Georgia Southern University’s reasons to wage a campaign to enroll more students aren’t limited to a dip in enrollment that occurred during consolidation at the Armstrong campus in Savannah or to the aspirations of the university’s new president.

When Georgia Southern and the former Armstrong State’s numbers are viewed together, the combined university’s enrollment has been in decline for at least seven years. One effect is a projected $15 million shortfall in the now consolidated Georgia Southern’s current funding. GS Vice President for Business and Finance Robert L. Whitaker and former interim President Shelley C. Nickel were already leading a 10-percent budget “redirection” effort before new GS President Kyle Marrero arrived April 1 with his emphasis on an enrollment strategy and a marketing campaign.

“Are you really talking about growing enrollment at this point, or maintaining it?” was the question, during an April 3 Statesboro Herald interview.

 “Well, first, maintaining it,” Marrero said. “This fall we need to make sure that we have not dropped any further, and so far things are looking good. Our numbers are looking solid for fall. That’s critical for the budget, where we are, and you already know what we’re having to face July 1 for fiscal year ’20.”

Multi-year decline

In a March 7 presentation to the university’s Faculty Senate, Whitaker had described stagnation in enrollment going back to fiscal year 2012, which included fall semester 2011. He also summarized the budgeting process and explained how down years can have a lingering effect because state funding is based on head counts from two fiscal years earlier.

After fall 2011, when Georgia Southern and Armstrong together enrolled 27,705 students, combined enrollment peaked in fall 2012 (counted as part of fiscal year 2013) with 28,013 students. But by last fall, the head count had declined to 26,408 students at the now consolidated university. Comparing the fiscal 2012 and current-year figures, Whitaker’s chart showed this as a 4.7 percent decline.

The deterioration has been worse for the second semester over the same eight-year span. This spring semester, only 24,307 students were counted at the consolidated, three-campus Georgia Southern, a 7-percent drop from the retroactively combined Georgia Southern-Armstrong enrollment of 26,163 students in spring 2012.

Summer-session enrollment fell 6 percent, from 14,061 students to 13,176, during the same period. In each case, the head count went up one or two years during the period before trending down again.

“When you focus on the last three years since consolidation, the decline in headcount follows a similar trend,” Whitaker observed in his remarks to the Faculty Senate. “GSU’s enrollment has been flat or declining since 2012.”

The consolidation of Armstrong State into Georgia Southern, initiated by the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia in the middle of the 2017 fiscal year, formally took effect Jan. 1, 2018, in the middle of fiscal 2018. Fiscal 2019 will end June 30.

Georgia Southern’s student credit hours, the basis of the formula the Legislature and governor use to allocate money to University System schools, have shown a related decline. Comparing fiscal 2019 to 2012, combined Georgia Southern credit hours fell 3 percent for fall, 6 percent for spring and 11 percent for summer, Whitaker noted with his chart.

No contingency left

“You may be asking yourself, if the landscape has been on a decline for several years, why is it just now becoming an issue? …” Whitaker said. “The answer is we’ve managed to this point because we have budgeted conservatively and included an annual contingency or annual reserve in our operating budget.”

But the university’s investment in new faculty and staff positions and other spending ate away at the reserve until administrators were unable to set aside any contingency for fiscal 2019, Whitaker said.

Georgia Southern’s budget for the current fiscal year originally totaled $473.1 million. But administrators focus on the biggest portion, “education and general” funding, which was projected to total $347.5 million. Of this, $155.2 million was to come from tuition and the special institutional fee, projected on the current year’s enrollment, while $140 million was expected from state appropriations, based on the head count two years ago.

But the decline in credit hours has cost the university $11.96 million in tuition and the institutional fee, according to Whitaker and Marrero.  Meanwhile, the administrators predicted a $2.5 million decline in the state allotment because of the decline two years ago. Whitaker’s chart showed a further $567,000 revenue reduction from the mandated phase-out of higher tuition for online courses.

“Our FY ’20 budget deficit is $15 million,” Whitaker said. “If we look just a little further into the future at our FY’20-21 budget, we know that our credit hours in FY’19 have declined and are going to have a negative impact on our FY ’21 formula funding.”

Also, the university is expected to fund part of a state-approved merit pay increase.

So, several months ago, GS administrators asked each of the university’s divisions to develop 10 percent “redirection plans,” cutting that much from regular spending. This is meant to stabilize the budget and invest in future growth, Whitaker said.

Enrollment planning

Arriving April 1 as Georgia Southern’s new president, Marrero mentioned this in his emailed greeting to faculty and staff. In that message and to reporters, he emphasized completing the new strategic plan – for which work was also underway before he arrived – and adding plans for enrollment and marketing the university’s brand as goals for his first six months.

In fact, he wants the overall strategic plan done in his first 90 days, by July 1, which is also the start of fiscal year 2020 and the day the university must have a balanced budget in hand.

“Then we build a strategic enrollment plan that says, OK, this is who and what  we are, where we’re headed as a unified Georgia Southern, one Eagle Nation,” Marrero said in the April 3 interview.

Marrero noted that the funding levels will only become certain after the state budget is signed by the governor and after the Board of Regents decides whether there will be any tuition increases or other funding changes. The regents meet next Tuesday and Wednesday in Savannah, where they will be jointly hosted by Georgia Southern and Savannah State.

The redirection is unlikely to reach its full 10 percent objective, with “just not enough so-called meat on the bone to get there right now” Marrero said, and added that another priority is to avoid job reductions.

“Our goal is to get there with just the vacant positions and that we aren’t affecting then any filled positions,” he said. “That’s our primary goal.”

By redirecting more money than would be needed to cover the shortfall, university officials also hope to invest some of it on the marketing strategy and other efforts to build enrollment.  He also noted population trends leading to fewer high school graduates, resulting in increased competition among universities.

“So, that’s first and foremost, is to ensure that we don’t decline any further in enrollment at any of our sites so that we stabilize, and then we drive this enrollment plan that we never find ourselves again in an enrollment decline that then creates a revenue shortfall,” Marrero said.

Whitaker’s PowerPoint and a link to YouTube, which includes his remarks in voiceover to the presentation, were posted on Marrero’s office website, https://president.georgiasouthern.edu. Click on “Performance Excellence.”