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2023 PRESIDENT’S REPORT

from 2023 Welch College Annual Report

The 2022–23 fiscal year has been one of the most difficult financial years in Welch College’s history because of the ongoing effects of the COVID pandemic on the college’s enrollment and giving. Yet in the midst of these difficulties, the Lord has been with us and has blessed us beyond measure: our core mission of spiritual and ministry formation has prospered, our basic quantitative measures have greatly improved from our COVID lows, and our qualitative measures of higher education excellence continue to break records.

MISSION-DRIVEN

In the midst of the hurdles we face, we are motivated by our mission to provide a faithful Christian higher education experience in an authentically Free Will Baptist context. This is so needed in our day of both secularization and “post-denominationalism.” Our students are responding.

This past year we saw signs of spiritual renewal on our campus, with more and more students coming to faculty and staff offices for prayer and spiritual guidance. In our Forum23 conference as well as in chapel, Wednesday evening worship services led by campus pastor Chris

Talbot, student-led revival meetings and chapel services, and our campus-wide Day of Prayer, we have been emphasizing the student body theme of 2 Peter 1:3–11. We have also been stressing the spiritual disciplines, humility, and repentance.

We emphasize the sufficiency of Scripture at Welch and the fact that God has given us everything necessary for life and godliness (2 Peter 1:3). This is for our spiritual lives as well as our lives together in the church and in witness and mission. In Scripture, God gives us what we need as He reveals Himself and His vision for us, the church, and the world. Twenty-first-century students can respond to this biblical vision just as much as students in the past—and they are!

For example, Jackson Watts, a member of the Class of 2023 from Pleasant View, Tennessee, said the following in a speech he gave at Commencement:

“I’ve come to see the importance of the ordinary means of grace we hear about so often here—the reading, singing, praying, preaching, and seeing (through the ordinances) of the Word—and why we hear about them so often. Because they are those things God has revealed to us in the only sufficient rule for our faith and practice, the Scriptures. I’ve come to realize that the faculty and staff of Welch College are here because they have a passion for teaching our generation about how to live in this world for Christ. I haven’t gained mere head knowledge; my spiritual life has been directly impacted by the ministry of those who serve this institution.”

Jackson, one of our B.A.-to-M.Div. students who is currently pastoring an area church, is only one of scores of students whose lives are being transformed at Welch. This transformation results from the college’s emphasis on the teaching of Holy Scripture and its impact on our lives, the lives of other believers, and the lives of those whom the Spirit is calling to Himself who are “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12).

This Scripture-shaped mission is what Welch is all about. It remains vibrantly at the center of our identity and our curriculum. And this is true whether a student is studying to be a pastor or missionary or whether he or she is preparing to be a teacher, nurse, dentist, businessperson, lawyer, counselor—or any other profession represented by the more than fifty programs of study we offer.

Enrollment

This past year was the first year in an uphill climb out of COVID. The 2020–21 and 2021–22 fiscal years were COVID years, with roughly a 25% annual decrease in enrollment and gifts, which provide almost all of the college’s financial support. The challenge for small, academically open enrollment colleges is that we have to build back our enrollment one fall semester at a time.

The major plank of our recovery will be a building back to preCOVID enrollment numbers. This past year we began that enrollment rebound with a strong freshman class and a 15% increase in enrollment over the previous fall.

This past year was our first build-back year. This coming year will be our second build-back year. By the fall of 2025, after both our low COVID freshman classes have cycled out, we project Welch will be completely back to pre-pandemic numbers. We predict that that year we will surpass the 36-year-record enrollment of 489 in the 2019–20 academic year.

Improving Quality

This past year, Welch continued to increase its excellence in tangible ways in almost every measurable area. The Welch brand is still very new in terms of higher education branding and positioning. More importantly, every year we are becoming more competitive for students who desire an intentional Christian education in a Free Will Baptist setting that is regionally accredited and highly ranked. The new, beautiful, classic campus we have, compared with most small Christian college campuses, gives us a sizable competitive edge over most four-year private colleges.

Welch retains its high rankings in U.S. News and World Report’s Best Colleges. Out of the 106 colleges in the Regional Colleges—South category, Welch ranked 3rd highest in graduation rate, 6th highest in average ACT/SAT scores, and 7th highest in alumni giving. Our alumni giving rate has always been extremely high for a non-elite institution. But in other areas we have increased our competitiveness drastically.

