The Council of Student Leaders subcommittee, Campus Outreach, hosted both Winthrop University President Dan Mahony and Vice President of Business and Finance Justin Oates in Dina’s Place for the first Town Hall of the year to talk about the current state of the university’s budget.
This event, held on Oct. 28, served to further the dialogue and showcase transparency from Winthrop administration to students about where their tuition dollars are going and how the university as a whole was spending said money. This town hall was very information and graphic heavy so students that were present had a lot of questions regarding the information that they saw.
The presentation was broken down into three parts: tuition, how the dollars are used across the university, and other revenue sources.
The town hall allowed students to ask questions and have them answered immediately by Oates and Mahony.
“I had a question on the increase over the year, you said on the last line for the tuition assistance, now I know you said it increases and then in 2019 it decreased by 1.6 percent. Is there a particular reason why that happened?” asked Joshua Alicea, a political science major.
Mahony said public service grants and funding from the state altered the amount of scholarships Winthrop could offer.
Mahony responded to this question first, “There’s a couple of things that happened. One of which is the state actually has what’s called core percent proviso, which limits the amount of dollars that we can use from general operating funds towards scholarships. And so in order to be aligned with that, we had to redo some of the scholarships. So we were limited,” Mahony said. “There’s also some things in there we don’t really control. One of the things that [fluctuate] from year to year, which is called the public service grants, and that’s money that goes to scholarships for children of veterans killed in action, things like that. We have no control over that. So we’re required by state law to provide those scholarships, but we have no idea sometimes until students get here, whether they qualify for their scholarships or not,” Mahony said.
Oates added that enrollment is also a determining factor in tuition costs. If enrollment drops, tuition rises.
“One other reason though is the enrollment drops. So you can see the revenue went down a little bit, which again, if you did this on a per student basis per student, it’s probably in the same range as prior year,” Oates said. “Excluding those things that the president mentioned. You have less students in general, you have to lift revenue, then you’re going to have less financial aid.”
Oates explained additional revenue sources that the university has at its disposal, including state appropriations. State appropriations are money that the university receives from the state to “run its operations” and offset tuition.
“[Tuition is] only one of our revenue sources. It’s only one of our revenue sources. …Besides tuition and fees and grants and contracts, state appropriations is about 10 percent of our operating dollars. This year they gave us additional $2 million in state appropriations, which you can see on here,” Oates said.”It only looks like about 1.2 percent, but when you count on all of the other kind of nuances going in, they really gave us about $2 million more in recurring funds.”
These additional funds allowed Winthrop to increase tuition increases to half a percent rather than past increases in the 2% range.
“Giving us additional funds allowed us to keep the tuition lower for students, which you may know, we only gave up half a percent increase compared to prior years two and above. It ranges anywhere from two and a two and a half the last three or four years,” Oates said.
Winthrop also has auxiliary revenue, which comes from health and counseling, housing and dining.
“Those make up about 10 percent of our revenue sources generated. And then other revenue are some of the money we received from The [Winthrop University] Foundation.”
Oates stressed that there are a multitude of revenue ventures that the university has actively searched for outside foundations to help support the students and the university. For example, Courtyard is not owned by Winthrop but by a real estate foundation that provides the university with about half a million dollars a year.
“So where is revenue generated from athletics policy?” asked Michael Hazell, a computer science major.
Oates explained that the student activity fee, league sponsorship, and away game guarantees are the main sources of revenue for athletics.
“They provide an annual amount to us. They also have generate dollars through away games where they go. [For example] we’ll pay Kentucky and Kentucky will pay us a certain amount on their plate. It’s called away game guarantee,” Oates said. “Those are the main revenue generation through athletics it’s between the student activity with the revenue.”
Oates explained the expense side of things and the breakdown of how it works for the university.
“So we did a similar thing with expense where we broke the expense down. We basically showed you the trend between ‘15 and ‘19 again. And so you could see expenses just like revenue. If you look at revenue, it also is going up a little bit in line. Expenses are very much in line with revenue usually. And so the expense side, the health, you can see, we break it up into benefits operating expenses, financial aid and salaries,” Oates said. ”So the operating expenses are like advertising contracts, services, supplies and materials, memberships that we…subscribe to. So those operating expenses…you can see 33 percent salary, 26 percent operate, 27 percent financial aid, and then 14 percent benefits.”
The benefits category has increased due to a state mandate that over a five year period, benefits go up by 1 percent.
“That’s definitely been a drain on the budget the last couple of years and will continue to be the next two to three years is we have that percentage increase in our pensions, which is our health and retirement for employees. So when you take another way to look at expenses as by what they call functional class classification,” Oates said.
Since the university is actually showcasing positive trends in keeping expenses lower than and since 2015 to 2019 the university has seen a growth in net position. Why is this important?
Oates explained that it is for a number of different reasons.
“One, the university needs our reserve in the bank so that if we have these as we move forward, we have a funding source beside current year revenue and expense. And so this is a positive trend. But the other positive pieces just on Friday, because we’ve hit the 20 million mark, we’ve gone to 22.2. We’ve worked with our board and they’ve actually agreed to invest 2.2 million of this into our residence halls and academic buildings on campus. And so that’s something that we really worked hard with them to understand the needs of the students,” Oates said.
With funding from the board, Winthrop Administration can work to ensure that technology is up to date, residence halls can get the upgrades they need, the roofs on McLaurin, Bancroft, Johnson, Joynes and many other buildings can get worked on. Winthrop University is getting the funding that’s needed to maintain a strong campus foundation, culture and community.
Graphic: Lizzie Talbert/ The Johnsonian
