Johns Hopkins Layoffs Reach Carey Business School As Federal Cuts Deepen

The Carey Business School in Baltimore’s Harbor East is among the units at Johns Hopkins University hit by a fresh round of layoffs tied to deep federal research funding cuts

Johns Hopkins University is laying off about 110 employees across multiple schools and offices, and its Carey Business School is among the units affected, as the institution absorbs one of the steepest declines in federal research funding in its history.

The cuts, first reported June 25 by The Baltimore Banner, an independent, digital-only nonprofit publication, fall on Carey, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the university’s central administration. Most of the eliminated positions are administrative, university spokesperson Doug Donovan tells the Banner.

“As our federal research portfolio shrinks the infrastructure around it must change in parallel,” Donovan says in a statement to the paper.

The university had already imposed a hiring freeze last year, cut vacant positions, and trimmed discretionary spending to control costs, according to the Banner. Those measures, Donovan says, were meant to make layoffs a last resort – but they were not enough to head off another round.

A ‘STRATEGIC REORGANIZATION’ AT CAREY

In a statement provided to Poets&Quants, the Carey School cast its portion of the cuts as a deliberate repositioning rather than a retrenchment.

“Business education is at an inflection point – shaped by shifting student demographics, new models of educational delivery, technological transformations, and evolving global enrollment patterns,” the school says. “Carey’s strategic reorganization positions the school to lead in this new landscape and define what’s next.” P&Q‘s efforts to obtain details about who will lose their job and whether they will receive severance or other compensation have not been successful.

The cutbacks arrive at an expansionary moment for the school. Less than a year ago, Carey announced it would move its full-time MBA from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., launch its first Executive MBA, and roll out a slate of new degrees that includes an Accelerated MBA, a Master of Science in Management, and a dual PhD/MBA with the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

In April, Carey also began offering steeply discounted tuition to Maryland residents and Hopkins graduates, a move the Banner reported at the time. And in May – barely six weeks before the layoffs – Poets&Quants reported that Carey had received a $50 million gift from the W. P. Carey Foundation, its namesake benefactor, to bankroll entrepreneurship programming, faculty professorships, and the school’s expansion into the business of health. The gift brought the foundation’s total giving to Carey to $125 million. The school, which opened in 2007 and reaches its 20th anniversary in 2027, is led by Dean Alexander Triantis.

THE BIGGER FUNDING PICTURE

The layoffs are the latest financial blow to a university that has drawn more federal research money than any other in the country since 1979, according to the Banner.

Since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, Hopkins has lost hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding. In 2025 alone, the value of its multiyear federal research portfolio fell by more than $500 million, and the university took in 43% less federal research funding and 28% fewer awards than it had in 2024, the Banner reports.

Last year, Hopkins carried out the largest layoffs in its history, shedding more than 2,000 jobs worldwide after the administration gutted funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Earlier this month, the university said it would raise its own in-house research awards by nearly $50 million while cutting administrative costs to offset a sharp lag in federal support. It pledged to spend 10% less on central administration and nearly 20% less on construction and renovation over five years, and it has nearly doubled its lobbying spending since 2024 while mounting a public campaign to defend research funding.

A WIDER SQUEEZE ON B-SCHOOLS

Carey is hardly alone in feeling the strain. Across higher education, federal funding cuts, a steeper endowment tax, and softening international enrollment have pushed even well-resourced institutions to retrench – and business schools, long treated as reliable revenue engines, are increasingly part of the calculation.

At Harvard, the university leaned on Harvard Business School to help close its budget gap. It asked the school to lift its surplus contribution to the university’s consolidated results from roughly $60 million to $82 million for fiscal 2026, with a $97 million target projected for fiscal 2027, Poets&Quants reported in May, citing internal figures obtained by The Harvard Crimson. HBS draws little federal research money, but some of its most dependable revenue streams – executive education, Harvard Business Publishing, and international enrollment – are under pressure of their own.

In the United Kingdom, financial strain is driving consolidation. King’s College London and Cranfield University announced in May that they plan to merge by August 2027, folding Cranfield’s postgraduate MBA and executive education into King’s. A Universities UK survey this spring found two in five UK universities open to or actively weighing mergers or acquisitions.

Others are closing entirely. The Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, a private business school near Chicago, announced in December that it would discontinue its MBA and shut down after June 30, 2026, citing declining enrollment that the school says made the program unsustainable. Enrollment at the nearly 80-year-old institution had fallen by about half between 2020 and 2024. Excelsior University, a nonprofit online school, is helping teach out its remaining students.

DON’T MISS JOHNS HOPKINS CAREY BUSINESS SCHOOL RECEIVES $50M GIFT FROM NAMESAKE FOUNDATION

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