Subject: Georgetown’s 2014 Financial Performance
From: Campus Broadcast <[email-masked]>
To: Campus Broadcast <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 20:51:38 +0000

[Georgetown University]

Dear Members of the Georgetown University Community,

The audit of Georgetown’s financial performance in the last fiscal year ending June 30, 2014 is complete and I am writing to share with you the results, to update you on Georgetown’s fiscal year 2014 financial performance, and to outline priorities that are guiding our strategic investments. The university’s operating expenses were $1.118 billion in fiscal year 2014. We operate on a very thin margin, closing the fiscal year with a small surplus of $1.3 million. You can find the Audited Financial Statements for fiscal year 2014 here.
Strategic Investments
Georgetown’s goal is to ensure that we remain competitive with our peers as a top-tier research and teaching institution amid an increasingly complex higher education landscape. To that end, we are engaged in a comprehensive planning process and are making strategic investments in the core areas that fortify the mission of Georgetown: financial aid, research and teaching, our physical campuses and technology. These investments, reflected in our fiscal year 2014 results, are enabling us to sustain an academic environment where the best students and the best faculty and staff come together to do their best work.

Financial Aid
Georgetown aims to recruit the very best students and invested $153 million in financial aid during fiscal year 2014, including amounts dedicated to our need-blind admissions and full-need financial aid policy for eligible undergraduates, one of only 23 universities nationwide with need-blind, full-need admission and financial aid policies. Maintaining our need-blind, full-need admission and financial aid policies reflects our commitment to increasing access to a Georgetown education. We have chosen to slow the rise of the undergraduate cost of attendance at Georgetown as it relates to tuition, moving from a ranking of the 3rd most expensive university to 38th, while our commitment to our need-blind admissions and full-need financial aid policy remains.

Research and Teaching
We have continued to prioritize investments in research despite a federal climate that is highly constrained as it relates to the federal sponsorship of research. University-wide, federal research spending is down 16% from last year. Over the last fiscal year, the Medical Center had a reduction of $18.3 million in research funding from the previous year, while still receiving $105 million in research funding. We do not expect the federal climate to change and are working to mitigate this challenge in a new financial climate by reducing expenses where we can and looking for new investments to diversify our research base. The McCourt gift, received in fiscal year 2014, is one way we are doing this, and will enable us to launch new opportunities for scholarship in the area of public policy and through the Massive Data Institute, which will be a resource for all of our faculty.

Our investments in the teaching mission include educational programs, educational innovation (such as the Initiative for Technology Enhanced Learning [ITEL] that has supported over 200 faculty in course-level innovation), and our engagement with edX and the mounting of six Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) through which more than 100,000 students worldwide have had the benefit of learning from Georgetown's faculty.

Physical Campus
Over the last decade, we have invested $600 million in our campus infrastructure and completed three major academic spaces - the Hariri building, Regents Hall, and the new downtown location for SCS. We have been guided in this work by a set of principles, including introducing new green spaces, organizing strategic growth consistent with campus districts, developing a more residential living and learning community, creating a pedestrian-friendly campus, improving transportation modes and means into campus, and establishing an effective, efficient clinical footprint to address Georgetown’s academic and medical mission.

With the completion of these academic spaces, we are now able to invest in new buildings supporting the student experience. Over the last fiscal year, we invested in the new Healey Family Student Center, providing valuable social and study space to enhance students’ academic experience. Construction is underway on a new residence hall, Northeast Triangle, which includes spaces designed by students to facilitate a collaborative living and learning experience. And we’ve broken ground on the John R. Thompson, Jr. Intercollegiate Athletics Center, funded through philanthropy, which enhances the competitive, co-curricular experience for more than 750 student athletes.

This phase of development would not be possible without the cooperation and patience of our entire community. The physical challenges associated with construction on main campus have required students, faculty and staff to change their routes and allow more time to travel through campus. Your patience is making possible a future campus that will reflect both what is timeless and sacred about a Georgetown education and what the next generation of Georgetown students seek in a learning environment.

Technology
Technology is a critical enabler of our teaching and research mission, and key to our ongoing competitiveness as a top institution. This year we made significant investments in our technology to modernize our foundation and core applications, leverage digital technologies, and enhance our research infrastructure.

These investments include completing ubiquitous wifi; expanding our High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster, a scalable computing infrastructure for use in teaching and research; moving our financial system to the cloud; increasing our information security capabilities; improving our network and data center infrastructure; continued mobile innovation and preparing for the launch of the university’s first Business Intelligence and Analytics platform to transform how we gather, store, share, and access our data.

Fundraising and Endowment
Gifts from alumni and other Georgetown supporters continue to provide critical funding for the university’s ongoing operations and our strategic priorities and investments. The university surpassed $1.3 billion in commitments towards its current fundraising campaign in fiscal year 2014, aided in part by the $100 million donation for the McCourt School of Public Policy, the largest gift in school history.

Our pooled endowment saw a FY14 investment return of 14.9%, well above our long-term target return of 7% (over the last five years, the pooled endowment generated an annualized investment return of just over 11%). This endowment, which totals $1.4 billion, is invested to provide a return that can fund long-term programmatic needs. During fiscal year 2014 the endowment generated a payout of $71.6 million to our overall operating budget, providing support for our strategic investments, including student financial aid.

Thank You
Seeking solutions for how to best prepare our students to be citizens and leaders of a more complex and interconnected world is at the core of our mission. Investing in this mission will make a world-class education available to the next generation of Georgetown students. Thank you for your work to invest in Georgetown’s future. We appreciate the continued commitment and creativity of our community to remain a top-tier research and teaching institution where all of our students and faculty can do their best work.

Sincerely,

Chris Augostini
Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer

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