lack of resources. She said the department hasn’t hired replacements.
“There’s just a lot of challenges losing that level of faculty, while also being told we have to do all of the same work, if not more, because now we actually have more students than we were anticipating having this fall,” she said.
O’Donnell is concerned that larger class sizes on her campus would make it harder for colleagues to incorporate experiential and one-on-one learning techniques into their courses — the kind of practices she said are especially effective for first generation students.
In a statement, CSUMB Provost Andrew Lawson said the university has a lower student-faculty ratio than other CSU campuses and remains “committed to providing strong mentorship and experiential learning opportunities to our students.” He said the Monterey Bay campus has added additional course sections to accommodate incoming students, including in general education courses for first-year students. The university’s colleges of science and business experienced the steepest enrollment increases.
Cal State Monterey Bay is also implementing what it calls an “incentive-based budget model,” which allocates funding to each of its colleges based partially on enrollment. Budget cuts last year impacted colleges with deeper enrollment declines more than those where enrollment was steady or dipped more modestly, Lawson said.
O’Donnell said that model is starving the budgets of departments like Spanish, ethnic studies and history.
Students “are being told that their desires don’t matter as much, basically, unless they’re in a major that’s actively growing based on market demand,” she said.
Cal Maritime is the smallest campus in the California State University system.Credit: Cal Maritime / Flickr
Cal Maritime
It’s not just faculty that are feeling the squeeze.
Cal Maritime, the smallest Cal State campus, has laid off 10 staff members, a university spokesperson confirmed. Sianna Brito, the president of the university’s chapter of the California State University Employees Union (CSUEU), said the Aug. 20 layoffs affected eight CSUEU members and two managers.
Declining enrollment and financial pressure have set Cal Maritime on a path to a possible merger with Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, a much larger campus 250 miles south of the current campus in Vallejo. The Cal State board of trustees opened discussions on the proposal to combine the two schools at its July meeting. It will weigh additional updates in September before voting on the plan in November.
Cal Maritime interim President Michael Dumont wrote in an Aug. 20 email to the campus that “enrollment challenges, state budget cuts, increased utility and insurance costs, and unfunded compensation costs” had left the university of 761 students with a combined $3.1 million deficit across its general operating and housing funds. He said the lack of funds “allowed us no other options” but to reduce staffing this year.
“I ask that each member of our community remember that we are being forced to do less with less, and we will need to exhibit grace and practice patience with one another as we continue assessing our operations and as we approach the integration recommendation decision,” he wrote. “We need to be clear eyed and realize that what we have been able to support or accommodate in the past may not be able to occur this year.”
Brito was among the staff who lost jobs. She said the layoff was unusually abrupt, blindsiding the managers to whom she reports and leaving no time to plan for colleagues to take over her responsibilities, which include the logistical and fiscal work behind the school’s faculty development and study abroad programs.
“We immediately had to turn in our business cards, our keys. We were locked out of our emails. We had to turn in laptops, and we were escorted off campus immediately upon being notified that we were laid off,” she said.
That was a shift from past layoffs, Brito said, in which departing employees continued working until their layoff date and were celebrated in campuswide emails. This time around, she said, Brito and her colleagues will be paid out until their official layoff date in October, but they ceased working the same day they were notified.
There could also be implications for students. Part of Brito’s job had been the fiscal processing that allows Cal Maritime students who aren’t studying for a Coast Guard license to study abroad.
“Now my job is parceled out to people who don’t have the institutional knowledge of the program,” she said. “So I personally feel like our students are not going to get the best experience with me not supporting that program.”
This story has been updated to reflect that only Cal State Monterey Bay is using the incentive-based budget model.
This article was rewritten and reposted on Sept. 27 to clarify that the lawsuit’s aim is to prevent underfunding of Proposition 98 in future years. The earlier version misstated that the lawsuit asserted the current state budget as enacted also violated the funding law.
