A $4.5 million budget cut was approved during a Board of Trustees meeting Nov. 2, 2018. Justin Oates, Vice President for Finance and Business Affairs, addressed where this cut is coming from.
Oates said while part of this cut is to the operating budget of the university, vacant positions are responsible for a good deal of it as well. Vacant positions savings come from faculty and staff jobs that were accounted for in the starting budget, but since they have opened up during the year and have yet to be filled, these jobs’ salaries are able to be cut from the budget. Typically, the university would try to find an immediate replacement for the vacant position.
“We’re trying to do things a little differently to try and find efficiencies and ways to get by without filling it right away, by maybe asking someone else to do a little bit more and paying them a little bit but not a full salary. A lot of [the cut] is vacancy savings,” Oates said.
“Every year, especially this year, we had a number of vacant faculty, and again you usually don’t hire faculty in year, you usually hire from Aug. 1 start date, so if we don’t hire them by Aug. 1, then they’re vacant. They help us because they’re in the original budget, therefore we’re not going to hire during the year, so that’s a big chunk of it,” Oates said.
A loss of enrollment has led to the budget cut. With less students enrolled, the university loses out on tuition and other sources of revenue. Following a loss of state revenue support in 2008, Winthrop heavily relies on student’s tuition.
“That’s the driving factor. With less students, means less revenue, which is why we’ve had to reduce the budget. It’s a revenue drop, which means we have to do the same on the expense side to stay balanced,” Oates said.
This drop in enrollment is not entirely due to lack of students coming in as freshman. In fact, Winthrop experienced a record number of applicants for the fall 2018 semester. An increase in graduation rates has contributed to the lack of enrollment. More students are graduating, which means less are returning.
“One of the positive things is our graduation rate is increasing. We’re graduating students four, five years, getting them out of here into the real world is a positive, not a negative. Over the next few years, we’ve got to look at that. We’re graduating students at a faster pace, which is positive. It means we may need to increase our incoming class sizes,” Oates said.
The budget reduction does not feature across–the–board cuts, which Oates called “detrimental.”
“We really went out and met with everybody and figured out where we could reduce, again, limiting the impact on our operations and our mission here at the university which is to educate students. We worked with them and tried to identify areas where we could reduce, again, with minimal impact,” Oates said.
Areas of reduction include professional development, enrollment and natural reductions.
“For professional development, we’re having to push off some professional development, supplies and stuff. So about $100,000 in my other areas which are finance, procurement. We reduced a little bit in enrollment. Luckily, the reductions in enrollment have been items that we didn’t need this year, so it’s not like we reduced what they needed. We were able to reduce because we didn’t renew contracts that we are evaluating how we want to move forward,” Oates said.
This cut should not affect student tuition or scholarships, Oates said.
“It shouldn’t impact those things because those are tied to the students. If you have the student number, your scholarships are based on that student number. If you have less students, the scholarships naturally go down, but not the average per student. It’s operating dollars, not scholarship dollars, that we’ve reduced,” Oates said.
“I think around campus, people understand where we’re at and that we’ve been working as a team to figure out where we can make reductions without impacting the operations and the students as little as possible,” Oates said.
