January 2024 University Updates Q&A

This is such an important issue and topic for all universities, including OHIO. I appreciate the way you have framed wellness as reaching beyond mental and physical health to also include issues of compensation and community care. I expect all of these will be significant topics of discussion for the Commit group working on our Dynamic Strategy as they develop goals related to our employee culture, as well as potentially for the Educate group as they consider the student experience. I would encourage you to engage in their outreach as they develop goals.

In this broad context I see wellness not as a single priority but as a perspective that will inform many of our priorities moving forward. It is a need we have to meet in order to ensure student success, drive innovation and collaboration, and ultimately fulfill our educational mission.

Our OHIO Online students are certainly on my mind daily, and my team and I continue to partner with Vice Provost Kari Lehman and her team to expand the services currently offered to online students.

One area we are focused on is providing necessary mental health support. Our office of Counseling and Psychological Services offers various types of support for all students, including online students , and at the same time we recognize a need for additional counseling support. We recently contracted with a new partner to expand those services and hope to launch the partnership later this spring. As we move forward, we hope to be able to continue to expand our wellness resources for online students. We also support online students through our Dean of Students office, provide them with emergency micro-grants and more. 

OHIO typically draws students from more than a hundred countries worldwide, and international students have comprised a critical component of our student population since Saki Taro Muayama of Japan became our first international alumnus in 1895. While our commitment to recruit, retain and graduate international students has never waned, we have seen declining international enrollment since 2014. OHIO's international enrollment strategies and recruitment plans were further impacted by the pandemic. However, during that challenging period, Provost Sayrs charged a representative group of OHIO leaders to convene as an International Opportunities Think Tank (IOTT), asking the group to "explore, project, and make recommendations for the future of international teaching, learning, research, recruitment, and student support services." The Enrollment Management division participated in that exercise and is now working closely with Dr. Gillian Ice, recently appointed as interim associate provost for global affairs, to evaluate IOTT's recommendations and to re-energize strategies to improve not only international enrollment pipelines but also global learning for all students at OHIO. Currently, for example, we are working on a proposed new recruitment strategy from West African countries, bringing together our talented faculty, staff, students and alumni who already have connections in and enthusiasm for the region. We also have seen growth in other areas, especially South Asia, and our international education experts are looking for ways to support and further promote that growth. We plan to coordinate international undergraduate and graduate recruitment and integrate these efforts with other aspects of campus and curriculum globalization, such as partnerships, student and faculty mobility, and alumni. 

This $7 million refers to the balance between revenues and expenses, which we call results of operations. Budgets also include ongoing investments in capital (building renovation, technology, etc.). The graph shows the entire budget for the university, including regional campuses, the medical school and auxiliaries (housing, dining, etc.) as well as the main Athens budget. The positive balance is largely in auxiliaries, where it will need to be reinvested in repair and renovation. Within our Athens and regional campus budgets, while faculty and staff compensation are a priority, there are also competing needs for increases in scholarships, health care and investments in additional staff (including faculty).  Providing equitable and competitive compensation (salary and benefits) to faculty and staff will require some difficult choices that will need to be made over several years. Provost Sayrs has already begun that work:

As she shared at our last University update in November, we completed a faculty compensation study in the spring of 2023 that resulted in two significant changes. One change was to raise promotional pay increases by $1,000 over the next three years. So, for example, the previous raise when moving from tenure-track Associate to Professor was $9,000. For FY23 that increase moved to $9,334. It moved to $9,667 in this fiscal year and for FY25 will go to $10,000. The second change was to increase the minimal salary threshold for assistant, associate and full professor. The compensation study also made recommendations related to bringing faculty salaries in line with market competition, and those recommendations are being considered as we develop the FY25 budget. Like the promotional increases, any implementation will have to be done in phases over time.

We do not anticipate any cuts to jobs or benefits as a result of budget constraints in the coming fiscal year. However, as we see inflation in our expenses and limited opportunities to increase revenue, we will need to continue our work to control costs. For example, every 100 students added beyond the budget generates approximately $1 million in revenue.  On the expense side, a 2% raise pool adds $7 million to the budget. So, it is easy for us to be quickly out of balance.  We have been able to increase efficiency for the last three years through tightening our budgeting practices in areas like vacancy savings and non-compensation expenses.

Regarding your comment about central administrative offices, most administrative units have not grown. We have made some targeted investments in areas such as out-of-state recruitment, academic recruitment and OHIO online in order to support enrollment strategies. There are also additional faculty investments for the increased enrollment but those take longer to bring in (particularly tenure track) so there will continue to be increases next fall.  In general, there is still going to be a need to keep staffing levels under control given the pressures on the budget discussed above.  

Thank you for raising these issues. I can share that Student Senate has been active in recent years in working with our facilities leadership as well as the Ohio University Police Department to identify safety concerns. Those conversations helped lead to the development of Paw Print park, which added significant lighting on South Green, the new bridge and pedestrian walkway under Richland Avenue near West Green and more. We will share the concerns about the roadway area behind South Green as well as the Peden crosswalk for further discussion and mitigation.