WSU Vancouver: A Campus in Transition

Where We’ve Been, Where We Are, and Where We’re Going

WSU Statewide Campuses | Office of the Executive Vice President July 2026

1. Where We Have Been

For most of its recent history, WSU Vancouver has managed decline slowly enough that no single year felt like a crisis — until the years stacked up. Five threads run through that history, and they are more tangled together than they first appear.

1.1 The Enrollment Story

The enrollment story is erosion, not a cliff. Between AY2023 and AY2025, total student credit hours, course sections, and overall enrollment each slid about 5%. Graduate enrollment fared far worse — down 36% over the same window — while undergraduate softening stayed shallower and more broadly distributed across programs. The cumulative effects of each year’s enrollment decline resulted in an overall decrease of 24%. The campus wasn’t standing still: temporary faculty positions fell 22% over three years while tenure-track and career-track faculty FTE grew each year, a shift toward a more permanent instructional core that predates this year’s budget decisions and both helps the budget and strengthens teaching and research. In Fall 2025, the trend cracked open: undergraduate enrollment grew for the first time since 2020, with larger incoming first-year, transfer, and graduate cohorts than the year before. See appendix 2

1.2 The Budget Story

The budget story is where slow erosion became structural. WSU Vancouver absorbed a reduction target in six consecutive fiscal years — FY21 through FY26 — but the character of those cuts changed partway through. FY21–FY22 leaned on temporary, one-time reductions in state funds only: 10% and 7.5% targets that did not require permanent restructuring. Starting in FY23, reductions became permanent, and by FY26 the campus was absorbing a 9.8% reduction applied to both state funding and tuition revenue — a $4.3 million structural cut, the largest of the run. That shift, from temporary belt-tightening to permanent correction, reduction made the problem impossible to solve through discretionary trims alone.

1.3 Internal Budget Issue Corrections

Two further budget issues surfaced over the past year. First, a structural deficit was identified in permanent positions supported with one-time funds; this was corrected by moving $830,000 onto core funding. This reflects the campus’s identifying and addressing its own budget issues in real time, even before this year’s cuts. Second, the tuition true-up process which occurs at the end of the fiscal year resulted in less net tuition revenue than had previously been modeled and anticipated. The model for tuition true-up will be corrected over the coming year. Read alongside the FY21–FY26 reduction history, this means part of what looked like a stable, if shrinking, revenue base was somewhat inflated. The correction does not change what already happened, but FY27 and FY28 planning must account for a revenue baseline that is about to shift downward, independent of any new reduction target.

1.4 The Leadership Story

The leadership story begins with a retirement, not a redesign. Mel Netzhammer, WSU Vancouver’s second chancellor since 2012, announced in August 2024 that he would retire the following year. Following a failed search, Sandra Haynes — already chancellor at WSU Tri-Cities — stepped in as interim leader of WSU Vancouver as well in June 2025, co-chairing an anticipated second search for his successor.

That search did not result in the appointment of a single-campus chancellor. Around the same time, WSU’s Board of Regents named Dr. Elizabeth “Betsy” Cantwell the university’s 12th president in February 2025, with her term beginning that April. Under this new presidency, the interim arrangement in Vancouver became the seed of something larger: rather than searching for a third Vancouver-only chancellor, WSU launched a year-long, university-wide co-design process, and by April 2026, Haynes had been named Executive Vice President for a newly created WSU Statewide Campuses structure governing Everett, Tri-Cities, and Vancouver together. A routine leadership transition became the practical opening for a structural change. (Appendix 1)

1.5 The Data Story

The data story ties the other threads together. Between July and December 2025, WSU Vancouver worked with rpk GROUP to build the Academic Portfolio and Resources Review (APRR) — a nine-metric framework assessing every academic department on enrollment density, credit-hour trends, degree production, faculty student credit hours, and cost per credit hour. The final report, linked above, landed February 2, 2026, giving the campus, for the first time, a standardized, comparable picture of where each department stood — a shared evidence base rather than guesswork. It is an early example of the principle WSU later formalized university-wide: that decisions should be grounded in transparent, outcomes-tied data. More in Section 2.1.

2. Where We Are Now

Three forces converged on WSU Vancouver at once, and this plan exists because none can be addressed in isolation: a deepening budget reduction driven partly by federal and state cuts and rising costs; five years of enrollment softening and tuition-revenue loss; and a leadership structure that changed underneath the campus the same year the cuts landed.

2.1 The New Leadership Structure

The new structure, now in its first full year, splits authority along a specific line: local, relationship-dependent decisions stay with the campus, while finance and operations, enrollment management, and marketing are now fully shared statewide functions. Christine Portfors leads Vancouver’s Academic and Student Affairs; Damien Sinnott (finance and operations), Laurel Rea (enrollment), and Brenda Alling (marketing) run their functions across all three campuses, with Vancouver-specific staff embedded locally under each.

