Illustration: Marella Moon Albanese
At last count, New Jersey had 58 colleges and universities, from Princeton University, a private institution with a multibillion dollar endowment, to taxpayer-funded research giants like Rutgers and Rowan, to for-profit specialty schools such as the Kubert School of cartoon and graphic art, to 18 county community colleges. Many of them are scraping for an ever-shrinking pool of students and public dollars.
One of the state’s leading progressive educators says it’s all a bit too much.
“The higher ed environment we have in New Jersey is simply not sustainable, and we better get serious about fixing it—fast,” says Michael J. Avaltroni, a chemist who is now in his second year as president of Fairleigh Dickinson University.
“Some schools are hemorrhaging money. Many students and families can’t afford tuition. The workplace and economy have changed dramatically. Yet we’re doing the same things we’ve been doing for decades—centuries even.”
Avaltroni’s views reflect the growing concerns of college administrators, elected officials and students, who say change can’t come fast enough to the state’s higher-education landscape.
Advocates say there’s too much competition among schools and not nearly enough collaboration. They say there are too many schools in too many silos offering the same courses and the same degrees, too many students departing for cheaper alternatives out of state, and too little taxpayer money for community colleges at a time when inflation-strapped families are desperately seeking the skills—and certification—to get good 21st-century jobs.
“Do we have too many colleges in New Jersey?’’ Avaltroni asks. “That’s a touchy issue. Let me just say there is too much capacity and too much competition. We’ve got to do better at working together instead of just raising tuition. We can certainly do better building partnerships between community colleges and four-year schools.’’
Community colleges face funding gaps
New Jersey rightly prides itself on the achievements of its K-12 public schools, whose students consistently test among the best in America. Princeton and Rutgers feature elite faculty, world-class facilities, and prestigious records of cutting-edge research. But state spending on community colleges here has lagged behind most other states. In 2024, New Jersey ranked 46th among the 47 states with community colleges in terms of state support per full-time student, providing $2,506 each—an astounding 71 percent below the national median of $8,555, according to data reported by the New Jersey Legislature.
This year, Governor Phil Murphy’s administration threatened to cut $20 million from county colleges, even though those colleges’ leaders had actually requested a $20 million increase in state support.
While the threatened cuts were restored at the last minute as part of a $56 billion budget deal, educators were clearly frustrated at what they saw as indifference from Trenton.
“I had the opportunity to testify before this committee 20 years ago, and at that point, my college was getting $6.4 million in state aid,” Steve Rose, president of Passaic County Community College, told the Senate Budget Committee in testimony last spring. “If this cut goes through, I will be getting $6.4 million from the state.”
While state support for county colleges did rise by $35 million over the previous three years, that increase came after 13 years of flat funding following the economic emergency of 2008 and the ensuing recession.
Aaron Fichtner, president of the New Jersey Council of County Colleges, says the funding gap remains critical. “We’re starting to head in the right direction, but after years and years of flat funding, and now the stress of continued inflation, there is real need out there,’’ Fichtner says. “We’re basically trying to run schools in 2024 with resource levels from 2002.’’
The stress on county colleges is only part of a bigger financial squeeze on many four-year schools and the state higher education system in general. Alarm bells have been sounding for more than a decade.
State college aid plummets
In 2013, New Jersey Public Policy Perspective (NJPP), the state’s leading progressive think tank, charted chronic underfunding of state colleges stemming back to the mid-1990s, when spending on higher education comprised 8.4 percent of the state budget. By 2012, NJPP researchers found, spending had dropped to just around 6 percent of the budget, where it remains.
Over the same period, state support for Rutgers University fell by 5.6 percent in real dollars. Adjusted for inflation, support for Rutgers fell a whopping 85 percent in less than two decades.Inevitably, state-supported schools responded with big tuition increases.
Nearby states like Maryland, New York and Connecticut, meanwhile, increased their higher education spending and honed a competitive edge over the Garden State. The average cost of tuition and fees in public New Jersey colleges is now $15,367 for in-state residents and $26,632 for out-of-state students—which is about 25 percent higher than the national average, according to the website UnivStats.
