On Thursday, Nov. 13, Hamline’s Faculty Senate held its monthly meeting in the Giddens/Alumni Learning Center (GLC). The bulk of the meeting focused on Hamline’s budget plans for the upcoming year and some of the strategies Hamline is considering to cut costs and increase revenue.

Hamline’s student body is a large source of income to the university, primarily in tuition but also through secondary means like work study programs, which was singled out as an area that could be boosted to bring in more money for both Hamline and its students.

The other student-related budgeting changes the university discussed were implementing residency requirements, which are policies that require students to have been residents of Minnesota for a certain amount of time before they’d be eligible for some forms of financial aid, and the scaling back of the Hamline Promise, which has already been recently rebranded as the Piper Promise.

The Piper Promise changes mean that incoming eligible students in 2026 would still have the first year of tuition covered by the Promise, but for their remaining years at Hamline that would be the maximum amount the Promise would cover — meaning that students would need to find other means of covering the cost of tuition increases.

“We’re taking a look at some changes to the [Piper Promise],” Hamline Chief Financial Officer Susan Kerry, who presented the budget before the Senate, said. “Where that hurts us is because we do a four-year guarantee on that. So if we promise the first year tuition and the students have to handle the incremental changes over the year, that really helps us a lot in terms of being able to afford to offer that program to so many students.”

Regarding potential new residency requirements, Kerry said that Hamline wasn’t sure if the Hamline brand was strong enough to make up for potential losses in student attendance, but that it was “getting a hard look.”

Provost and Dean of the Faculty Wesley Kisting also covered budgeting when he spoke before the Senate. Kisting has been instructing the Division Chairs of Hamline’s different academic departments to prepare for an upcoming budget hearing where the divisions will, among other things, present both plans for growth and backup plans for a 1-3% reduction should the need arise.

This follows after last year, when “every single area of academic careers was cut 3%,” according to Kisting.