Although the 2024-25 state budget shields school districts and community colleges from funding cuts, the California School Boards Association is suing the Newsom administration over a provision that the school boards association claims is unconstitutional.
The change to the Education Code would deny schools money they would be entitled to under some conditions in future years, setting a dangerous precedent, CSBA argued in a lawsuit filed this week.
The school boards association is asking the Superior Court in Sacramento County to invalidate that section in the education budget bill. CSBA argues it violates the letter and spirit of Proposition 98, the formula that determines how much of the General Fund must be allocated to schools and community colleges.
The Department of Finance inserted the little-known statutory wording into the budget trailer bill in the final days of the legislative session in June, with no discussion or notice. It was not mentioned in the budget analysis that legislators reviewed before passing the budget.
“CSBA’s defense of voter‐approved Proposition 98 is nonnegotiable, as is the obligation of the state to follow the Constitution that governs it,” CSBA President Albert Gonzalez, a Santa Clara Unified school board member, said in a statement.
On behalf of Newsom, the California Department of Finance refuted CSBA assertions in a series of exchanges with legislative leaders in July. All of its actions were legal, Joe Stephenshaw, director of the Department of Finance, wrote.
The lawsuit would not affect this year’s budget, which took effect July 1. However, the tense negotiations and controversial revenue maneuvers preceding the budget’s passage were very much on the minds of Newsom’s financial advisors when they wrote the statutory change that the school boards association opposes.
It pertains to the unusual challenge that Newsom and the Legislature found themselves in trying to write the 2023-24 budget. Because of the devasting impacts of winter storms and floods, the federal government and the state pushed back the tax collection deadline from April to November 2023. Without having tax receipts in hand, Newsom and the Legislature made a best-guess estimate of what Prop. 98 minimum guarantee would be for 2022-23. As it turned out, the minimum guarantee was $8.8 billion less than what they appropriated.
Rather than cut funding for school districts and community colleges after the 2022-23 fiscal year had ended and money had been spent, Newsom left what he called “an overappropriation” alone. Two of the main formulas to determine the Prop 98 minimum guarantee incorporate what the state spent on schools in the prior year. So, the over-appropriation in 2022-23 would increase the amount that the state owed schools in 2023-24, 2024-25 and beyond. his initial 2024-25 budget in January, Newsom proposed allowing schools to keep the $8.8 billion for 2022-23 but to exclude the money when calculating the Prop. 98 minimum guarantee for 2023-24 and 2024-25.
CSBA and other education groups opposed that move. They said that dropping Prop. 98 below what the Legislature had approved violated the initiative that voters passed in 1988.
In most years, the Legislature’s Prop. 98 appropriation becomes the base amount for the following year, then is adjusted for enrollment growth or decline, inflation, or increases in economic growth per student. That assures that Prop. 98 minimum funding guarantee will grow over time, CSBA said.
Faced with strong opposition from a coalition of school groups, Newsom eventually gave up on lowering the minimum guarantee. But still short of funding to pay for it, Newsom turned to a series of multiyear maneuvers: suspending the minimum guarantee in 2023-24, deferring funding from one year to the next, draining the rainy day fund, and creating a multi-billion dollar debt that the General Fund, not future Prop. 98 revenues, would pay back over several years. All of these tactics were legal.
Newsom tries again
But Newsom and Finance officials hadn’t given up on the idea of revising the Prop. 98 minimum guarantee downward when tax revenues come up short. They quietly inserted language into the trailer bill to limit the state’s funding vulnerability in the event of another tax filing delay in the future.
It says that when the filing deadline for personal and corporate income taxpayers is pushed back at least two weeks, then the state will revert to the previous year’s minimum guarantee. After the new taxes are collected, the state will recalculate the new Prop. 98 minimum and determine the difference between the original and revised Prop. 98 minimum. The “excess” appropriation won’t be able to raise the Prop. 98 minimum that year and for subsequent years, the statute says.
