🔒In wake of pandemic pains, declining enrollment, UHart’s new strategic plan aims for financial stability, campus investment

About a half-decade after taking the reins of the University of Hartford, including a few tumultuous years during the pandemic, President Gregory Woodward has a new strategic plan that aims to restore fiscal stability and significantly invest in the private college’s campus with new buildings, residence halls, classes and programs.

The road ahead won’t be an easy one, especially as many colleges in Connecticut and nationwide look to recover financially from the pandemic and face pressures from declining enrollments and increasing costs.

Nationwide, college enrollments this past fall were down 7.8% since 2019, according to a report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. UHart has seen its enrollment decline 9.9% since 2017. It now has about 5,924 students.

Woodward said the school’s strategic plan is unique because it’s shorter term — five years, instead of the typical 10 in the higher-ed industry — and is a living, breathing document that can be tweaked as market conditions and circumstances change.

It has six goals and 57 action items that touch on a range of topics from financial stability, boosting enrollment and future investment to diversity, equity and inclusion.

“Industry and business have strategic plans that are usually three years tops. Why does higher education make their plan 10 years out; that’s ridiculous,” Woodward said. “We made a five-year plan that has ‘now’, ‘soon’, and ‘later’ items. Other plans seem to say ‘Here is what we will do’ and you never see the plan again until it’s dusted off years later.”

Woodward said his vision is for UHart to continue to offer diverse learning experiences common to large universities, “but delivered in the context of a small institution.”

He said he sees UHart as a “comprehensive college,” a collection of professional schools enhanced and supported by a strong liberal arts learning philosophy.

Its competitors include local colleges like UConn, Quinnipiac University and the University of New Haven.

“We offer small classes, high faculty-to-student ratios, flexibility, and a focus on personal relationships,” Woodward said, adding the school’s proximity to the Capital City provides students with expanded opportunities for connections and development.

It’s the third time the 67-year-old Woodward has worked on a university’s strategic plan. He also helped develop ones for Carthage College in Wisconsin, where he served as president, and Ithaca College, when he was the school’s provost.

Financial stability

COVID-19 wreaked havoc on many colleges, financially and otherwise.

UHart lost about $30 million due to fallout from the pandemic, including having to refund students for room and board in the 2019-2020 school year. In addition, the number of students living on campus the following year dropped from 2,800 to 2,200. The school also had to spend millions of dollars on COVID-19 testing and contact tracing.

It did recoup about $12 million from the federal government, but had to institute a significant cost-cutting plan to cover the remaining losses.

Woodward said early retirements helped eliminate 72 positions. Seventeen staff — but no faculty — were let go and no programs were cut.

“We streamlined the organization,” Woodward said. “We are doing better on our business operations, we are tighter on our contracts, and we have outsourced a lot of things universities often think they can do themselves. … The total net pandemic loss was manageable within our annual budgets,” and the school didn’t have to tap its endowment to make ends meet.

The school also recently sold the former 10.4 acre Hartford College for Women campus for $1 million, a move that will lead to longer-term savings on maintenance and other expenses.

The university’s annual operating budget is about $200 million, Woodward said.

Moving forward, the strategic plan has numerous goals in how to maintain a sustainable budget. They include setting and achieving aggressive targets for major gifts, planned giving and philanthropy, increasing occupancy in residence halls, developing key partnerships — including with the private sector — for resource support, and enhancing international student recruitment and enrollment.

International students are a popular target for schools because they typically pay the full cost of tuition and fees.

UHart has also been actively adding new, in-demand programs to boost its sagging enrollment, including nursing, physical and occupational therapy, sports administration, aerospace and robotics engineering, business analytics and digital media and journalism, among others, Woodward said.

He also believes investing in UHart’s infrastructure, which the university has done the past several years, will attract more students.

Martin Van Der Werf, director of editorial and education policy at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, said UHart isn’t the only higher-ed institution to face enrollment challenges. It’s a nationwide trend that’s been exacerbated by the pandemic.

“The University of Hartford is caught up in the declining demographics in Connecticut and New England,” Van Der Werf said. “There is also a lot of competition. There are so many schools in Connecticut and the region and it’s hard to rise above the competition, such as against colleges like Yale, which have niches.”

Van Der Werf said most colleges can bounce back from COVID-19 if they are willing to make some changes.

“They really have to look at their business model,” he said. “Who do you want to attract, and will you look at new opportunities?”

Those new opportunities, he added, could entail offering new programs, but also bringing older students into the fold.

“Some colleges are moving forward with more professional and part-time programs for older students,” he emphasized, a model that likely needs to be adopted by more colleges if they want to attract working professionals, an appealing demographic and customer base.

Infrastructure investment

UHart’s strategic plan also calls for adding new buildings, teaching spaces and residence halls, something that’s already started.

The crown jewel of the $90-million campus face-lift is the 60,000-square-foot Francis X. and Nancy Hursey Center for Advanced Engineering and Health Professions, which opened in September. The center is equipped with specialized training technology for the engineering and healthcare fields.

The university also has a renovated sports center; will have a $30 million wellness and recreation center; and there have been expansions to the Barney School of Business.

There will also be new residence housing options beginning in the fall of 2022, when the Village Apartments open. Woodward said the school will begin a complete $20 million renovation of all seven quads — which house 207 apartments — when classes end later this month.

The school also has a focus on increasing the racial diversity of faculty and staff and to provide ongoing mandatory diversity training and development.

Woodward noted UHart recently hired its first-ever executive director of diversity, equity, inclusion and social justice. New minority faculty hires have also skyrocketed, he said.

“It’s gone from 10% of the new faculty hires being people of color in 2017 to today where 40% of new faculty hires are people of color,” Woodward said.

David Gordon, chair of UHart’s Board of Regents since 2018, said this represents the first time in his 14 years with the school that he’s seen a strategic plan as specific and planned out as the one undertaken under Woodward’s leadership.

Upwards of 400 people had direct input on the plan, which was approved by the board last winter and took effect at the start of the current academic year.

“It’s the first time I’ve seen a plan that sets such high-level goals and very specific actions to achieve those goals,” said Gordon, a 1975 UHart alum who is a business strategy and development consultant and former executive at health insurer ConnectiCare. “It’s a culmination of a lot of input from key constituents and from university faculty and staff.”

Gordon said he’s optimistic the plan’s goals – especially related to financial stability – will be met.

“We will be successful,” Gordon said. “We can absolutely get to financial sustainability. It will come from financial discipline and making sure we make the right financial decisions to achieve our goals. We will also succeed because of the investments we are making in our students.”