University of Baltimore Staff Senate AGENDA

September 9, 2019 11:00 – 12:30pm Bogomolny Room

Attendance Present: Megan Manley, John Chapin, Laurie Harow, John Brenner, Constance Harris, Pavan Purswani, Suzanne Tabor, Jessica O’Keefe, Emily Brungo, Keiver Jordan, Shana Bynon Absent:

1. Call to order

2. a. Approve Agenda - Approved b. Approve August minutes - Approved

3. CUSS report

Tabor – CUSS was at Salisbury, attended by phone o Advocacy Day in February for CUSS and CUSF representatives. o Chancellor’s representative was not there. o Next meeting at UMBC, I will be there.

4. Chair’s report

Still working on the action plan. We disseminate to all you the end of the week or next

week.

Chair of Staff Senate, Chair of Faculty Senate and Provost met to discuss charges for the

committees of the GSC

Board of Regents Awards packets – nominations due February 14, they are expecting at

least 10 packets, 2 for each category, there are 5 categories. (Named the categories).

One exempt and one non-exempt for each. Nominee must be here for five years.

Staff senate committees. Staff recognition, work life, social engagement, and

communication. If interested in serving with any of those groups. You should email

UBSS your interest.

o Brenner – Did we ever hear anything from the most recent group of nominees?

o D. Smith - There was a communication to UB. It may have been 1 person, but

Darlene will go back in the emails regarding that.

Typical staff awards at Convocation, are we doing them? We have the awards in the

December. We will be pulling back the title of Convocation, but call it a Welcome Back

for Faculty and Staff. As part of that the December holiday celebration is used for the

recognitions. This started last December. These people were already selected for

awards.

5. Budget Update – CFO – Beth Amyot presentation

PowerPoint Presentation

Highlight three topics

o Police Academy o Revenues

Tuition Revenue, Enrollment Drivers o Budget Impact

Structural gap and operating reserves, RCM considerations

Police Academy o Partnership with City and the Police Department o Locations where the academy will be delivered, primarily Learning Commons,

and portions of the gym o Tenant fit-out costs, lease payments, parking rent – are revenue generation.

Tuition Revenue o Second to our state appropriation for our sources of revenue o Tuition snapshots

Shortfall in FY19 – $2,283,000 Shortfall in FY20 – $2,845,000 The revenue is shrinking, when you look at the years together.

o Current Year Data is from end of August. Rest of university $1.9 shortfall. Law will handle their portion of the

shortfall. o FY20 Enrollment and Tuition – Total University

Enrollment information is from the enrollment team. Beth’s team calculates tuition. 4,852 – Tuition would have been $57 million, but we budgeted at 55 million. Tuition expected is $52 million.

Financial impact differs by the enrollment mix, UG, Grad vs Law.

Law purposely requested to be aggressive against their enrollment targets, so they have a contingency built that covers their shortfall.

Look back one year compared to the actual for this year. There is already 209 less students, even though it is 390 short of most likely. The target was already 200 less than what we had last year, so we are really down almost 600 students year to year.

Incremental change in the enrollment by category Declining each year and rate of decline is increasing.

Translates to $9 million less in tuition revenue than we did three years ago. (Drop of 15%)

Tuition rates increase every year, so if we still have the same number of students as three years ago, we would have 7% more in revenue than we did three years ago.

We can’t spend money we do not have. The base budget gets cut, what can’t do with cut, is done with cash savings.

We started last year with $1.4 million structural gap. Then you ended up with $3.7 million gap. We started this year with $4.3 million gap, then added $2.8 million tuition revenue gap.

Our reserves balance has been pretty stable and is around %15 million, which is not much for a budget as our size. Using reserves would use all the reserves in two years.

What is the impact on RCM? The president directed the law school under RCM as of July of this year. He wanted the rest of the university to transition July 2020. UB already had some challenges, and there are challenges with implementing RCM.

Staff without skills for RCM causes some issues. We have a structural gap of $7 million, so how are we going to cover that.

Enrollment needs to be the big game changer, and if we don’t change enrollment, then we need to do more permanent cuts.

