FINANCIAL
REPORT THE 2012-2013 SCHOOL YEAR MARKED A NEW
chapter in the financial history of UWC-USA. Since our founding benefactor Armand Hammer passed away in 1990, UWC-USA has benefited from his ongoing legacy through a trust. In recent years, the Armand Hammer Trust has covered more than 20 percent of the school’s annual budget, which is about $11 million per year. We are in the final year of the trust, after which we must find new sources of funds to run our program. One of the benefits of financial scarcity is to clarify those things in which we believe most because not everything is possible. How do you choose between competing goals? The entire on-campus community will spend considerable effort making do with what we have and saving where we can. But we all understand our school cannot “save” its way to excellence. Difficult Choices So we make other choices. We would like to be able to reward a 15year veteran master IB teacher with appropriate compensation—benefits, retirement planning, housing, and a cost-of-living raise—but we would also like to offer an additional partial scholarship to a student from the Caribbean. How do we choose? If we matriculate an additional 20 students whose families can afford to pay full tuition, is a dormitory upgrade in the next two years more financially viable? Should we delay an expensive solar power project if it means four students from traditionally poorer countries can attend on a full scholarship? Reasonable people can disagree on these questions. We will make difficult choices like these, because of financial constraints, in the coming years. The Cost of a UWC-USA Education The cost of a UWC-USA education includes many elements.
UWC-USA Annual Report 2013 4
About half the cost goes directly to paying employees—the security staff, maintenance crew, cafeteria servers, teachers, and administrators in the form of salary, benefits, and retirement. I have never heard an alumnus claim—nor have I ever believed—that paying anyone on campus anything less would lead to a better school. On the contrary, my strongest wish is that we could offer more—not because UWCUSA employees are particularly motivated by money (nobody moves to Montezuma, New Mexico, to make their fortune, after all) but because they deserve to be rewarded. They offer their energy and their love and the best years of their lives for us. What Else Costs a Lot of Money? Scholarships cost a tremendous amount of money. From our beginning in 1982, we have been a scholarship-driven school. The plain fact is that few students, ever, could attend UWC-USA without an extraordinary subsidy from their national committee and the school itself. Students and alumni know this. What is less known, however, is how much the school subsidizes national committees worldwide. Even national committees that provide a “full tuition scholarship” are subsidized by our school by more than 50 percent of the true cost of our education. The vast majority of national committees provide a much smaller fraction of the total cost than even that 50 percent amount. In the wider UWC movement, we do not typically talk about costs and fees. But these financially constrained times call for a greater understanding and disclosure of the financial facts. A Tradition of Generous Scholarships Thanks to fortunate friendships—most notably the generosity of Shelby M.C. Davis and his family—we have built an impressive tradition of scholarship support. I know of no school in the United States with a more generous scholarship policy than ours. But generosity by