President Olive Shares Goals for 2019-2020

Bluefield College president Dr. David Olive sets specific goals for each academic school year. This year, he has shared four goals, mostly stemming from the first goal to implement the 2019-’24 Strategic Plan.

Dr. Olive’s first goal for the 2019-’20 academic year is to “successfully implement the 2019-’24 Strategic Plan.” The BC Board of Trustees approved this new plan after the school’s previous strategic plan ended with the 2018-’19 academic year. As part of the new plan, the college recently started the process of building student engagement, as well as the engagement of “external constituents.”

Since the 2019-’24 Strategic Plan is still a work in progress, the BC Board is currently determining objectives under each of the plan’s proposed goals, providing “pathways in how to be successful in achieving the goals set,” Dr. Olive said. Each goal will have an average of five objectives and assigned responsibilities under each objective. Once the objectives are set, each objective will be assigned to a specific employee. In addition, the resources necessary to achieve the goal will be determined, as well as a form of measurement to assess “how well we are…progressing toward reaching the objective, which leads us toward the goal,” the president said. Dr. Olive also stated that if there is no progress seen toward the goal, then “we must come up with new strategies.”

The Board of Trustees will meet on November 1, 2019, to review and potentially endorse the objectives. Eight or nine of the objectives have already been “broadly defined and came out of the work from this last year,” said Dr. Olive. The goals are being personalized for every area of division, and many of them gear toward student engagement.

Ram Days, registration, arriving on campus, orientation, and Welcome Week all are meant to lead to a successful start of the college experience for new students, hopefully leading more students to a diploma through Bluefield College. Dr. Olive said, “We want new students, when they arrive, to be as prepared as humanly possible for getting off to a good start.”

A number of students at BC are first generation students and “sometimes don’t come as equipped or prepared” to have a successful start to college, Dr. Olive said.

“’First semester, best semester,’” is being used around campus to help students have a successful launch into the first school year, he added. “We want students to graduate…and we’re trying to do our part to help everyone be successful…and see every student who starts their education finish their education through Bluefield College.”

Dr. Olive also said that the majority of BC’s online students are working adults who encounter obstacles, such as “not being focused enough,” or “sickness in the family,” which prevent them from completing a degree at first. He also said, however, “It’s not wasted, so-to-speak, to start and be on a path and something intervenes that causes you to leave that path.”

Overall, the first goal aims for “better retention, better graduation rates…when we can help more students stay on their educational pathway.” Dr. Olive also said that this goal is why the college exists.

“That’s why we exist; we exist to help educate people,” he said, “and if we can’t get someone all the way through to get a diploma, then in some small way, we feel we’ve failed…”

Dr. Olive’s second goal is to “persist with work on the Quiet Phase of the Vision Inspired Campaign.” The latest fundraising campaign for the college, Vision Inspired is currently in a “quiet phase” in which it is contained within the campus community, faculty, and staff. It is meant to “portray an inspired vision,” said Dr. Olive, which will lead to a “hopefully very successful [way] to be able to celebrate the college’s achievements” at the centennial two years away.

“Trustees, Advisory Council members, close friends, (and) donors who are faithful year in and out…those are the people with whom we’ve been working to get them engaged and buy in to the vision that’s being cast,” said Dr. Olive.

The campaign consists of multiple components and is “comprehensive in scope.” Giving by the community, alumni, and other donors are all part of a “year-in, year-out giving effort…like the BC Fund that helps support student scholarships” in “academic, athletic, and need-based” areas. Dr. Olive feels that the college is “faithful to [its] students and their success.”

Dr. Olive described the process of gift-giving and divided the process into multiple “types” of gifts. The first type of gift that he detailed was “gifts designated to the endowment to work for the perpetuity…That’s a dollar in; that’s a dollar back out.” Other types of gifts detailed (see sidebar) were direct gifts, planned gifts, endowed scholarships, gift annuities, and trusts.

Hal Keene, director of planned giving, has “increased the number of planned gifts” by a large amount, according to Dr. Olive. Keene, he said, is a “great guy [with a] heart and love for the school.” Dr. Olive also stated that even though there is “still some work to go for the goal” to achieve the Vision Inspired Campaign, and even though the “Advancement folks are really skittish” because details of the campaign are not openly shared yet, the objectives are headed on a strong path for success.

While discussing this second goal, Dr. Olive also briefly mentioned that there are projects to complete, such as the expansion of the Science Center.

“We want to enhance and expand the SAC,” he said, as well as expand South Campus across the road, where workers have “started moving earth to flatten out the hillside and start expanding.”

Dr. Olive’s third goal is to “identify strategies to maximize revenues and control expenses.” He stated that “higher education continues to change…every day,” and that Bluefield College is heavily dependent on student enrollment. Dr. Olive said that BC is like other small colleges (2,000 or less in enrollment), and since the college is so heavily dependent on enrollment, it has come to face many obstacles in the past few months.

Recently, three local state schools announced free tuition for Pell-eligible students in the state of West Virginia. This is “not a luxury” that BC has because it takes “many resources” to make the school successfully operate. Dr. Olive shared that the “largest component of budget are salaries” and the next largest is student aid scholarships, which are meant to give back to the students.

Dr. Olive took a moment to briefly explain how scholarships are awarded to students, stating that BC tries to “look at the whole picture,” including the family’s ability to pay. He said, “That’s where the BC Access Grant comes into play,” which is a grant awarded to students who show financial need and is “based on all other dimensions of aid.”

As for the third component of the budget, Dr. Olive shared that BC has a “very sizable electric and water bill [and is] spending in a month what someone might make in a year on utilities alone.” He also stated that insurance, particularly for student athletes, is also a very important piece of the budget as we live in a very “litigious” society. As BC is a campus full of risks of injury, such as snowy or icy sidewalks and athletic injuries, insurance is very important.

Dr. Olive stated that although “our margins are thin,” food services and housekeeping are also a larger piece of the budget. Overall, Dr. Olive said that these resources are why “we want to have successful campaigns to broaden our donor base.”

Dr. Olive’s fourth and final goal is to “further the development of South Campus into recreational and athletic fields.” The work on South Campus goes back to the overarching goal of a Vision Inspired Campaign. Currently, plans for South Campus include two recreational and athletic fields. Dr. Olive feels that South Campus is the “next horizon now that the Sims Center has materialized and provides for [the] campus community.” The first step is to continue developing that property so that it can have use and “students can enjoy more outdoor-type amenities.”

All-in-all, Dr. Olive said, “They’re all important,” when asked which goal is the most beneficial to the students at BC, though he feels that the Vision Inspired Campaign “stems out of our previous strategic plan” and has “made great strides around the student engagement.”