By time we meet next month, we will have more definitive guidance on how we will deal with the $7 million cut.

o Managing enrollment o Managing the deficit o Implementing RCM

Q. Constituent – Is it unrestricted or date. o The numbers are only unrestricted.

Q. Constituent - Will the police academy help offset the deficit? o Yes, there will likely be some budget relief if we go through with that.

Q. Could we see those charts with new student and retention? o So you would like to see new students and returning students isolated. Yes, we

can read provide that. o D. Smith – I can provide a numbers perspective of new and returning in my

update

Q. Purswani – 1. What is the status for the RCM for the three colleges? 2. Enrollment and retention need to be our focus. Is this the right time to pull the RCM trigger at the moment?

o With RCM, we are going to take certain steps and then evaluate different steps with how we proceed. We can pick an implementation method that makes sense to us at this point in time. One example, a benefit of RCM, if the tuition stays with the college, then the colleges care more about enrollment, so people engage in a deeper way. Is there a way to still get the incentivize part of RCM to the colleges, without all the structural areas that we do not have yet.

RCM Next steps o Schools will be involved in a different and deeper way. It has to happen anyway

with the strategies the Provost is leading. o Q. Manley - Who will be part of the RCM committee?

The Deans were asked to nominate a faculty member from each school. The Dean, the business manager and the faculty will represent the school, and then some others will also be included (ex. Provost Office).

o Q. Manley - Are there going to be conversations about reviewing this structure again?

I don’t think we are operating as a university with less than 4,000 students. If we lose a third of our students, we already lost a quarter. We need to say who are we, how do we support our students, and align our resources that way. We will have recommendations for short term cash and longer term base revenue.

The rankings show that we do have something going for UB.

6. Enrollment Update—Provost Darlene Smith

The enrollment report as of census date, which is broken down by school and by segment. (ATTACHMENT)

o In this report, it is a mixed bag of good and not so good news. o Overall headcount is 4500. o As was alluded to in Beth’s presentation, you need to look at new and returning

and the pockets. Returning rate was good. Some of the schools exceeded goal, particular

CAS, GPA graduate, UG, Law School. We have been working aggressively on student retention, using new strategies.

Reducing the number of academic holds. Working to enhance student retention

Disappointed in freshman – came out late with a new freshman strategy. As you may know the target for freshman can be sophomores and juniors, not seniors. The academic profile is the best in the last ten/eleven years in terms of the freshman program. We made decisions to increase the incoming SAT, and we raised our average over 50 points and raised our 25% up.

It was quality vs. quantity. The past was just on quantity, but we made a decision to hold to our new admission standards. We needed to stop the negative cycle with freshmen. We will be back out on the market with the pathway model.

The new student level, our new graduate students exceeded the number we had last year, even though we did not hit our goal. The population shows signs of stabilization. See a great deal of stability in the graduate marketplace.

Identify realistic goal and to do work with our transfer feeder school to work on the transfer population.

Multitude of reasons for not meeting goals

What is happening in the city? Baltimore city housing market is the second worse in the nation, behind Detroit. While we attract more than Baltimore City residents, we have a poor housing market, fear of crime, there are perceptions in the marketplace about UB’s future and stability. We are outspent in the marketplace in terms of advertising. $625,000 is what we spent. Stevenson spent over a $1 on just their undergraduate.

Internal operational issues.

Enrollment projection process

Enrollment strategy process

In the spring, we set up committees around enrollment. o Do we have structure that is conductive to an effective

and efficient organization? In the next month or so, we will be coming to the end of that process. The organizational design has looked at admissions and all aspects of it, Bursar, Financial Aid, Records, etc.

o Enrollment implementation committee was better conceived on paper.

o Developing white papers on fall of 2020 enrollments for each of the signature programs at the graduate level. Strategy papers for online, Shady Grove enrollment. We have identified initiatives that could be enhanced. Looking at credit for prior learning, where we need clearly articulated policies.

o Our accelerated pathways into graduate education. How effectively are communicating the pathways to graduation and how students can save time and money? Looking at who would be the right people to steer this strategy.

