University of Vermont President Marlene Tromp delivered the school’s first “State of the University” address Tuesday morning, telling trustees, faculty and staff that UVM has closed the $12 million budget deficit it projected in May, that undergraduate enrollment has fallen as expected, and that the university will expand free tuition for Vermont families, launch a private fundraising campaign, and stand up a new division devoted to economic development across the state.
“We will not be daunted in the face of the challenges before us,” she said.
We took the claims one at a time and checked them against the university’s own published data.
What This Means for a Vermont Family
The one announcement with a direct effect on Vermont households is the expansion of the UVM Promise, the program that lets some Vermont students attend UVM without paying tuition.
Who qualifies: admitted, dependent Vermont undergraduates whose parents’ adjusted gross income — the income figure at the bottom of a federal tax return, after certain deductions — is at or below the threshold.
The threshold now: $100,000. Beginning Fall 2027: $125,000.
What it covers: tuition and the comprehensive fee — the mandatory annual charge every full-time UVM student pays for student services, health services and campus programs.
What it does not cover: housing and food, which run about $16,400 a year on campus. Over four years, that is roughly $65,000 a family still owes.
How to apply: there is no separate application. Apply to UVM, file for financial aid by the university’s priority deadline, and apply for the grant from the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation, or VSAC.
Where to check: uvm.edu/studentfinancialservices/uvm-promise
One design detail matters and has not been reported. The UVM Promise is what financial aid offices call a last-dollar program. A student’s federal Pell grant, Vermont VSAC grant and outside scholarships are applied to the tuition bill first. UVM writes a check only for the gap that remains.
The alternative design is called first-dollar: the university pays tuition off the top, and the student’s federal and state grant money is then free to go toward housing and food. That version would dent the $16,400. UVM chose the other one.
What Checks Out
Research funding rose. UVM reports $222.6 million in extramural research funding — money awarded from outside the university — for fiscal year 2026, roughly $15 million more than the year before. In a year when federal science funding was cut across the country, holding that line is a real result, and Tromp is entitled to say so.
Philanthropy had a strong year. The UVM Foundation secured $96.39 million, the second-best fundraising year in the university’s history, from more than 20,000 donors.
The demographic cliff is real. Projections from the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education show northeastern states — New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire — facing an average 17 percent decline in high school graduates. Fewer American babies were born starting around 2007, and those children are now the college-age cohort. Every university in the region is competing for a shrinking pool.
The enrollment numbers are on the record. The freshman figure — about 2,600 first-year students against a usual target of about 3,000 — came from university spokesperson Adam White in response to a reporter’s question, not from the address itself. But UVM gave the number when asked, and it is the sharpest figure in the whole picture.
The deficit is closed. Tromp said the $12 million gap was eliminated by not filling vacant staff positions and by cutting operational inefficiencies, and that no faculty were laid off. We have no reason to doubt it, and she named the method rather than leaving it at the result.
What Checks Out, With an Asterisk
“Limited state funding.” True — and it is Vermont’s own decision. Vermont gave UVM $52.5 million against a $776 million operating budget in fiscal 2023, about 6.8 percent, among the lowest state appropriations to any flagship university in the country, and the most recent share Compass has verified. That low figure is the deliberate result of a policy choice dating to 1971, when Republican Gov. Deane Davis opted to hold direct state aid to Vermont’s public colleges at traditional low levels. It became known as the Vermont Model, and it has survived every administration since. Tromp’s complaint is legitimate; it is also 55 years old, and it belongs to the Legislature.
Recruiting Vermonters is hard. True as far as it goes, but the constraint is not admissions. As Compass Vermont reported in July 2025, UVM admitted 85 percent of its Vermont first-year applicants — and 94 percent of its out-of-state applicants. For the Fall 2023 class, UVM received more than 28,000 applications from non-residents and just over 1,000 from Vermonters. UVM is not turning Vermonters away. It is receiving 28 out-of-state applications for every Vermont one.
Tuition-free, but not room and board. The UVM Promise covers tuition and the comprehensive fee. On-campus housing and food are about $16,400 a year, and are not covered.
One figure was reported two ways. The 10,800 enrollment number appeared as the university’s total enrollment in one account and as an undergraduate count in another. UVM’s own catalogue puts Fall 2025 at roughly 11,600 undergraduates, 1,780 graduate students and 490 medical students — about 13,870 in all. The 10,800 fits as an undergraduate figure and a 7 percent decline. No total enrollment number for Fall 2026 has been published.
The Part That Runs Past This Year
Three things in Tuesday’s numbers do not stop at the end of this fiscal year.
The deficit closure works once. Eliminating positions that were already empty produces savings without a layoff, which is why nobody felt it this year. It is also a lever with one pull. There is no second set of vacant jobs to leave unfilled next year.
The smaller class comes back three more times. This is the arithmetic nobody has run. Undergraduate enrollment fell from about 11,600 to about 10,800 — roughly 800 students, or 7 percent. But the freshman class alone is about 400 short of target. That undersized class returns next year as sophomores, the year after as juniors, and the year after that as seniors. Even if recruiting stabilizes tomorrow, UVM’s undergraduate body keeps shrinking for three more years as larger classes graduate and smaller ones replace them. Tuition is more than two-thirds of UVM’s general fund. The revenue follows the students.
