Students arriving at Calvin this fall were greeted with a wealth of new facilities. Ranging from a renovated library to a new soccer stadium to a new cadaver lab for pre-health students, these spaces were all designed to benefit the student experience. Despite the diverse new spaces, students do not need to worry about funding being taken out of their pockets.
According to Provost Noah Toly, for the last few years, Calvin has had an “invest to grow” mindset. While college decisions are often the result of a number of factors — which makes getting good data on the effects of the new construction difficult — Toly is optimistic. Toly said that “last year, when students came through, Hekman was under construction…but they got to see what we had in our imaginations, and we told them stories about it, and now they’re here in larger numbers than they were coming before.”
Vice President for Student Experience and Strategy Sarah Visser agreed, and added that “when we do research to understand why students chose Calvin, community is a big piece of it.”
Athletics is one place where students can find such a community. According to senior cross country and track athlete Luke Witvliet, having physical spaces dedicated to a specific team is key to enabling that team to “grow athletically, but also as a team family.”
Toly and Visser both also pointed to football as an area that is paying dividends, with over 110 students participating in the program. Witvliet also emphasized the benefits that the new track and field facility offers the team. Having independent facilities for each team “makes logistics and timing much easier and allows teams to really be at their best and not make logistical workings an issue and a mental block,” said Witvliet.
According to Vice President of Finance Dirk Pruis, the university’s “general practice for funding major capital projects is to use donor funding.” Pruis added that sometimes universities will take on debt financing — or loans — for large-scale or critical projects, but that major investments at Calvin — like the library or the stadium — are never funded using tuition dollars. Instead, the university relies on relationships with donors cultivated over many years to fund major projects and reduce costs for students in a number of other ways.
Tuition makes up 80% of Calvin’s operating revenue, according to Pruis, and is put into a number of areas that connect more immediately to the student experience.
Pruis told Chimes that “the largest portion of our [general operating] costs is in our most important asset: our people.” According to Pruis, salaries and benefits for faculty and staff make up nearly two-thirds of the annual operating budget. This annual operating budget is a different set of funds from those used to fund major capital projects, but it does go into upkeep of all of Calvin’s spaces.
This upkeep includes the cost of maintaining facilities constructed or renovated as a part of capital campaigns. Witvliet pointed out several examples of personnel costs, including maintenance and grounds workers, associated with the athletic investment. Costs for other projects might include HVAC, electricity, or software costs. “There’s always an operational cost that attaches to projects like these,” said Visser.
According to Pruis and Visser, tuition dollars are used to fund these ongoing costs, but there are other sources of funding. The Calvin Annual Fund, made up of money given to the university by alumni and other external donors, also feeds into operating costs for the university. According to Pruis, “donations to the Annual Fund are essential; they contribute more than $3 million annually to our operating budget, reducing tuition needs by over $800 per student.”
