The staff and administration cuts, along with other belt-tightening measures, will help the university trim up to $90 million from its budget in the next five years, said Brown Chancellor Thomas J. Tisch.

“The university’s financial planners have done their work against a backdrop of economic convulsions and market upheavals around the world,” said Tisch.

Students will pay more to go to school next year, but the 3 percent tuition hike –– to $38,000 –– is the smallest increase since the early 1960s, Tisch said.

Tuition for graduate and medical students will also jump by 3 percent. Other undergraduate fees, including those for housing and health, will bring the total for a year to just over $49,000.

The budget cuts and hikes were recommended by the university’s 17-member Resources Committee, which includes faculty, students, staff and senior officers. Corporation members approved the measures during their winter meeting yesterday.

The corporation also approved a $758.7-million budget for the next academic year, an increase of less than 1 percent over this year’s budget.

Although the budget will remain flat, it will “safeguard the academic core, including programs of need-blind admission and enhanced financial aid,” Tisch said. “It will also allow the university to undertake several well-chosen and carefully planned capital projects and academic initiatives, and it will prepare the university to operate in a period of great economic uncertainty.”

It’s unclear how many employees will lose jobs. The university stopped hiring in October, and some vacant jobs won’t be filled in the future.

“We’re trying to do it carefully,” said Elizabeth Huidekoper, executive vice president of finance and administration.

The reductions will not affect the faculty, she said. However, an earlier plan to increase the size of the faculty will be scaled back.

The university is facing the same challenge as other colleges in a weak economy, Huidekoper said. Most rely on income from tuition, fees, federal funding, gifts and endowments.

Last fall, many of the best-endowed schools, including Harvard, Yale and Stanford, warned of double-digit drops in their endowment returns.

In an e-mail last month, Brown President Ruth J. Simmons said the value of the university’s $2.8-billion endowment could decline to $2 billion by the end of June.

In a statement yesterday, Simmons said the university will make new investments in “its academic core even as it pursues reductions and efficiencies throughout its operation. This is a difficult but essential equilibrium to maintain.”

As recently as last May, Brown’s financial planners assumed an average 5-percent annual growth in revenue for the next five years. The new financial realities have driven those revenue assumptions down, requiring a reduction of $80 million to $90 million in the budget by fiscal year 2014, Tisch said.

Although tuition and fees account for a large portion of Brown’s revenue, officials opted for a small increase in tuition and fees “given the serious financial pressures afflicting students and families,” Tisch said. They also increased the undergraduate financial-aid budget by nearly 11 percent, he said.

The cuts will allow the university to focus on several big projects, including the construction of a new creative arts center, adjacent to the Brown Office Building on Angell Street, and the renovation of Faunce House as the Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center.

Also, the amount of gifts to Brown’s annual fund, a major source of unrestricted money, have been growing at a record pace, more than doubling since 2001, Tisch said. While the current financial crisis will slow that rate of growth, alumni, parents and friends “continue their strong support for the university,” he said.

pdavis@projo.com