UVM is an outlier, not a bystander. The demographic decline is hitting every New England flagship, and it is not hitting them equally. The buffer is the share of undergraduates who come from the home state, because those families are the ones a public university can still reach when out-of-state demand softens. The University of Virginia holds a two-thirds Virginia majority. The University of Maine enrolls 61 percent in-state students. The University of New Hampshire enrolls 47 percent. UVM is at 23 percent. Compass laid out that math in May, after The New Yorker singled UVM out as an extreme case of flagship vulnerability. A university that recruits roughly three of every four students from beyond its borders is more exposed to a regional decline in high school graduates, not less.
What Doesn’t Hold - Out of State Grads Staying in Vermont
One claim in Tuesday’s material does not survive contact with UVM’s own research office.
From the university’s release: for every Vermonter UVM graduates, two of its out-of-state students stay and build careers in Vermont.
Tromp made the same two-for-one claim in a July 2025 interview. Compass checked it then. UVM has since published newer data, and the newer data is further from the claim.
The Class of 2024 Undergraduate Career Outcomes Report, issued by UVM’s Office of Institutional Research and Assessment in June 2025, tracks where graduates went to work. Among the graduates it could locate:
About 190 were Vermonters. 128 of them stayed in Vermont — a 67.4 percent stay rate.
About 590 were from out of state. 197 of them stayed — a 33.4 percent stay rate.
Run the claim. Out-of-state graduates who stayed, divided by Vermonters who graduated: 197 divided by 190 is 1.04. About one, not two.
Read it the most generous way available — out-of-state graduates who stayed against Vermonters who stayed — and it is 197 divided by 128, or 1.54. Still not two.
The report has limits, and they cut in UVM’s favor. The university has outcomes information for only about half its graduating class, and the employment-location table covers 777 people, roughly a third of the class. It is a six-month snapshot, so a graduate who takes a Boston job at 22 and moves to Burlington at 30 does not appear in it.
UVM’s own report does this arithmetic itself, in a note printed directly above the table. Of 777 located graduates, 325 stayed in Vermont, which the report describes as a net gain of 197 new residents to the state.
That is the real number, and it is a good one. Roughly 200 new working-age Vermonters from a single graduating class, in a state that spends considerable public money trying to attract exactly those people. It did not need to be rounded up.
UVM has published no data supporting the two-for-one figure.
Two More Numbers From That Report
Graduates who stay in Vermont earn less. UVM graduates working in Vermont average $51,290. Those working elsewhere average $60,022 — a gap of about $8,700 a year, or roughly $168 a week.
UVM is the largest employer of its own graduates. The university hired 77 members of the Class of 2024; UVM Medical Center hired 33. Of roughly 900 employed graduates, 110 went to work for the university or its hospital.
What Was Announced Without a Number
Four announcements arrived Tuesday with no figures attached.
A new Division of Statewide Economic Development. No director named, no budget, no staff count, and no stated relationship to the Agency of Commerce and Community Development or Vermont’s regional development corporations.
A three-year budget planning process. Announced as a process. None of its outputs — a target enrollment, a revenue assumption, a projected fiscal 2028 gap — were released.
A private fundraising campaign, launching this fall, framed as a way to make up for lost federal grant money. Campaign gifts are overwhelmingly restricted — designated by the donor for a specific purpose — and directed into the endowment, and endowments spend roughly 4 to 5 percent of their value each year. A $100 million campaign, fully funded and fully endowed, produces something in the neighborhood of $4 to $5 million a year in money the university can actually spend. Against a $12 million operating hole, that is a long-run answer to a short-run problem.
Vermont Listens, a civil-discourse initiative modeled on a program Tromp created at Boise State University, with first events this fall in Bennington and Burlington. No budget, no funder, and no account of what the Idaho version produced.
There is also the $96.39 million itself. UVM’s release describes the figure as commitments — pledges, planned gifts and bequests. That is not $96 million arriving this year.
And the $222.6 million in research funding is a fiscal 2026 number, covering the year that ended June 30. Most of those awards were made before the sharpest federal cuts landed. Tromp said UVM used its own money to keep some paused projects running while grants were frozen; the university has not said how much. The forward question is the indirect cost rate — the overhead percentage the federal government pays on top of each grant to cover buildings, compliance and administration. That is where a federal policy change hits an operating budget, and it did not come up.
Tuesday’s address was, by design, a morale speech at the start of a hard year, and much of what it claimed is accurate. Research funding is up. Fundraising was strong. The deficit is closed. The demographic decline is genuine and not of UVM’s making, and the state’s thin support for its own flagship is a Montpelier decision, not a Burlington one.
What the speech did not do was put numbers on the parts that are still coming — the second year of a shrinking class, the cost of the new tuition promise, the size and shape of a new statewide division. Those are the figures a Vermonter would need to judge whether the optimism is warranted.
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