Chancellor Syverud Updates University Senate on Budget, Enrollment and Forever Orange Campaign

Thank you, Professor Nordquist. I’ll be brief. I will provide updates on budget, enrollment, and on the successful close of the Forever Orange Campaign, a little bit on Los Angeles, and then I’ll take questions after the provost as usual.

On the budget front, the good news is we are running a balanced budget in FY25. We’re six months into that, almost seven. The challenge is that it is going to be difficult to do the same thing for FY26, which starts on July 1, 2025. It is going to be difficult because of significant headwinds, including health care costs, labor costs, the changing landscape in athletics, and master’s and international enrollment. I think producing a balanced budget for FY26, which we are required to do over the course of this semester, will require or really mandate some tough choices to keep our university strong, but we’re working through it.

On enrollment, I am pleased to report that both new first-year and transfer undergraduate enrollment for spring 2025 exceeded goals, with wonderful groups of students This semester Syracuse received 35 new starting first-year students in January. Our goal was 30. And we received 90 new transfer students. Our goal was 75.

Looking toward next year, this past Jan. 5 was the deadline for fall 2025 undergraduate first-year applications. Once again, for the fifth consecutive year, Syracuse University received a record number of first-year undergraduate applications. More than 46,000 have applied to be part of our academic community.

Undergraduate transfer applications for fall 2025 also are trending up from last year at this time.

There is a lot of work still to do before we welcome our first-year undergraduate class in August. But these are really good signs that we have a strong pool of applicants. It’s at a time where a growing number of our peers do not, and are facing undergraduate enrollment shortfalls and much more budget uncertainty as a result.

Turning to the fundraising campaign, the Forever Orange Campaign, which we launched publicly in November 2019, the campaign closed on Dec. 31, 2024, a couple weeks ago. The campaign exceeded its goals in every category. The total raised was $1.59 billion, $90 million dollars beyond our goal. We reached this milestone with support from 125,699 unique donors, which was nearly 700 donors above our goal. And alumni engagement in the University over the course of the campaign increased to 20.5%. That’s roughly a doubling of alumni engagement over where we were at the start of the campaign, and half a percent above our goal. Most importantly, it means thousands of alumni from every school and college are now more involved and invested in the future of Syracuse University.

I am really grateful to a lot of people who helped us get to this point. That includes Chief Advancement Officer Tracy Barlok and all the hardworking team in Advancement, but also the deans in the schools and colleges and their teams. Thanks also to all the faculty and staff across the University who shared their groundbreaking work, their stories, their teaching, who helped and mentored students, who inspired alumni, parents, friends, and a very substantial number of current students, to give. I also have to acknowledge the hard work of so many of our students who let us tell their stories and who helped us in reaching out to donors, alumni, and friends. I think the campaign has changed the University significantly, not just in state-of-the-art new facilities that advance our academic goals, but also in real improvements to the student experience and lots of initiatives to support the faculty, including new chairs and research funds. We’re going talk more later in the spring about what comes next for fundraising. But for now, it seems like a good time to just celebrate what was by far the most successful fundraising campaign in the University’s history.

The last thing I want to say is I think it’s important for all of us to acknowledge not just the horrible fires that have devastated the Los Angeles area, but how many members of our community have been involved. We had many students in our SULA center a week prior to classes starting here on campus, at the height of the fires. Fortunately, the new SULA center, and the areas where our students reside, were never in evacuation zones. But many of our alumni, many of our students from the LA area, and some of our staff were very seriously affected. It was a lot of work to ensure we had plans for taking care of our students and our alumni and friends in case we needed to move quickly.

I want to thank the academic affairs team, public safety team, and communications team, who worked closely with the people on the ground in Los Angeles for Syracuse University, and especially the dedicated faculty and staff in the center, who focused on our students when they had their own serious worries. We are very fortunate to have that team in Los Angeles.

I wish everyone a successful spring semester. I am looking forward to questions after the provost’s remarks. Thank you.