This was not leadership change imposed on Vancouver from outside in the same year as budget cuts. Its timing traces to Netzhammer’s planned retirement, and the resulting structure was shaped in parallel with WSU’s year-long, university-wide co-design process — launched early in President Cantwell’s tenure, gathering input from more than 1,700 students, faculty, staff, and community partners before five system-wide redesign recommendations were finalized in July 2026: Decision Making Authority, Coordination Mechanisms, Data & Investments, WSU Your Way, and Regionally Responsive WSU. The Statewide Campuses model directly expresses the first two. The other three recur throughout this plan; Appendix 1 maps all five recommendations in one place.

2.2 Where the Budget Stands Today

The FY27 reduction was $6.2 million — 15% of the core funds base, deeper than any of the three scenarios (3%, 5%, 10%) originally modeled. That target has been executed, not just planned: 65 separate actions, spanning statewide campus reorganization (3) vacant-position eliminations (23), non-renewed lecturer contracts (2), retirement-timed departures (9), filled faculty positions (2), and filled staff positions eliminated involuntarily (20), concentrated in academic and administrative support. Other positions eliminated included adjuncts, TAs, and discretionary funding. Every affected employee has been notified individually, with notice periods running 15 days to 12 months depending on classification. No academic program was closed. See Appendix 3.

Layered on top of the $6.2 million reduction is the separate tuition calculation correction which reduces the revenue base the campus can plan against. This is an additional, near-term adjustment, not part of the $6.2 million figure, and it argues for treating the current budget picture as not yet fully settled even after this year’s position actions are complete.

2.3 Where Enrollment and Data Stand Today

The modest Fall 2025 uptick is real but unconfirmed as a trend — the campus is waiting on Fall 2026 data before treating it as a turnaround rather than a one-year blip. The APRR gave the campus a shared evidence base, but it also exposed gaps: no dedicated institutional research staff, incomplete retention data, and known inconsistencies in how certificate students get coded. These gaps will be addressed as the campus refreshes the data analysis year to year.

3. Where We Are Going from Here

3.1 Completing the Statewide Campuses Transition

In part, we are finishing this transition: confirming through the FY28 review where the combined leadership model is working and making adjustments where it is not. It is worth keeping in mind that the model was not built in isolation but was shaped in step with the system-wide co-design process.

3.2 Correcting the Tuition Calculation and Preparing for Next Year

Over the next year, Finance and Administration will work through the mechanics of adjusting the tuition modeling process with the system budget office — how the adjustment is phased in, and how it’s communicated to a campus community that has just been through a year of position eliminations. It is also an application of the Data & Investments recommendation from Section 2.1 — accurate financial data is the precondition for everything else that recommendation asks for.

3.3 Reorganizing to a Shared Services Team

The redistribution work is still in motion. The new Academic and Student Affairs Shared Services Team — built to absorb the 8 eliminated administrative positions — is now being stood up, and the campus has acknowledged that this team is absorbing more than it was originally scoped to handle. That is a named risk, with a 90-day workload review already scheduled to check whether the model is holding.

The Shared Services Team will restructure support for academic programs, enrollment, advising, and library into one shared services team. The Shared Services Team is not a one-time fix — it is the operating model going forward for how Academic and Student Affairs distributes personnel, scheduling, travel, and clinical-placement work across colleges instead of duplicating that capacity six times over. This structure is designed with regular evaluation embedded to ensure appropriate workload across the positions, optimized practices, and effective support for all academic and student affairs units across campus.

3.4 Institutionalizing the Data Process

The APRR becomes an annual review rather than a one-time crisis response — refreshed each year, checked by the Academic Leadership Council every fall, with specific data gaps (retention tracking, faculty FTE accuracy, completion coding) named as an FY28 investment priority. This is Data & Investments made permanent: a standing habit of tying decisions to evidence, not a one-time consulting engagement commissioned during a hard year. We are working on moving an existing employee into the role of IR lead for the campus to assist with data processing.

3.5 Targeted Enrollment Growth

The APRR points to four programs for growth investment, in priority order: Electrical Engineering (a capacity problem — redirect existing faculty before hiring), Elementary Education (a yield problem — fix marketing and financial-aid messaging, not the program), CESHS graduate programs (a visibility problem — students who apply mostly get in), and Human Development (a “melt” problem — high declared interest that isn’t converting to majors, addressed through an early advising pilot). These priorities also express two more redesign recommendations on the ground: WSU Your Way, because removing yield and visibility barriers is what flexible pathways looks like in practice, and Regionally Responsive WSU, because each program reflects documented regional demand rather than a generic growth target.