“A growing amount of college costs have been shifted to students and their families, with tuition rising much faster than household incomes and families increasingly borrowing huge sums to pay for higher education,’’ NJPP researchers wrote. ‘’New Jersey is in danger of being left behind in the competition for high-paying jobs and businesses seeking well-educated workers.’’
Every year, it seems, the chronic financial pressure on New Jersey colleges and universities brings out deeper and more worrisome stress fractures.
Revenue at Rider University in Lawrenceville, for example, dropped more than $20 million—some 16 percent—since the Covid pandemic struck a little more than four years ago. Brookdale Community College in Monmouth County was forced to eliminate vacant positions and consolidate others in a $1.4 million cut in planned spending.
In 2023, William Paterson University was forced to cut 266 jobs to balance its budget. Two years ago, New Jersey City University made deep cuts in staffing levels as it slashed academic and sports programs. With the school declaring a financial emergency under a ballooning deficit, its president resigned, and the school received a $10 million state bailout.
Tiny Bloomfield College, which saw enrollment plunge during the pandemic, was forced to merge with Montclair State University in 2023 after years of debt and financial uncertainty. The 156-year-old school primarily serves low-income Black and Hispanic students, with most having a family income of just over $30,000.
The financial challenges aren’t just hitting smaller colleges; the 169-year-old College of New Jersey, a respected and selective state school that enrolled more than 7,000 students this year on a $270 million annual budget, has chalked up $350 million in long-term debt.
Former TCNJ president Kathryn Foster told lawmakers in 2023 that the debt stemmed from borrowing for facilities upgrades and other improvements. “We are all wrestling with these financial-stability questions, whether you’re a very strong institution or whether you’re some of the institutions that have been the canaries in the coal mine,” she said.
Other big challenges deepen the sense of financial gloom.
Looming on the horizon is an enrollment cliff, expected to arrive in 2026, and worried New Jersey college administrators are already sweating.
The cliff, a sharp drop-off in the number of high school graduates, is expected to last until 2037. The dip, experts tell us, stems from a decline in birth rates during the Great Recession of 2007-2009. According to the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education, New Jersey will face a 6 percent decline in the number of high school graduates and, many fear, a corresponding dip in college enrollments.
For New Jersey—a state that loses more than half of its college-bound high school graduates to other states—the brain drain could be critical.
Minorities are losing out
Another cliff is the one facing New Jersey’s racial minorities. A report from the New Jersey Council of County Colleges found that the lack of sustained investment has stymied economic mobility for all Jerseyans, but especially for the poorest and most vulnerable.
The report cites data showing that, while 60 percent of all New Jersey adults have a postsecondary credential or degree, just 37 percent of Black residents and 30 percent of Hispanic residents have one.
Almost 60 percent of white and 80 percent of Asian and Pacific Islander residents, meanwhile, list some college certification on their resumes.
Community college opportunity grants, championed by the Murphy administration, have made an impact on the equity gap, providing assistance in the 2022-2023 school year to some 12,000 low-income students.
But Fichtner, president of the state’s county college council, says a lot more must be done to relieve the problem and the financial stress on higher education in general, especially at a time when employers are demanding a better-educated workforce and more targeted training.
“We have to get more people to postsecondary education and degrees. We’ve got to address huge equity gaps in…attainment in New Jersey,’’ he says. ‘’We can do that if we work together, but it’s really about finding new models of collaboration, and we’ve got to get away from a competitive mindset.’’
FDU president Avaltroni, who, in 2009, pioneered the creation of the university’s School of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Florham Park, says collaboration among county colleges, traditional four-year universities and, increasingly, employers, is now the best way out of Jersey’s higher-education squeeze.
Avaltroni, an upbeat innovator, sees more schools working with corporate leaders to provide tailored career training. He sees more high school students earning college credits targeted for today’s workplace and a postsecondary world where schools can’t be everything to every student.
“I look around and see an industry in desperate need of reinvention,’’ Avaltroni says. “The current business model needs to be fixed—it needs to be built to truly serve the needs of today’s learners and tomorrow’s workforce.”
But he sees a way forward: “All of the challenges provide us with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to move away from the status quo, questioning every assumption about how universities should operate, who they should serve, and what the ultimate endgame is.”
Jeff Pillets is a journalist based in Trenton who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2008.
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