CWU enrollment down, university planning for more inclusive future

ELLENSBURG — Central Washington University President Jim Wohlpart gave the annual State of the University address Friday morning, speaking on the university’s plans for the future and the challenges it is currently facing.

The major challenge Wohlpart addressed was the university’s lower-than-expected enrollment numbers.

“We don't do a good enough job bringing all of those students into our community, whose lives, whose families’ lives, whose communities could be transformed,” Wohlpart said. “We have an obligation to our community to make certain that we are welcoming those students here.”

The freshman enrollment numbers were better than last year, with 1,584 new freshmen enrolled as of Friday, according to the presentation slides. The number is still very low compared to pre-COVID-19 numbers, and the university did not meet its goal of 1,800 new freshmen.

“What has happened in our enrollment is historic,” Wohlpart said. “It isn't like the little dip that we're going to come out of now that the pandemic is gone. This will impact us for many years to come, and so we need to do the work now, even though it may take a year or two to bear fruit, we need to do that work now to make the changes we need to make to change this.”

Wohlpart said the other challenge with enrollment is that the university loses a third of its freshman by the end of their first year.

“We have a moral obligation to expand access to higher education and to make certain that those students are successful,” Wohlpart said.

The low enrollment led to a budget deficit for the year, which will be covered by state funding, Wohlpart said. Nonetheless, the deficit is indicative of the school’s challenges.

Wohlpart said one goal of the university for the future is to bring about change to state legislation to help the school prevent budget deficits for staff funding. He said that state funding only covers a portion of the cost-of-living raises the school provides to employees; the rest is supposed to be funded by tuition revenue, which does not currently cover that need.

“We actually have a shrinking pot of money every year to pay employees,” Wohlpart said. “We also don't get inflationary increases for our goods and services budget, and those things cost more every year.”

In spite of these challenges, Wohlpart also shared positive news regarding the university’s various funding streams.

The university was awarded grant money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for a partnership between CWU and Yakima Valley Technical Skills Center. CWU also submitted an application to the foundation for grant money to bolster the university’s college in the high school programs.

Wohlpart said the school will also be going after more endowments in order to secure longer-lasting funding than one-time grant programs.

CWU also received funding to support the humanities, which Wohlpart said is a subject area receiving budget cuts and lower amounts of funding at many other educational institutions.

“We got $103 million to build a humanities and social science building here at Central Washington University,” Wohlpart said.

The university also received $6 million for the academic portion of a new multicultural complex, Wohlpart said.

“We will be working with the students on the funding for their portion of it,” Wohlpart said. “That'll happen in the next year, but we are starting the process of the design of the building, working closely with our students. This is something the students have been asking for and pushing for.”

Much of the university’s strategic plan, vision statements and changes moving forward revolve around diversity, equity, and inclusion, such as the multicultural center.

Wohlpart said the university is working on instituting a more equitable approach to faculty evaluations for both tenured and non-tenured positions.

“One of the initiatives of the strategic plan is to focus on the evaluation of our faculty and to revise our promotion and tenure criteria,” Wohlpart said. “It was something that was resounding that we needed to address a lack of equity in our tenure promotion criteria and then we heard it as a strategic planning team over and over again.”

Wohlpart said much of the conversation around the new strategic plan involved questioning how exactly to become more inclusive.

“How do we create a culture here at Central that allows every individual to show up for the whole person?” Wohlpart said. “(To be) able to share their various races, ethnicities, genders, sexualities, abilities in an environment of safety and belonging?”

Wohlpart explained that these were goals, not direct reflections of the university.

“We do need to remember that this vision statement is aspirational. It is not who we are today. It is who we hope to become,” he said.”

Wohlpart wrapped up his address with a statement on the importance of the work done at CWU at all levels of the university.

“We change lives here at Central Washington University. The work you do day in and day out provides our students the opportunity to learn and grow and realize their potential, and very often, as I talk to our students and our alumni, it's a potential they didn't even know that they had. And then they go out in the world and they make the world a better place to live, to work, and to learn.”

Gabriel Davis may be reached at gdavis@columbiabasinherald.com. Download the Columbia Basin Herald app on iOS and Android.