CSBA criticized this “unlawful provision” for “artificially lowering the baseline upon which future years’ school funding is established.” The lawsuit argues that voters passed it to assure a “stable and predictable source of funding that is not subject to political influence or manipulation.”
“When the Newsom administration proposed a budget maneuver in January to exclude some school funding from the Prop 98 formulas, education groups opposed it because it was unconstitutional. The budget language passed this summer to allow a similar manipulation of the guarantee in the future would be similarly unconstitutional,” said Rob Manwaring, senior policy and fiscal advisor for the nonprofit Children Now and an advisor on the lawsuit.
Delays in the tax deadline as occurred in 2022 and laid out in the provision will presumably be rare, but CSBA said the integrity of Prop. 98 must be preserved.
The Legislature has no authority to amend the wording of Prop. 98 – only voters can do that, CSBA argued.
A sixth-grade math teacher helps two students during a lesson about math and music.
Credit: Allison Shelley / EDUimages
Top Takeaways
The president dismissed many programs as outdated or “woke.”
Advocates for English learners argue that the cuts will reverse progress.
The initial budget will face resistance from Democrats and maybe some Republicans.
President Donald Trump would maintain funding levels for students with disabilities and for Title I aid for low-income students while wiping out long-standing programs serving migrant children, teachers in training, college-bound students, English learners and adult learners in the education budget for fiscal 2026.
Trump’s “skinny budget,” which he released on Friday, would cut $12 billion or about 15% of K-12 and some higher education programs administered by the U.S. Department of Education. It contains sparse, sometimes dismissive, language explaining why he is eliminating programs and offers no details about plans to consolidate $6.5 billion in 18 unspecified programs into a single $2 billion grant program.
“K-12 outcomes will improve as education returns to the states, which would make remedial education for adults less necessary,” according to the one-paragraph explanation for the full $729 million cut to adult education.
The budget summary justified eliminating funding for programs like Upward Bound and GEAR UP, which focus on increasing the college and career readiness of low-income students, as “a relic of the past when financial incentives were needed to motivate Institutions of Higher Education to engage with low-income students and increase access.”
“I don’t think the budget request reflects a deep understanding of what the programs are and what they do. The language is designed to capture headlines, not hearts and minds,” said Reg Leichty, founding partner of Washington, D.C.-based Foresight Law + Policy, which advises education groups, including the Association of California School Administrators, on congressional education policies.
“(Trump) has eliminated programs that it’s taken decades to build,” said U.S. Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, a California Democrat serving the East Bay. “There’s been no analysis of what the financial assessment would mean to the communities served. You can always find more efficiencies, but just cutting everything is just mindless.”
Only charter schools would receive more money — $60 million to bring the total federal spending on charter schools to $500 million.
The U.S. Department of Education spent about $150 billion in fiscal 2024 on programs in states and school districts, of which California received $18.6 billion, according to the Pew Research Center.
Trump’s initial budget is the first step in what will likely be a lengthy and contentious process in Congress before the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1.
“It’s not a budget reflective of the perspectives of many Republicans on Capitol Hill. We’ll see how they try to accommodate the administration,” said Leichty. “It’s a different Congress, it’s a different moment, but still, cuts of this scale and scope are hard to imagine how even the House (with a tiny Republican majority) would pass them.”
The two largest federal K-12 programs — Title I grants of $18.4 billion and $15.5 billion for the Students with Disabilities Act — reach every school district nationwide and have bipartisan support, but Trump has proposed reshaping both programs as block grants administered by states with less oversight and more local control — actions requiring congressional approval.
“With a budget that cuts the Department of Education by so much, we’re really pleased to see it does not cut funding for IDEA,” said Kuna Tavalin, senior policy and advocacy adviser for the Council for Exceptional Children, referring to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. “Of course, the devil is in the details.”