For example, twelve years ago, when we were first numerically ranked in the first tier by U.S. News, we ranked 27th highest in average ACT/SAT scores; we have risen to 6th. That year, we were ranked 18th in graduation rate; we have risen to 3rd. These sorts of increases are remarkable among institutions with a low resource base like Welch.

We also remain competitive in our recruitment of children of alumni. This past year our percentage of students who are children of alumni was 2½ times the average enrollment of children of alumni in most Christian colleges. In the higher education industry, high alumni giving rates and rates of attendance of children of alumni are measures of alumni satisfaction, and our rates in these alumni areas are unusually high.

It is remarkable that our dedicated faculty and staff always use periods of budgetary challenge to continue improving the quality and excellence of a Welch education in tangible ways. I owe them a debt of gratitude.

Academics

Academic excellence continues to improve at Welch. Our percentage of earned doctorates on the faculty remains high and is improving every year as younger faculty earn their doctorates. That rate is currently 71%. Student evaluations of classroom teaching continue to improve, with students giving their professors high marks for combining classroom excellence with spiritual mentoring. Faculty performance is the most direct indicator of college student retention. And our retention is up again this year, nearing the 80% mark, which is unheard of at schools like Welch that have an academically open enrollment policy, which tend to be closer to 50%, as we used to be.

Our new M.Div. program, under the able leadership of Dr. Matthew McAffee, Provost of Welch College and Dean of Welch Divinity School, is growing, and we are so impressed with the students enrolled in our B.A.-to-M.Div. program. Our denominational, donor, and alumni constituency appreciate the combination of excellence, forward-movement, and focus on ministry training represented by this degree, which is also increasing Welch’s reputation in the academic community.

The concern I shared with you a few years ago regarding the decrease in ministerial students is behind us. Our ministerial enrollment has continued to grow and was the only segment of our enrollment that continually grew during the pandemic. Ministry enrollment has increased by 24% over these past four years! We are continuing to work to bring more young ministers to Welch to lessen the shortage of pastors in our denomination.

However, there is a cost to this, as I will discuss more below: the additional scholarships added to our budget. But, thanks be to God, that investment, though costly, is paying dividends in young men who are now able to attend Welch rather than going to free or nearly free community colleges.

This past year we initiated a new degree program, the M.A. in Humanities. This degree is intended to give students who want to go to graduate school in fields such as English, history, philosophy, psychology, and politics a strong Christian worldview foundation in these fields. The increasing sway of secular progressivism demands that we educate more individuals who can articulate a Christian worldview in the public square, and this M.A. will help us equip students for this calling.

Matthew Bracey is leading this program, and we have also hired a leading Christian scholar in the field of humanities as a part-time instructor who is teaching anchor courses in the program. His name is Tyler Flatt, and he holds a Ph.D. in Classics and Latin from Harvard University and teaches liberal arts and great books at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Please pray for this new degree program.

Finances

Fulfilling our mission requires financial resources. And with the downturn in income brought on by COVID as well as rising prices of almost everything it takes to run a college, finances are very tight.

In recent months dozens of colleges have closed. I have looked at the audits of several of these colleges, and what is very evident is that most of them were in a very poor financial condition before COVID hit, and the pandemic was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

For Welch, it was the opposite scenario. In the few years before COVID we were experiencing enrollment growth. We raised more funds than we had ever raised in the history of the institution, owing to relocation and construction and the fact that we sold the campus and built a new campus. Rather than losing several million dollars in net assets, we tripled our net assets and had $13 million in income surpluses. So the big picture looks very good and very promising. It is the short-term financial picture that is daunting. Let me explain.

Initially, we had budgeted nearly a $500,000 deficit for the 2022–23 fiscal year, following two COVID years of budgeted deficits of around $750,000 each year. Over those two previous years, we beat our budget projections, experiencing a cumulative increase in net assets of about $1.4 million. However, this past fiscal year, because of some very large gifts that we had budgeted for but did not materialize—one of which was received after the end of the fiscal year and another of which we still expect—we had a decrease in net assets of around $1.1 million.

In addition to that, we took a loss “on paper” for a parcel of land that we booked at appraised value last year but which we sold for nearly $1 million below appraised value this year. This brings our decrease on the books for the 2022–2023 fiscal year to a little over $2 million. This real estate transaction represents a positive financial opportunity for Welch. The college has self-financed the property and is leasing it back from the buyers, who plan to work with real estate professionals to develop the land in a way that will greatly benefit the college’s cash picture in the future.

