On Thursday, legislators from the Senate and Assembly hosted a joint hearing on higher education, where they heard from representatives of colleges and universities. The hearing came after a rally earlier this week at New Jersey City University where students, professors and elected officials urged Gov. Phil Murphy to allocate more state funding to the struggling university.
Financial problems at Bloomfield College almost caused that school to shut down before a merger with Montclair State University allowed Bloomfield to stay open, but with the loss of dozens of employees.
At the hearing, Secretary of Higher Education Brian Bridges, said, “Declining enrollment is one of the biggest challenges and declining state support. Every state spends less on higher education than it did twenty years ago, and that is a national trend that New Jersey is not immune to. And also the institutions are facing increased pressures. … The cost of doing business is just a lot more expensive for universities [than] even five years ago, let alone ten or twenty years ago. So the dollar investments that are coming from the state tuition dollars and other cells just don’t go as far as they used to.”
