President Chabotar Quoted on Higher Education Finance
President Kent Chabotar was quoted by Inside Higher Ed in a July 27 article about the online publication’s second annual Survey of College and University Business Officers
Two-thirds of the survey’s 502 respondents said their institutions are in “good” or “excellent” financial health, a level of optimism that surprised Kent. “Endowments may have recovered but enrollment, state support, unemployment and tuition discounting have not,” he said.
Kent served as chief financial officer at Bowdoin College in Maine before being named president of Guilford in 2002.
“Having been a CFO, my guess is that part of this optimism is that the CFOs believe that finances reflect their own performance just like a win-loss record for a basketball coach,” he said. “The reality is that although the CFO plays a vital role, financial health also depends on a variety of factors outside the business office.”
