I am delighted to announce that the University’s new chief investment officer will be Geeta Kapadia, CFA, an investment professional with 25 years of diverse experience and a demonstrated commitment to service and excellence in her profession. She will begin in the position on Monday, August 22.

A key member of the University’s executive leadership team, the chief investment officer devises the University’s investment strategy in collaboration with the Board of Trustees Finance and Investment Committee and Fordham’s senior leaders in the finance area. Kapadia joins the University at an exciting moment, with our endowment hovering close to $1 billion, and she is eminently qualified to manage it for strong returns and continued growth.

Since 2009, Kapadia has been associate treasurer for investments with the nonprofit Yale New Haven Health System, the largest health care system in Connecticut, where she led a five-person team overseeing an academic medical center’s $5.7 billion in assets and oversaw the system’s $3.8 billion in defined contribution retirement assets. From 2005 to 2008, she was a senior investment consultant with Mercer Investment Consulting, based in the United Kingdom, and in 2004 she served as investment analyst and director of marketing for Capital Metrics and Risk Solutions in Pune, India. She has appeared on lists of standout investment professionals several times, most recently in 2019, when the news platform Trusted Insight named her one of its top 30 health care chief investment officers.

Kapadia earned her bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago, a master’s degree in financial markets and trading from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and an investment management certificate from the U.K. Society of Investment Professionals. She is an outstanding leader in her profession, who gives back to that profession and serves her community. Among many other volunteer pursuits, Kapadia is a longtime member of the CFA Institute, having served on its disciplinary review committee and mentored and advised other investment professionals throughout their candidacy for the Chartered Financial Analyst exam. She has also worked to bring greater diversity to the field of investment management, and received the Yale New Haven Health System’s Diversity and Inclusion ‘All In’ Award for 2019.

Kapadia is married to Shreeyash Palshikar, Ph.D., a scholar of South Asian studies, who recently returned from a senior Fulbright fellowship in India. The couple have two children, Anand, age 12, and Zara, age 9.

I am grateful to my Fordham colleagues Nicholas Milowski and Kamal Joshi, and to David Barrett and Meg Morris of David Barrett Partners for so ably assisting in this important search.

In addition, Fordham Trustees Don Almeida, Manny Chirico, Carolyn Albstein, Rick Calero, Sly McClearn, Tom Ennis, and Dario Werthein lent their time, guidance, and expertise to this effort, and I thank them.

We are thrilled to welcome Geeta Kapadia to Fordham. She will join me and the rest of the Finance team on the fifth floor of Faculty Memorial Hall on the Rose Hill campus and after August 22nd may be reached at [email protected].

Sincerely,
Martha K. Hirst
Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer & Treasurer

“The uncertainties that existed then rolled out in unanticipated ways throughout the course of the year, and some of them still pertain today. But, on balance, when we look back at fiscal year 21 from a fiscal point of view, we are very gratified by how well Fordham did,” said Martha K. Hirst, senior vice president, chief financial officer, and treasurer.

Several factors played a part in the positive assessment, Hirst said during the Zoom forum, which was attended by more than 300 members of the University community. Revenue from tuition was higher than predicted, even as the University increased the amount of financial aid it distributed. This was attributed to a higher-than-predicted undergraduate enrollment.

Another significant factor was an increase in housing revenue. Hirst noted that when the University set the budget, it did so under the assumption that campus residence halls would only be occupied half the year. In fact, Fordham was able to welcome students back to campus in the fall of 2020 for the whole school year.

Revenue from parking, conferences, and third-party rentals of campus facilities dropped, but government aid—chiefly from the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF) that was part of the American Rescue Plan passed by Congress in March 2020— helped cover a $13.2 million shortfall. That $13 million was the third of three portions, or tranches of funds the University received, for a total of $41.6 million.

In the end, revenue for the fiscal year 2021 was predicted to be $592.9 million but was actually $617.7 million.

“All in all, a combination of better-than-budgeted enrollments, more housing revenues, and federal stimulus money gave us an unanticipatedly strong revenue performance,” Hirst said.

However, expenses also rose by $17.4 million more than what had been budgeted. Some of the increase came from salaries and wages, as budgeted labor reductions were not carried out. Other increases came from higher meal costs due to students being on campus and COVID-19-related safety expenses. The latter, Hirst noted, was addressed by the budget’s contingency fund, which for the fiscal year 2021 totaled $13.5 million.

“It is a reflection of how important it is to have a contingency line in any operating budget, for unforeseen circumstances,” she said.

