By all accounts, Brian Hemphill is leaving West Virginia State University in pretty good shape.
Private donations are up, enrollment numbers are up, revenue is up and Hemphill will be up and out of West Virginia in two weeks. With only days remaining as the school’s president, State’s Board of Governors took time at its Thursday meeting to celebrate the man they say led the school to new heights.
“I’m going to get through this,” said board chairwoman Ann Smith, resting her hand on Hemphill’s shoulder. “I’m going to get through this one, even if I don’t want to.”
For the past four years, Hemphill has been at the head of West Virginia State, an institution fighting the onslaught of real and potential budget cuts and an overall smaller market of students attending public colleges in West Virginia.
Save for modest gains at the West Virginia Osteopathic School of Medicine in Lewisburg, WVSU is the only public, four-year college in the state to increase its headcount enrollment during the 2011 to 2015 window, data from the Higher Education Policy Commission shows.
Hemphill attributes this to new efforts to better market the school in the greater Kanawha Valley and increased efforts to attract new international students. So far that seems to be working.
“As we look at the different categories of income, we find ourselves ahead of the game,” said Melvin Jones, vice president of business and finance.
Board chairwoman says goodbye to Pres. Brian Hemphill. "I'm going to get through this one, even if I don't want to." pic.twitter.com/ePz85yErgy
— Jake Jarvis (@NewsroomJake) June 16, 2016
For the first time anyone could remember, West Virginia State has overshot its projection for how much money it should take in this year from tuition.
As of May 31, the university expected to be 92 percent of the way through its budget. This means the school should have spent 92 percent of all the money it expects to spend, and it should have received 92 percent of all the money it expects to take in.
Jones told the school’s finance committee that by May, WVSU had already received a little more than 102 percent of the projected tuition revenue.
“I’ve been sitting in this seat now for four years, and this is the first time we’ve seen our tuition exceed what we’ve projected,” Hemphill said. Even more money is expected to roll in as students continue to take summer classes.
Just as revenue is up, expenditures are down. West Virginia State only spent 86 percent of what it had projected to spend. Administrators said that was due in part to several job vacancies that still will be filled and in part to cost-cutting measures.
With all the good news, there was a pink elephant in the room: the recent impasse at the state Legislature over next year’s budget. As at other colleges in the state, West Virginia State officials worried about what would happen if the state government shut down.
“We believed that the state would not do that,” Jones said. “Even though we had the money to meet payroll demands, we wouldn’t have been able to access it. We were looking for a loan that we could have put on our outside bank accounts.”
Jones said WVSU approached two banks for a lifeline, both of which agreed to loan the school $1 million each if the Legislature had not approved a budget by the end of June.
Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin has yet to sign a budget bill the Legislature passed on Tuesday. For now though, WVSU administrators think they’re in the clear.
Reach Jake Jarvis at
jake.jarvis@wvgazettemail.com,
304-348-7939 or follow
@NewsroomJake on Twitter.