When you say you go to WashU, how do people respond? How does that feel? The best feeling, we think, is when someone understands the top-notch quality of education given here. That we have the opportunity to receive this education is a gift and a privilege.  

But WashU’s recent financial decisions have hurt our education and will be detrimental to the education of future students. We need WashU to prioritize education. 

Here’s what’s happening: WashU is wasting money on educationally irrelevant investments, taxing Arts & Sciences (and its other schools) to make up for its deficits, and defunding what matters.  

The waste is profound. As of December 2025, StudLife reported that WashU has spent over $265 million on Workday. This year, they’ve spent $23.8 million, plus yearly licensing fees of $5.7 million. Workday’s many flaws are too numerous to fully list but include: not being able to cross-list classes, inaccurately counting completed credits, useless course guide search functions, and an unintuitive, complicated interface. When staff try to resolve these issues, their requests initiate weeks-long opaque processes.  

Perhaps the failures of Workday as an HR and finance system-cum-course registrar comes down to its design: Workday touts itself as “unifying HR and Finance on an open, trusted platform powered by AI, [to deliver] high-impact outcomes our customers can count on.” In its own words, it’s built for business, not education. 

While bleeding cash on Workday, WashU continues to invest elsewhere. It recently bought Fontbonne University ($39 million) and announced purchases of the St. Louis College of Pharmacy and 6200 Forsyth, a soon-to-be new administrative building.  

Though Chancellor Andrew D. Martin has blamed the University’s financial issues on Trump’s attacks on higher education, these issues stem from WashU’s decisions and policies. WashU’s Central Fiscal Unit (CFU) bills the University’s schools for services rendered, like the transition to Workday. Though the University blames school costs and federal funding cuts for the $7.4 million deficit in 2026, higher bills from the CFU for the fourth year in a row indicate this deficit must be related to financial decisions that preceded the Trump administration. 

To cover its deficit, WashU has instituted austerity measures. In fall 2025, the University eliminated nearly 200 jobs while implementing massive layoffs during increasingly financially unstable times for many. (Is this what it means to be “In St. Louis, For St. Louis”?) Heartbreakingly, these layoffs included subject librarians who had been with WashU for decades. These experts were unceremoniously fired with only a six days’ notice and required to leave campus the same day that they received that notice. This outrageous treatment shows us something about how WashU thinks about education.  

Through our contacts in the Washington University Graduate Workers Unions (WUGWU), the Faculty Senate, and WashU’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, we have learned that many Arts & Sciences faculty, staff, and graduate students did not receive standard keeping-up-with-inflation raises at the end of 2025. This is painful for graduate students,  most of whom are already paid $8,000 below the cost of living for a single childless person in St. Louis, despite the fact that many graduate students have dependents. When the Faculty Senate asked the administration, WashU refused to confirm whether central administration officers and the executive resource committee received their raises. 

WUGWU also found that many graduate students early in their programs have had their six-year funding packages reduced to five, which also applies to all incoming PhD students. And the number of students admitted per cohort has been reduced by nearly 50%. WUGWU also found that master’s-seeking graduate students have seen financial aid cuts and tuition increases.  

For undergraduates, the University increased tuition to $71,310 per year excluding fees. It is a slap in the face of any tuition-paying student, who now gets less for more. 

Then there is the disappearing act of Arts & Sciences’ new building, Riney Hall. Despite breaking ground on the project in spring 2025, WashU abruptly changed course over the summer. Students arrived back on campus as if no construction had ever started. 

While Martin gestured at Trump policies to justify Riney’s cancellation, no specific budget numbers have been provided. Given the purchase of Fontbonne and other announcements, one cannot help but suppose that what had been slated as the new home of the Department of African and African American Studies and the Department of Sociology was deemed too politically risky, rather than too expensive. Riney’s cancellation co-occurred with the abortive effort to establish a task force to explore the consolidation of six departments and programs, all of which engage with politically charged subject matter in today’s anti-intellectual atmosphere.  

For graduate and undergraduate students, this means that we’ll have fewer courses to choose from, taught by less qualified instructors. There will be fewer qualified graduate student instructors (many of whom teach and assist in undergraduate courses) and fewer associate professors and non-tenure-track faculty. Because of a shrinking graduate school, graduate students will have fewer peers to learn from and grow with and subsequently smaller professional networks. We’ll be less prepared for the job market. We’ll be scrambling to pay our bills, feed ourselves, and, for many, care for our families.

Graduate students now receiving five years of funding will miss out on valuable training and be less equipped for a job market in academia as they compete with those who were given six years to complete their degrees (like at Emory and Vanderbilt, and most other R1 institutions across the country).  

These actions demonstrate a deprioritization of education. WashU has prioritized administrative buildings over spaces for scholarship like Riney Hall. It has invested a quarter of a billion dollars into an integrated HR-finance-course-registration system (which still struggles to deliver), yet fired some of the most expert librarians on campus. It is defunding Arts & Sciences programs.

We see these decisions echoed in other WashU deprioritization of genuine learning, like the embrace of artificial “intelligence” and treating cheating with modest consequences for students and cumbersome processes for instructors.   

We believe that education is a gift of time to become a deeper version of yourself. To learn how to think. To learn something about the world. To learn how to engage with that world in a meaningful, careful, intentional way. WashU must prioritize genuine education.