The university estimates it will be able to add around $5.8 million to its reserve fund by the end of the fiscal year on June 30. The savings is around $2.8 million more than the $3 million Wright State’s budget calls for the school to save this year.
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While the surplus is cause for celebration, the university community should remain cautious because of enrollment issues and the need to further boost reserves, said Doug Fecher, chairman of the WSU board of trustees.
“To get two surpluses in a row I think reflects the hard work of the whole university,” Fecher said. “But I also don’t think we ought to rest on it. We still have the enrollment challenges we’ve talked about and we need to get the entire organization to focus on revenue.”
The surplus marks the second straight year for WSU, which added around $10 million to its reserves at the end of fiscal year 2018, chief business officer Walt Branson has said. To do that, Wright State cut spending by around $53 million in fiscal year 2018.
The back-to-back savings marks a turnaround for Wright State, which spent more money than it brought in six years in a row from fiscal years 2012 to 2017, WSU budgets show.
The overspending caused Wright State total reserves to plummet from $162 million in 2012 to a projected $31 million in 2017. Branson has said that it may take the university close to 20 years to rebuild its reserve fund but that financial sustainability will come much sooner.
Increasing enrollment is the easiest way for Wright State to fast-track its financial recovery as tuition is the university’s biggest single source of revenue. But, enrollment has proved problematic in recent years.
Wright State’s enrollment was expected to dip below 17,000 for the first time last fall since 2007 to around 16,224, nearly 3,550 below the school’s peak in 2010 when a transition from quarters to semesters started taking place, according to a fiscal year 2019 budget. Though similar sized schools are also facing enrollment issues, Wright State’s full-time enrollment from fiscal year 2012 to fiscal year 2017 dropped 13 percent.
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To prevent further declines, Branson said the university is changing its approach to enrollment management.
“What we’re doing now is a much more analytical and data driven way to do it,” Branson said.
In previous years, Wright State’s enrollment estimates did not rely on data and the financial benefits of boosting the number of students enrolled was not really analyzed from a budget perspective, Branson said.
Branson started working at Wright State in September 2017. Before he arrived, Branson said that it appears the university would project its enrollment to match whatever its goal was. If WSU had a goal of growing enrollment by 5 percent, the university would project that’s what it was expected to increase by.
It’s hard to say if Wright State’s previous method to estimating enrollment is why officials didn’t foresee its decline, Branson said.
Projecting enrollment in that way though is not “realistic,” Branson said. Now, WSU is trying to take a more “collaborative” approach to estimating enrollment, Branson said.
“The data approach that they’ve developed is a big leap forward,” Fecher said. “It needs to be a database, analytical approach because there’s more to (enrollment projections) than just what you want to have.”
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