The federal government funds programs that support students with disabilities from early childhood through 21 years old. Consolidation raises the specter that funding for some stages may be fungible, which “could potentially be really damaging,” Tavalin said.
“This raises the hair on the back of my neck,” he said.
Programs that Trump would abolish include:
TRIO organizations like Upward Bound and GEAR UP, $1.579 billion.
English language acquisition through Title III, $890 million.
Migrant education, $428 million
Teacher quality partnerships, $70 million
Federal work-study, $980 million
Preschool development grants, $315 million
The budget proposal also calls for cutting $49 million from the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. The office would shift the focus from enforcing Title IX and programs with goals of raising achievement for minority students to carrying out presidential executive orders and ending the office’s “ability to push DEI programs and promote radical transgender ideology.”
The budget is silent on several significant programs, including Head Start, research funding through the Institute of Education Sciences, the Child Care and Development Block Grant, and the state assessment program.
Reactions
Title III
This funding helps English learners and immigrant students learn to speak, read, and write English fluently, learn other subjects such as math and science, and meet graduation requirements.California received about $157 million in 2024-25 from Title III.
Students who are not yet fluent in English when they begin school are entitled under federal law to get help to learn the language.
According to the budget, “To end overreach from Washington and restore the rightful role of state oversight in education, the Budget proposes to eliminate the misnamed English Language Acquisition program, which actually deemphasizes English primacy by funding (non-profit organizations) and states to encourage bilingualism.”
Advocates for English learners disputed the reasoning.
“The claim that Title III ‘deemphasizes English primacy’ ignores decades of research and legal precedent,” said Anya Hurwitz, executive director of SEAL (Sobrato Early Academic Language), a nonprofit organization. “Supporting bilingualism does not come at the expense of English proficiency — it enhances it.”
“Without these funds, many schools will be forced to abandon evidence-based strategies that work and cut services,” said Martha Hernandez, executive director of Californians Together. She said that without targeted support, more students may take longer to learn English and become “long-term English learners” who struggle to thrive in middle and high school.
Migrant education
The Migrant Education Program supports children of agricultural, dairy, lumber, and fishing workers who have moved during the past three years. California received $120 million for this program in 2024-25.
Debra Duardo, superintendent of schools in Los Angeles County, wrote in an email that the loss of these funds will drastically reduce academic support and widen academic achievement gaps. “This decision would have devastating impacts on Los Angeles County schools, where we serve one of the nation’s largest populations of English learners and children from migrant families,” she said.
Preschool Development Grants
These programs help states improve their preschool and child care programs, for example, by conducting needs assessments, teacher training and quality improvement. California received Preschool Development Grants in the past, but is not currently a grantee. However, eliminating the grant program could impact California in the future, said Donna Sneeringer, vice president and chief strategy officer for Child Care Resource Center, a nonprofit organization based in Los Angeles that was a partner in the state’s last preschool development grant.
“There’s still work to be done,” Sneeringer said. “California has made significant changes in our early learning landscape. With transitional kindergarten being available to all 4-year-olds, there are a lot of changes that our child care and early learning providers are having to go through.”
In the budget proposal, the Trump administration called Preschool Development Grants “unproductive” and said they had been “weaponized by the Biden-Harris Administration [sic] to extend the federal reach and push DEI policies on to toddlers.
Adult education
Unlike K-12 schools, adult education is heavily reliant on federal funding. Sharon Bonney, CEO of the Coalition on Adult Basic Education, said she found the proposed cuts “shocking” and fears the cuts would mean adult schools would rely on volunteers rather than trained teachers. She believes that this is a part of the Trump immigration agenda — 6 out of 10 adult education students are immigrants.
Adult schools offer career education or training, but much of their programming is aimed at helping immigrants assimilate and prepare for the citizenship test or learning English as a second language.
Teacher quality grants
Federal funding for the Teacher Quality Partnership grant helps recruit and train teachers for high-needs schools and for hard-to-fill teaching positions.
