This school year has been a huge adjustment for all students and faculty. Winthrop Interim President George Hynd addressed the university in a half-hour YouTube video that went over how the pandemic has impacted the semester and how the university plans to move forward with the rest of the year.
Before the pandemic, Winthrop made several notable accomplishments. “Among other accomplishments, I would note that you launched the bachelor’s of professional studies program targeting adult learners, raised $6.5 million in cash and pledges in the 2019 calendar year, won the men’s Big South Conference basketball championship and we even had an alum, Camm Wess, make it to the finals of The Voice,” Hynd said.
In addition to the accomplishments made before the pandemic, there were also many that occurred during it as well.
“Two of our college’s accreditations were extended, the College of Business Administration was reaccredited by the AACSB and the College of Education had no areas for improvement cited in their reaccreditation. We also introduced new programs in data science and analytics, applied software development and educational studies.” Hynd said. “We were noted a First-gen Forward institution, and, of course, just last week we celebrated all of our first-gen community members. TRiO received continued funding for five more years to the tune of $1.4 million and, reflective of the times, of course, DHEC came to campus to provide testing to our community.”
Winthrop has a strategy to become a national model for a student-centered university experience.
“One of our most important aspirations, of course, is to increase our six-year graduation rate. We have made progress, having achieved a 64% graduation rate for first-time, full-time freshmen. With the pandemic this year, it might be a challenge, but it looks like some of our actions have had the desired impact on improving this metric at least through 2019,” Hynd said. “Improving our graduation rate is in large part highly dependent on improving our freshmen to sophomore retention rate. Unfortunately, it appears that our retention rate, while still better than some of our peers, has migrated downward to 70%.”
Due to the pandemic, this has been a challenging year financially. Higher education has yet to be restored to pre-Great Recession funding levels.
“Over the last few years, we have been fortunate to see a gradual increase in allocation for operations and a larger amount in capital funding to support our facilities infrastructure from the state of South Carolina. We have been fortunate to have strong support from our legislative delegation and certainly from our board of trustees, but we continue as an institution to be heavily reliant on tuition. The board of trustees has been intentional in keeping tuition at a minimum of late, with modest to no increase in the last two years. However, traditionally approximately 65% of Winthrop’s operating revenue comes from tuition,” Hynd said.
Overall, 80% of Winthrop’s revenue comes from tuition and student fees. Factors that have impacted Winthrop’s budget include: total fall 2020 degree-seeking enrollment declined by 1.3% or 68 students, undergraduate degree-seeking enrollment declined by 222 students or 5.0%, graduate-seeking enrollment increased by 154 students or 18.5% and, including the Courtyard, fall 2020 housing occupancy is down from 91% in fall 2019 to 63%.
“I’ve asked our finance and business affairs division to work on a dynamic budget model that will allow us to implement a 3-5 year budget plan that is based on realistic assumptions. This budget model will consider undergradu- ate, graduate, and graduate online enrollment and tuition rates, retention and graduation rates by class, housing occupancy, and meal plans purchased and other revenue resources: state funding, grant indirects, contract courses, athletics, etc.” Hynd said.
The plan will be updated annually to ensure that each future year is forecasted accordingly.
“The purpose is to balance the budget each year, address persistent needs such as the classification study, free up capital for investments in new program areas and support faculty and student research, travel and professional development.”
This year, Winthrop will implement an Academic Master Plan. The plan will include programming health metrics to give an annual platform for evaluation and monitoring, aligning program health to budget allocation, which will provide incentive for performance improvement. Increased improvement will lead to revitalized programs, improved retention, and financial health. Low performing programs are replaced by transformed programs and/or new programs that are aligned to market demand and strategic goals.
“Despite the COVID pandemic, budget challenges and much needed academic master plan, we have other positive initiatives that will excite our engagement as we move into 2021,” Hynd said. “We will be launching a campus-wide master planning initiative once we have a consultant in hand and launch a visioning process that the whole campus can participate in. We will need to determine how we are going to look different in five or ten years from now [and] most importantly what new facilities do we need to build or renovate.”
This work will provide the opportunity for the involvement of everyone on campus, including students, faculty, and staff as well as alumni. An additional initiative will be campus beautification.
“We truly have an extraordinarily beautiful university campus. But the toll of weather, humidity, and scarce resources have really extracted their toll. I will be reaching out to the campus community for the launch of the campus beautification initiative,” said Hynd.
Another initiative will be building toward a Winthrop campaign that will help raise money for the Winthrop community.
In closing, Hynd said, “Thank you for everything you do to make Winthrop the distinguished university it is today. Seeing how our university community has raised up and met the challenges associated with COVID, I have great faith that we can move forward with these plans and initiatives.”
