NJ Private Colleges Fight Back Against State Aid Cuts

New Jersey’s 13 private colleges are staring down a proposed cut that would drop their state operating aid from $9.6 million to $5.6 million, and the people running those schools aren’t staying quiet about it.

That’s a $4 million reduction. In one budget cycle.

Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s $60.7 billion spending plan landed the blow, and the Independent Colleges and Universities of New Jersey came out swinging fast. Steve Reynolds, the organization’s president, didn’t soften it. “We’re getting cut disproportionately with the publics, who we compete with,” he said. He’s right to be angry. New Jersey law actually requires that private college aid equal 25% of the per-student support given to state schools, but the statute includes an escape clause that’s been punched through repeatedly: only “so long as funds are available.” That phrase has done a lot of work over the years.

Full funding under the formula would put the number somewhere between $25 million and $30 million annually. The best these schools ever got in a single year going back to 2010 was $16.5 million, and that peak came in fiscal year 2024. Every year since has been worse.

The $5.6 million Sherrill is proposing would be the lowest figure since 2021. Cold comfort: it’s still more than the three years during the 2010s when these schools received absolutely nothing.

David Rousseau, vice president of the organization, said the comparison to public universities is what makes this cut especially hard to defend. “We educate 63,000 students, employ 20,000 people. Our faculty and the people who go to these schools are taxpayers of New Jersey,” he told reporters. Worth sitting with that number: 63,000 students across 13 campuses, competing every enrollment cycle against subsidized county colleges and Rutgers, which aren’t getting their base aid trimmed at all under this budget. Four-year public universities and county colleges both see their operating aid held flat. The independents don’t.

There’s another layer that’s getting less attention. Sherrill’s budget also eliminates several supplemental line items that used to send additional dollars to private schools. Those weren’t rounding errors. They were real money that smaller campuses counted on to stay price-competitive with institutions that don’t rely on tuition revenue the same way.

Sherrill, a Democrat who took office in January 2026, has framed the $60.7 billion budget as a structural deficit fix that doesn’t lean on broad tax increases. She’s pulling back across most of state government. But the private colleges’ argument is straightforward: if public universities aren’t absorbing comparable cuts to their base aid, why are the independents being asked to carry more of the load?

The lobbying muscle isn’t there the way it is for Rutgers or the county college network, which has organized support built into nearly every legislative district across the state. Private colleges don’t move votes the same way. But 63,000 students and 20,000 employees aren’t invisible either. Those people live in legislative districts too.

The full picture, via NJ Monitor, makes clear the trend line has been heading the wrong direction since 2024. Reynolds and Rousseau are betting the legislature notices before the budget closes.