University, school districtand nonprofit teacher preparation programs use grants from the $70 million fund to recruit and train teacher candidates for high-needs schools and hard-to-fill teaching positions, and sometimes to offer them stipends and other financial help.
“These abrupt, short-sighted cuts will directly disrupt critical teacher residency programs that were actively preparing new educators for high-need positions in urban and rural districts across the state,” said Marvin Lopez, executive director of the California Center on Teaching Careers.
The grants have been “weaponized to indoctrinate new teachers” in divisive ideologies, according to information attached to a letter from Russell T. Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, to Susan Collins, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
“Cutting grants aimed at supporting and diversifying the teaching profession, at the same time that the nation’s student body is becoming increasingly more diverse and as many districts are struggling to recruit enough teachers, is senseless,” said Eric Duncan, director of P-12 policy at EdTrust West.
Students walking on the campus of California State University, Dominguez Hills on Nov. 19., 2024.
Amy DiPierro
The University of California and California State University are facing nearly an 8% reduction to their state funding for 2025-26 under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget proposal unveiled Friday, raising concerns about the impact on their campuses.
Top officials at both of the state’s public university systems immediately warned that the cuts, which were telegraphed in last year’s budget agreement, would result in larger class sizes and fewer available courses. They hope the Legislature will restore some of those funds before the budget is finalized this summer.
UC, which has 10 campuses, would see a decline of $396.6 million in funding while the 23-campus CSU would lose $375.2 million under the governor’s proposal for next year.
Newsom also plans to defer previously promised budget increases of 5% — part of his multiyear compact agreements with the systems — until 2027-28.
CSU Chancellor Mildred García expressed disappointment that the governor’s budget maintains cuts even in light of a rosier state budget outlook than previously projected — and said she hopes that funding will be restored if state revenues improve. The CSU enrolls more than 460,000 students, the great majority of them undergraduates.
“The impact of such deep funding cuts will have significant real-world consequences, both in and out of the classroom,” García said in a statement. “Larger class sizes, fewer course offerings and a reduced workforce will hinder students’ ability to graduate on time and weaken California’s ability to meet its increasing demands for a diverse and highly educated workforce.”
UC President Michael Drake offered fewer specifics but said he is concerned over how the cuts might affect “our students and campus services.” UC enrolls just shy of 300,000 students.
Newsom’s proposal is only the start of the budget process. He and lawmakers will negotiate over the next several months as updated revenue projections become periodically available before the budget is finalized in the summer.
The state’s system of 116 community colleges fared better and would receive $230.4 million in new general funding as part of a small cost-of-living increase under Proposition 98, the voter-approved formula that determines how much money K-12 schools and community colleges receive from California’s general fund.The system enrolled more than 1.4 million students as of fall 2023.
Community college leaders responded favorably to the proposed budget’s support for career education and workforce development. “The governor’s emphasis on career education and recognition of prior learning aligns with our colleges’ mission to assist 6.8 million adults in advancing their career paths through their local community colleges,” Nan Gomez-Heitzeberg, a member of the California Community College trustees, said in a statement.
State funding is only one source of revenue for the two universitysystems,which also get money from student tuition and fees as well as federal support.
In total, the governor’s budget proposes $45.1 billion for the state’s three higher education segments –UC, CSUand California Community Colleges — plus the California Student Aid Commission, which administers the enormous Cal Grant aid programs and others.
Under Newsom’s multiyear compact agreements, first announced in 2022, UC and CSU were due to receive 5% annual budget increases in exchange for making progress toward goals like increasing graduation rates, eliminating equity gaps in college completion and enrolling more California residents. With Newsom planning to cut funding and defer those increases, achieving the goals could prove challenging.
“In the absence of that incentive, I think we in the equity community and students are going to have to really ensure that we are demanding that our CSU and UC leaders continue to hold the line and honor their commitment to students even in leaner fiscal times,” said Jessie Ryan, president of the Campaign for College Opportunity, a nonprofit organization that advocates for expanding college access in California.