3.6 Seamless Student Support and a Sense of Belonging

Using an example from the preceding paragraph, the melt seen in Human Development reveals a broader issue: students don’t experience the university as separate offices — admissions, advising, financial aid, the registrar, college support staff — they experience it as one continuous relationship, and every handoff is a place where a student can quietly disengage before enrollment data shows it a semester later. To help prevent this melt and enhance the major, service experiences need to be designed around seamless handoffs and a felt sense of belonging, not around the org chart. This is exactly what WSU Your Way asks for at the university-wide level, made real for a Vancouver student.

The new Shared Services Team is an opportunity here, not just a cost-saving structure: because it already centralizes advising operations, enrollment support, and college-liaison functions that used to sit in separate offices, it’s positioned to design one consistent path for a student moving from admitted to enrolled to declared major to advised to graduated, rather than several disconnected paths run by different people. Concretely, this could mean the college liaison and enrollment coordinator roles explicitly own handoff moments themselves — not just their own piece of the process — with a shared, trackable record of where a student is, so no one falls through a gap between offices. A similar coordination need exists in Student Academic Support Services (Writing Center, Service Learning, Undergraduate Research, etc.).

3.7 The Case for a One-Stop Student Services and Academic Support Center

A one-stop academic support center is a direct answer to that need. The campus will evaluate creating such a center because the evidence is specific and the payoff measurable — and because it is the clearest way WSU Your Way could show up in a student’s actual day.

Why would we explore the development of these models? Decentralized service models designed decades ago are mismatched to today’s students. When services operate in silos, students face cumulative frustrations that can contribute to leaving college entirely — a retention mechanism working in the wrong direction. Every time a student has to figure out on their own where to go for academic support or whether a question belongs to financial aid, the registrar, an advisor, or a college’s front office, and then chase down the right one, is a small moment where disengagement can take root and later show up as a withdrawal or non-return. Given the reduction in administrative staffing, a one-stop model is not just a student-experience improvement — it is a way to help a smaller staff function effectively by eliminating duplicated effort across offices. Since several of these pieces already exist inside the new Shared Services structure and Student Academic Support around the campus, these are a lower-lift addition than building something from the ground up.

3.8 Making Majors More Relevant: Scheduling and Curriculum

The APRR points to a lever beyond the four priority programs: how and when courses are offered, and how curricula are structured, can move enrollment on their own — independent of marketing or advising. That tracks with the yield and melt data: some of the softening here isn’t waning interest, it is programs that do not fit the lives of students who are working, commuting, and juggling other obligations around a class schedule that wasn’t built with that in mind.

This is worth pursuing alongside the yield and visibility fixes already underway: reviewing whether course sections could be offered in formats and time blocks that reduce scheduling conflicts and reviewing curricular sequencing and degree requirements for places where flexibility could increase without loosening rigor. This should happen college by college, using the APRR’s department-level data as the starting point — natural work for the Scheduling, Accreditation, and Assessment Coordinator role already built into the Shared Services Team. It is WSU Your Way in practice, and, to the extent scheduling and curriculum reflect what regional employers need, Regionally Responsive WSU as well.

3.9 Research as Part of the Growth Strategy

Research must have a place at the table. The case is not for research expansion everywhere — it is for strengthening research where WSU Vancouver already has real strength and encouraging the growth of external funding. Enhancing undergraduate research deserves particular attention in this scenario as its own retention and belonging mechanism, tying directly back to the seamless-support work in Section 3.6 rather than competing with it for attention.

3.10 Strengthening Shared Governance

The core of shared governance lies in the formal Washington State University structures through faculty senate. It is worth mentioning here as the reorganization has pulled decision-making authority toward a statewide EVP office and centralized finance, IT, and enrollment functions. None of that is inherently a governance problem, but it is exactly the moment to be precise about what shared governance requires, because it’s easiest to erode quietly during a reorganization. This must start with defining clearer roles and accountability for who decides what. 

At its core, shared governance divides labor by where expertise and accountability sit. Faculty carry primary responsibility for matters closest to the academic mission — curriculum, degree requirements, faculty status, academic standards — because that is where their expertise is irreplaceable. Administration carries primary responsibility for operations, budget execution, and personnel management outside the faculty ranks, because that’s where accountability for institutional viability sits. The board — or, in a state system, the regents and system leadership — holds final fiduciary authority. Shared governance means these groups consult each other meaningfully before decisions are finalized in their own domain — not that every decision is made by everyone.  

Again, formal shared governance lies within the WSU system. Local shared governance, however, consists of developing excellent communication channels to inform the management decisions and to craft messages to be carried to faculty senate and other established governance units.

3.11 Staying Honest: Ongoing Communication

None of the above matters much if the campus does not hear about it honestly and on a predictable schedule. The plan commits, concretely, to a public webpage starting with this report; a standing online feedback channel with a published log of questions and answers; quarterly public reporting on FY27 budget implementation; and an annual, campus-facing APRR refresh. This is the mechanism by which where we’re going gets checked against what actually happened, rather than taken on faith.