Since the onset of COVID, we have budgeted for cumulative deficits of approximately $2 million (about $750,000 each in the 2020–21 and 2021–22 fiscal years and about $500,000 this past year). However, our actual cumulative deficit from May 2020 to May 2023 has totaled less than a third of that—only $675,234. Still, because of this year’s large deficit, and in order to meet our budgeted deficit of $190,000 next year, we are engaging in the heaviest budget cuts since the fallout from the Recession after 2008. While difficult, this is necessary to shore up the college’s finances as we complete our postCOVID recovery over the next two years. We have been cutting expenses since the onset of the pandemic—not just recently—and that process continues even more intensely this year.

Monetary giving to Welch has increased from last year to this year, but it is still not enough to constitute a full recovery of pre-COVID gift income. We have initiated a new capital campaign, Light the Future, to complete the funding of the new campus and to raise funds for student scholarships and a needed new building on campus. We are also in the midst of a special drive this summer to raise funds for scholarships for needy students and ministerial students. Please pray for and give to these initiatives.

However, the big picture gives us confidence for the future. This picture includes our strong equity position (having gone from $7 million in net worth before relocation to more than $22 million now), the ability to recruit students to a beautiful new campus, the post-COVID recovery and growth trend we have seen in both enrollment and gifts this past year, and the strong freshman class we are anticipating this fall.

We need the support of our denomination and alumni more than ever as we weather this storm. Please pray for and support the Light the Future campaign and our summer initiative to raise money for student scholarships.

Recovery One Step At A Time

Sometimes someone who has seen other nonprofits bounce back after the pandemic asks, “Why hasn’t the college recovered following COVID? It’s been over for two years.” However, colleges like ours depend on the enrollment of freshman classes, one fall semester at a time. And most families make their decision on where their high school senior will attend college eight to twelve months before fall enrollment.

With this timeline, Fall 2020 and 2021 entering classes (mostly freshmen, a few transfers) were drastically down at Welch. In our business, it is “one fall freshman class at a time.” And, like other SACS-accredited colleges that rely mostly on dorm students from a distance for their revenue, it is going to take a full cycle of new, larger freshman classes to overcome these two classes that were extremely low owing to COVID. So, while Fall 2022 enrollment was up by around 15%, gross tuition revenues were still almost $750,000 less than they were before the pandemic.

Think of Welch as a farm with one primary crop produced each year. Preparation and planning for one crop are continuous, and so is the cost of production. Expenses for equipment, fuel, seed, fertilizers, labor, and storage are in a steady state of motion. But you only get one chance—only one harvest per year. You pray and plan for a great harvest. However, as it is with farming, anything can happen. When the crop goes through a drought, and next year another drought, your production is drastically reduced, as your income is. But your expenses are the same or higher.

Though “one fall freshman class at a time” is the main answer, there are a few other answers to the question “COVID’s been over for a while; why’s the recovery taking so long?” The first one is that capital campaign fundraising languished during the COVID years, and we need these funds to pay our debt on the new campus. During the first COVID year (most of 2020 and the first part of 2021), donors did not want us to visit them because of the pandemic. During the second year of the pandemic, our largely middle-income donor base, because of economic uncertainties, was leery of making new pledges or was having trouble fulfilling existing pledges. We are coming out of this—we received more capital campaign gifts this past year than in the two COVID years combined. But it is still not enough to get us back to pre-pandemic norms.

Furthermore, during the period immediately following COVID, inflation has driven up the cost of most of the things we spend our money on—food, maintenance, utilities, insurance, fuel, travel, and on the list could go. In just the last year, we have spent $350,000 more on these fixed costs than we did the year before.

Lastly, just before COVID, our Board voted unanimously to help alleviate our denomination’s pastoral shortage by awarding a substantial scholarship to every Free Will Baptist ministerial student. We believed this was important, because so many ministerial students go to free or nearly free community colleges with the intention of transferring to Welch later because they cannot afford all four years. Large numbers of these students never go through with their intentions to become Free Will Baptist ministers.

So this past year, our scholarships were up by about $200,000 from the year before. Was this a good decision? We believe it was. This strategic decision came at a cost. Yet ministry enrollment was the only area of enrollment that went up both years during the pandemic. Equipping young ministers is our top priority.

Thank You

I want to say thank you for your support of Welch College and its mission. Thank you for giving sacrificially to keep this vital ministry strong for the future. Thank you for sending us students for a life-changing higher education experience that is rooted deeply in biblical teaching and living. And thank you for your continued prayers for this Christian community of faith and learning. Your prayers, gifts, and referrals of students make an immediate impact that results in an eternal difference. We cannot do what we do without you.

In Christ,

J. Matthew Pinson President