Cal State’s 2025-26 budget request pleaded for the state not to cut its base funding and not to defer the money promised in the system’s previous agreement with the Newsom administration. CSU officials estimated that a 7.95% cut was tantamount to what’s needed to serve more than 36,000 full-time students.
The CSU system sought an operating budget of $9.2 billion, $593 million more than in 2024-25. That includes money for line items CSU officials say they can’t avoid, like increases to liability and property insurance and health care premiums. The budget request argues that a funding cut “would severely constrain” CSU’s ability to deliver on other top priorities, like programming for students’ basic needs and mental health.
In contrast, Newsom’s budget proposal was met with a warmer response from the chancellor of the state’s community college system, Sonya Christian, who said it “supports the priorities” of the system. In addition to the cost-of-living increases, Newsom’s budget includes several new funding proposals for the community colleges. They include:
$168 million in one-time funding for a “statewide technology transformation” project that will streamline data collection across the system, including automating credit transfers between colleges
$100 million to expand “credit for prior learning,” under which colleges award credit for skills learned outside the classroom, such as in a job or by volunteering
$30 million in ongoing funding to expand the Rising Scholars Network, programs that provide services for current and formerly incarcerated students
Friday’s proposal also includes a nearly 8% cut for the California Student Aid Commission, but its programs would still receive a hefty $3.1 billion. Most of that money — $2.6 billion — would go toward the Cal Grant program, which provides aid awards for roughly 417,000 students. The remainder would fund the Middle Class Scholarship and the Golden State Teacher Grant Program, which aids students studying to become teachers who commit to working in high-need schools.
“The governor’s proposed budget recognizes the role of financial aid in students accessing the life-changing opportunities of California’s higher education institutions,” Daisy Gonzales, executive director of the commission, said in a statement.
Christopher J. Nellum, the executive director of EdTrust-West, said the January budget maintains the state’s commitment to educational equity. But he said the state should “aggressively invest more in education and keep California focused on ensuring any new resources advance racial equity” in anticipation of the incoming Trump administration,which has signaled its opposition to diversity programs.
Emmanuel Rodriguez, the senior director of policy and advocacy for California at The Institute for College Access & Success (TICAS), said in a statement that the state must also ensure the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education is adequately equipped “to shield Californians from anticipated federal regulatory changes that will leave students more vulnerable than ever to predatory, low-quality colleges.” The bureau has the authority to disciplinepostsecondary institutions if they don’t provide the promised education or prove to be fraudulent.
At Sonoma State University, lower enrollment is worsening financial cutbacks.
Credit: Ally Valiente / EdSource
When Kaitlin Anderson committed to play golf for Sonoma State University, she posed proudly in a Seawolves sweatshirt.But last week, school officials announced that they plan to end all NCAA sports next year, part of a bid to balance the school’s budget amid sliding enrollment and anticipated cuts to state funding. Anderson, a business marketing major from Peoria, Arizona, now is thinking that she might leave the campus.
“I will not be coming back here” if the golf program is eliminated, said Anderson, a first-year student. “I think this school will not do well after doing all this because half the reason we have so many people is because of athletics.”
Sonoma State, one of the 23 campuses in the California State University (CSU) system, is perhaps the most extreme example of how public universities in the state are tightening their belts in the wake of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s January budget proposal and troubling enrollment drops at some campuses. The governor’s plan calls for a nearly 8% reduction in state funding in 2025-26 for both CSU and the University of California (UC), while also deferring previously promised budget increases of 5% until 2027-28.
The governor’s proposal is not final, and later revisions could paint a rosier financial picture for higher education. But CSU leaders have warned that the plan, if implemented, couldresult in fewer course sections and larger class sizes, along with some cuts in student services.