We have proposed 11-12 steering groups with a singular focus to enhance the strategy, ensure the details are completed.

Beth alluded to the enrollment projection process. Our forecast error rate is quite high. We need to get better at forecasting. Last year we started a process of in depth meetings with the schools around the projections. Generally speaking the budget was set around worst case. What we need to get really good at, is selecting a realistic goal and getting to it. Each Dean will work with Enrollment Management and Institutional Research. Dean’s and their teams will be the deciders of what their commitment is to enrollment. Once that is approved, that is when the enrollment teams are going to determine how to overcome the challenges.

The SPBC will see the enrollment numbers before they are approved for an independent review.

Ownership, accountability and collaboration in terms of executing the FY20 enrollment projections.

Q. Manley – Is there going to be any reallocation of resources to enrollment?

D. Smith - Probably. Are we appropriately staffed in the areas needed? We are in early discussions about what an infusion in marketing could do for us.

Q. Harris – In terms of the kinds of programs we will be marketing? Are we going to identify online program management companies to help us identify the markets? Are there other things that we will be looking at?

Yes. In populating these teams, your name is on the online one. (Constance Harris). Once the team list is finalized this week, members will be notified of their assignment.

Q. Tabor – Has there been any discussion about the class schedule, pushing the times back to allow Montgomery County? Also, looking for online that is not real time (synchronous vs. asynchronous)

Response: Harris – We have started looking at this. There have been multiple formats of online courses that have been implemented across the university. We need consistent definitions and formats for online learning. We need students to understand what online course means. It is a challenge that we face and need to address.

Response: D. Smith – The course schedule piece. There is some resistance on the part of some faculty. We have to try and understand the resistance and remove it. At the UG level there has been success at block schedule. You design it so you sequence so it allows students to have productive use of time on campus. We need to do more of that, as it shows increased persistence.

o In some schools, we struggle that we have to offer two classes in the evening. At 5pm, leave the office, find your car, park, walk to campus and be on time for a 5:30p class. Some schools have already changed their schedule to 6:00 or moved to more online and hybrid courses. We need to have those conversations quickly.

o C. Descak – A Request for Information has been launched, so that when an RFP is issued we will know what is available and what more we need.

o Q. O’Keefe - Have the enrollment strategy goals been set? We meet every other week on Thursday afternoons, and this is on the

agenda this week about freshman. Our goal will continue to raise the 25th percentile. UB has the largest

spread between 35th percentile and 75th percentile, so we are looking to close that gap by bringing up the 25th.

o Q. O’Keefe – Is the goal to shift our planning for fall 2021 to be on a more traditional cycle?

The system and processes put in place will be in place. Everything we are working on right now is for fall 2020 enrollment.

7. Open Enrollment Information—Diana Eglitis

Open Enrollment – October 15 – November 14, 2019

PowerPoint presented o New Workday system – automated system. No more paper enrollment forms or

benefit summary statements. o Healthcare spending account, there is an increase to $2,700 o Wellness activities will carry over to 2020. o Summary of the plans offered.

No changes to companies offered/types of plans o Employees need to obtain W number and password configuration.

Review your current elections before open enrollment.

Key points o If you participated in benefits last year, then the system will default your

elections for this year. Your current selections will rollover for next year, except flexible spending account.

o For anyone that wants to add a dependent. It will require that you upload the documentation required. Must be done by November 14

o Walk-in hours at HR, Tuesday and Thursdays from 11 am to 3 pm. o They have not posted 2020 plans, but the documents will be on the DBM

website.

This is a new system for the state; there will be no correction period. There is nothing you can do after November 14th. Employees can see it on the website, so they need to verify it.

o Benefits fair is October 28th.

8. Professional Development—Zandra Rawlinson (5 minutes)

Employment Development

o How to successful work with your boss

Building Bridges Program

o 5 admins participating in the program. We are one of seven institutions in that

program

USM Women’s Forum – 30th anniversary October 25th.

o Early bird is ending soon

o Will take place at Shady Grove

Learning Bites Café – session around behavioral types.

o Will happen after this session in BC 143.

PowerPoint Presentation by CFO Beth Amyot