Ultimately, the University ended up $7.9 million in the black.

“That is an excellent outcome for us, given all that we encountered last year,” Hirst said.

Looking to the Future

When it comes to this year, Hirst noted that the biggest source of good news continues to be on the enrollment side, as this year’s first-year class is 750 students larger than the year before, which bodes well for tuition revenue. This is predicted to be offset by higher costs for teaching salaries, as well as the fact that the funds from HEERF will have been spent. Nicholas Milowski, vice president for finance and assistant treasurer, noted that the HEERF funds enabled Fordham to shore up its finances and avoid what would have been a shortfall in the fiscal year 2022 of nearly $10 million.

All told, total revenue for the fiscal year 2022 is forecast to be $671.7 million, while total expenses are forecast to be $668.7 million.

“This is a balanced budget at still a more modest level of expenditures than several years ago because we are working our way back from the pandemic, and we still have a lot of unknowns. We’re not back to normal yet,” Hirst said.

Travel and meeting expenses are a good example of the way the budget is slowly improving. Milowski noted that the line item, which plunged to $1.6 million in the fiscal year 2021 from $16.3 million in 2019, will dramatically rise again this year, but only to $10.2 million.

“We do recognize that it is important and that it is mission-critical. We want everyone to understand that we are restoring it as is absolutely necessary, but as you can see, we are still not able to anticipate or expect the same level of expenditure that we would in a normal year, which for us was three years ago,” he said.

Outlook for 2023

Inflation is a big concern for the future, and although she said it is expected to ease by this time next year, Hirst said that there are already plans to tap the contingency fund to cover expected increases in costs. One cause for optimism is the fact that Fordham is well-positioned to deal with rising energy costs.

“We have some utility contracts that are locked in for another year or so, so we’re going mitigate some of the utility increase that we otherwise would have, and that’s a credit to our facilities and administration team to have anticipated that,” she said.

One new cost that is expected to arrive is the operating expenses for the new campus center on the Rose Hill campus, which are estimated at $10.8 million a year. Undergraduate tuition, which was frozen during the pandemic, will need to be addressed as well, as the federal stimulus dollars that enabled Fordham to hold off on an increase will not be available again.

“We’ll continue to support students with significant financial aid, but there doesn’t seem to be a university or college around that isn’t raising tuitions this year, especially after freezing the undergraduate tuition rate, as Fordham did,” said Hirst.

“It’s one of the realities of the time we’re in.”

Educating for Justice

Through it all, Milowski said that all decisions will be based on Fordham’s current strategic plan, titled Educating for Justice. Major priorities in the plan include educating students as global citizens & transformative leaders for justice in the innovation age; excelling across the natural and applied sciences and allied fields to promote social change and equity; and cultivating a diverse, equitable, inclusive, caring, and connected community that promotes each member’s development as a whole person.

He cited the University’s new Ph.D. in computer science as an example of a development driven by Fordham’s strategic plan. Hirst echoed him, noting that “the lion’s share” of government-sponsored research is in STEM disciplines.

“It is exciting to contemplate that we can begin to grow STEM initiatives at Fordham, not only to attract dynamic students and faculty but also that there might be greater opportunities to compete for some government-sponsored research opportunities,” she said.

One of the brightest developments of Fordham’s financial picture is its endowment, which passed $1 billion for the first time in history this year. This amount is on par with Fordham’s peer and aspirant schools and bodes well for the future.

“It tells the outside world about our fiscal health. The strength of it helps us enormously when we’re going to borrow money, such as for the campus center, or to refinance some of our bonds,” Hirst said.

“Everybody at Fordham wins when we have a strong endowment.”

The full recording of the fall 2021 budget forum is below:

The roughly $150 million in revenue bonds for the campus center project will be issued by the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York for Fordham.

“Both rating agencies note Fordham’s solid enrollments, our prudent management, recent enhanced financial stability, and capacity to manage this additional level of debt,” said Martha Hirst, Fordham’s senior vice president, CFO, and treasurer.

In its annual rating report released on Nov. 19, Moody’s assigned an A2 to Fordham’s proposed bonds as well as its outstanding bonds, and rated the University’s outlook as stable. The positive rating reflects Fordham’s “relatively large scope of operations and very good strategic positioning as a prominent Jesuit institution located in New York City offering a diversity of undergraduate and graduate programs,” according to the report.