Sonoma State has been taking in less money from tuition and fees as its student body has shrunk 39% over the past decade due to changes in local demographics and some continuing fallout from wildfires in the region. In addition to the sports closures, it is also planning to close six academic departments and eliminate two dozen majors in an effort to plug a nearly $24 million budget deficit.
Several other CSU campuses are warning about possible impacts of the governor’s proposal.Stanislaus State, which serves more than 9,000 students in the San Joaquin Valley, could face a $20 million deficit after accounting for the January budget proposal, a Jan. 22 email from the president’s office said. Sacramento State, with a student body of more than 30,000, anticipates making a $45 million one-time cut. CSU Channel Islands officials have outlined plans to permanently reduce the Ventura County campus’s budget by $17 million in recurring expenses in 2025-26, saying that expenses per-student exceed the state average by thousands of dollars.
Reduced state support could be missed most at schools like Sonoma State, one of 11 CSU campuses where enrollment has dropped over the last decade, reducing revenue from tuition and fees. Enrollment this fall was also a mixed bag, rising year-over-year at 15 CSU campuses and falling at eight.
At the Sonoma State campus in Rohnert Park, students responded to the news about the end to NCAA Division II intercollegiate sports and academic cuts with a mixture of anger and disbelief. A video published by the Press Democrat newspaper in nearby Santa Rosa shows an emotionally charged town hall meeting among student-athletes, coaches and university leaders. “So you think that we’re easily replaceable?” one attendee asked interim President Emily Cutrer. (“No, that’s not what I was saying,” she replied.) As tensions escalated, students erupted into bitter laughter and shouted interjections. “Do we get our money back for the semester?” one student asked, prompting applause.
A group called Save Seawolves Athletics has filed a federal civil rights complaint arguing that Sonoma State’s plan to end the school’s NCAA Division II athletics program will impact minority students disproportionately, spokesperson and assistant men’s soccer coach Benjamin Ziemer said. The group is also considering filing a lawsuit.
Signs of belt-tightening were also common this fall at San Francisco State, where enrollment is down 26% over the decade. Students and faculty members in December protested academic job cuts by staging a mock funeral march. Earlier in the fall, the university’s J. Paul Leonard Library announced that it expects to trim its budget 30% over the next two years, reducing its spending on resources like books and journals. The university offered 443 fewer course sections in fall 2024 than in fall 2023, a decline of nearly 11%, according to university data. President Lynn Mahoney said in a December message to the campus that the school is planning for “significant reductions in the 2025-26 budget” totaling about $25 million.
Leaders at California State University, Dominguez Hills — where enrollment has fallen a slighter 3% since 2015, but 20% from its peak in fall 2020 — have already whittled $19 million from the school’s base budget since the 2023-24 school year. If state funding is slashed in 2025-26, campus officials have outlined plans to shave another $12 million, and have contemplated reducing the number of course sections, among other things.
“I don’t want to cut out Psych 101, but if we have a thousand less students here, then maybe I don’t need 20 sections of Psych 101; maybe I only need 12,” President Thomas A. Parham said at a Nov. 7 budget town hall. “What we are trying to do is reduce the number of sections and, in some cases, fill those higher, so that instead of 15 students there might be 25 in them. But we are still trying to keep the academic integrity intact, even as we work smarter around the limited resources we have.”
Some faculty and students at Dominguez Hills are worried. Elenna Hernandez, a double major in sociology and Chicano studies entering the last semester of her senior year, said the tighter finances have been evident at La Casita, a Latino cultural center where she works on campus. She said La Casita, which receives campus funding, isn’t staying open as late as it has in the past and received less funding for its Day of the Dead celebration. The center is important to her because it runs workshops where students can learn about Latino history and culture.
“A lot of students don’t have access to this education,” she said, noting that more than 60% of the student body is Latino. “The classroom doesn’t teach it, necessarily, unless you’re in an ethnic studies class.”
Stanislaus State University President Britt Rios-Ellis said last week in an email to the campus that the university is considering several ways to balance its budget, including reducing the number of courses and looking to save money on utility costs.
