UC Berkeley has identified $28 million in potential savings by eliminating work that is not “mission-critical,” according to a statement released by Kelly Sparks, vice chancellor for finance and chief financial officer .
Across the country, higher education is grappling with rising costs and federal funding uncertainties connected to the second President Donald Trump administration.
UC Berkeley is not exempt from these challenges and is moving to a multiyear framework for financial sustainability, which includes reduced expenditures for some campus programs. Campus identified these potential savings as part of its Expense Growth Management initiative, or EGM.
During the process to identify where spending could be cut, “Campus leaders were asked to consider what activities they could stop or scale back,” said campus spokesperson Dan Mogulof in an email. “Ideas were submitted so they could be reviewed for potential collective impact before action was taken.”
Of the $28 million in potential savings identified, Spark’s statement said $6 million has already been realized.
Campus did not specify how it reached that figure. “Decisions were left to the various colleges, schools, and administrative units,” Mogulof said in the email. Sparks’ statement also noted that during budget review, administration asked campus leaders to prioritize “mission-critical work.”
What campus defines as “mission-critical” is not exactly clear.
“The reality of our budget situation requires us to make tradeoffs. To ensure that we can fulfill our educational, research, and service missions at the high level expected of UC Berkeley, we necessarily need to consider reduced spending on activities that don’t contribute significantly to our educational, research, and service missions,” Mogulof said in an email.
Campus recently confirmed that it had asked the Student Learning Center to reduce its overall budget by 5% for the current fiscal year. In August, it cut staff at the Student Parent Center as part of a broader restructuring of support services designed to address a structural budget deficit.
Mogulof did not confirm whether these cuts were part of the realized savings.
The EGM also held expense growth under 4%, according to Sparks’ statement.
“The Expense Growth Management (EGM) is designed to allow divisions to regulate their divisional expenditure growth year-over-year, ensuring alignment with overall projected campus revenue and supporting long-term deficit reduction,” Mogulof said in an email. “This framework balances financial accountability with collective campus financial health.”
Campus hopes the framework will help balance the budget without the need for drastic spending cuts.
“Our costs are rising faster than our revenues, and we also face uncertainty in federal funding. But what’s important to know is that Berkeley is addressing these same challenges from a position of strength,” Sparks said in her statement.
Part of the framework is coming up with innovative ideas for generating revenue, such as the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Fund, the UC system’s first venture capital fund. Campus also plans on “extending equity ownership opportunities across additional campus programs, including SkyDeck and BAIR Commons, and pioneering initiatives like the VC-sponsored research program to attract new external capital,” according to Sparks’ statement.
Sparks’ statement also shared some goals for the future, including analyzing the costs of instruction and administrative operations, a Recharge simplification pilot, which would simplify a program that provides campus resources for commercial uses and increase accountability and transparency in the budget process.
A Berkeley budget book, which will provide insight into the state of the campus budget and its divisional budgets, is expected to be released by late November.