Also noted in the Moody’s report were three other positives: Fordham’s increasing enrollment supports rising net tuition revenue, which, in turn, boosts the University’s operating performance. The University’s operating cash flow margin was “a sound 15.5%” in fiscal year 2019. And, surplus operations and strong donor support, with three-year average annual gifts that amount to more than $65 million and well above a peer median of $23 million, continue to build reserves.

Standard & Poor’s (S&P) Global Ratings assigned its “A” long-term rating to the revenue bonds and affirmed its “A” long-term rating on Fordham’s outstanding bonds. The agency’s Nov. 25 report also rated Fordham’s outlook as stable.

Similar to the Moody’s report, S&P cited solid enrollment growth and student quality as evidence of Fordham’s strong enterprise profile. Also noted were the University’s “consistently positive operating margins, concentrated revenue base, solid cash and investments relative to operations and debt, and improving expendable resources.” With regards to Fordham’s “solid management,” the report noted “conservative budgeting practices, success in implementing multi-year strategies, and well-considered reactions to external change.”

The proposed bonds represent the majority of the funding for the campus center project. As the centerpiece of the University’s new campaign focused on the student experience, the project will also be supported with fundraising dollars.

In gatherings held at each of the Rose Hill and the Lincoln Center campus, Father McShane formally unveiled Continuous University Strategic Planning (CUSP), which follows Toward 2016, the 10-year comprehensive strategic plan the University created in December 2005.

But before that, he addressed serious racial and anti-Semitic incidents that took place at the Rose Hill campus last week. He speculated that the perpetrator of the first incident, in which a racial slur was found on the door of an African-American student’s room, was a freshman who “has not had enough time in our midst to absorb and be positively infected with the spirit of our University.”

The incidents are shocking, disturbing, disheartening, disorienting, and makes him furious and very depressed, he said, because they illustrate how the University was not able to protect a vulnerable member of the community.

“Please, faculty members who are here, I’m asking you to address these matters—the incident, the causes of racism, and what we can do to get a healed campus back,” he said in an afternoon address at the law school.

“We have a lot of work to do. And as we go forward, I ask you please, let us draw together, let us come together, let us knit ourselves together as a community which will make clear to every student, and everyone here that this kind of behavior—hatred, violence, and intolerance—has no place here at Fordham, period. There is no excuse for it. Ever.”

Father McShane also formally welcomed several new senior members of the administration: Martha Hirst, Fordham’s senior vice president for finance and chief financial officer; Elaine Crosson, new general counsel; Maura Mast, the new dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill; Eva Badowska, the new dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; Virginia Roach, the new dean of the Graduate School of Education; and Matthew Diller, the new dean of the School of Law.

Higher Ed in Transition

In embracing CUSP, which is being overseen by a 22-member committee from various University departments, Father McShane noted that the world of higher education is changing at an extraordinary rate, and as such, traditional strategic plans are of little use now.

“What we have to do is move away from an exercise which would create a document that we are supposed to live with for 5, 7 or 10 years, and move toward a process of continuous strategic planning, which will enable us to be far more agile in reacting or responding to what is going on, and plotting a course that will differentiate us from others,” he said.
The guiding principle going forward, he said, lies on key aspects to achieve greatness “on Fordham’s own terms.”

“[It] means making Fordham the model—‘the,’ not ‘a’ model—urban Jesuit university for the 21st century,” he said.

The rest of the afternoon was devoted to a question and answer session with CUSP co-chairs Patrick Hornbeck, PhD, associate professor of theology and chair of the department; Debra McPhee, dean of the Graduate School of Social Service; and Peter Stace, vice president for enrollment.

Hornbeck noted that although Toward 2016 had merit, it failed to anticipate such developments as the financial crisis of 2008 or the drops in demand for legal education and graduate studies in the arts and sciences.  He made a distinction between strategic planning and operational planning.

“Strategic questions are the ones that ask us to step back and take the sort of 30,000 foot view of the institution. What is Fordham, and why are we here?” he said, noting that for him, CUSP can be summarized by the phrase, ‘This is not business as usual.’

“I think very often here at Fordham we’re used to thinking, acting, or perceiving in certain terms. We’ve gotten used to the way that we do our business, and part of this planning is disrupting and figuring out how we can be ourselves in a better, more effective way,” he said.

Hornbeck emphasized that although there are 22 members of the committee, the process, which is expected to go through three-year-long cycles, will be inclusive of all members of the University community—from faculty, staff, and students, to alumni and University neighbors. Contributions can already be made at http://www.fordham.edu/cusp.

“We’re going to be creating a culture of planning here at Fordham. We want to build planning and planning-related thinking into the work that we do on an ongoing basis,” he said.