Miranda Gonzalez, a fourth-year business administration major at Stanislaus State and president of the school’s Associated Students student government organization, said she initially was surprised that CSU would need to trim its budget at all in light of a decision to increase tuition 6% each year starting this past fall and ending in the 2028-29 school year. Full-time undergraduate students currently pay $6,084 for the academic year, plus an additional $420 per semester if they are from out of state.
“It was kind of a shock that the CSU was going to be cutting their budget when they just raised tuition as well,” she said, adding that lawmakers and campus leaders should remember that any reduction “ultimately impacts the lives of our students, faculty and staff.”
State funding is not the only source of revenue for the CSU and UC systems, which also get money from student tuition and fees, the federal government and other sources like housing, parking and philanthropies.
The revenue picture is not gloomy at every Cal State campus.
Cal State Fullerton, which has the largest student body in the system, saw enrollment grow 4% to roughly 43,000 students between 2023 and 2024. The steady growth provides the campus with a revenue cushionthat has potentially saved jobs, campus President Ronald S. Rochon said.
“We are at a record enrollment, and because of the enrollment, we continue to have the kind of revenue to keep our lights on, people employed and our campus moving forward,” Rochon said in a Nov. 7 presentation to the university’s Academic Senate. “This is something that we all should be taking very, very seriously. We should not rest on our laurels with regard to where we are with enrollment.”
The California Faculty Association, which represents CSU employees including tenure-track faculty, lecturers and librarians, argued last spring that the university system should tap its financial reserves to balance shortfalls. CSU officials, however, say that reserves leave them only enough money to cover 34 days of operations systemwide.
UC’s fiscal outlook is less dire. Enrollment is stable across its 10 campuses and is even increasing at several. Some campuses, like UC Berkeley, may not have to make cuts at all to department budgets. A Berkeley spokesperson cited increased revenues from investments and noted that Berkeley will benefit from a systemwide 10% tuition hike for out-of-state students that kicks in this year. Berkeley enrolls about 3,300 undergraduates from other states and another 3,200 international students.
Other campuses, however, likely would have to make cuts under Newsom’s proposed budget, including to core academic services. The system as a whole faces a potential $504 million budget hole,due to the possible drop in state funding paired with rising costs. “I think this budget challenge does require us to focus more on some campus budgets than we have perhaps traditionally,” Michael Cohen, who chairs the finance committee of UC’s board of regents, said at a meeting last week.
UC Riverside has already saved some money on salariesbecause of retirements and other employee turnover, said Gerry Bomotti, vice chancellor for budget and planning at the campus. Still, the campus could face a deficit next year because ofincreasing compensation costs on top of possible cuts in state funding. Bomotti said the campus will try to minimize anyharm to academic units if reductions are needed.
“Our priority obviously is serving students and supporting our faculty and our enrollment. We tend to always give that priority,” he said.
California’s 116 community colleges, which enrolled more than 1.4 million students as of fall 2023, could face a more favorable 2025-26 budget year than the state’s two university systems. The colleges would get about $230 million in new general funding through Proposition 98, the formula used to allocate money from California’s general fund to K-12 schools and community colleges.
By some measures, the past decade has seen more state and local dollars flowing into California’s public colleges and universities. State and local spending on higher education in California has been at a historic high in recent years on a per-student basis, hitting $14,622 per full-time equivalent student in 2023, up from $10,026 in 2014, according to an analysis by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, which takes into account funding for both two-year and four-year institutions. Looking at four-year schools alone, the association calculated that California spent $3,500 more per student than the U.S. average in 2023. Living costs and salaries, however, are often higher in California than in many other states.
Marc Duran, a member of the EdSource California Student Journalism Corps, contributed to this story.
This article has been updated with the correct spelling of Kaitlin Anderson’s last name and to clarify her plans if the golf program is eliminated.
