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Central College completes shift in operations for cost-saving, efficiency • Iowa Capital Dispatch [1]

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Date: 2025-08-19

Central College has spent this summer making internal changes to leadership and operations, concluding work college leadership said they started strategizing on after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Central College President Mark Putnam said he’s approached decisions around changing university operations as “rethinking the work” — looking at measures to save money and streamline services without lowering the quality of a Central education and experience.

“I think how any institution approaches this could risk, in a negative scenario, quality, but I think for most it’s about maintaining quality by rethinking the ways in which we do things and beginning to change the conformities and conventional-wisdom pathways that we have followed,” Putnam said.

In spring 2022, Putnam said Central College staff and leadership began looking at how the university could shrink costs in both academic and business areas. The goal was to take a more holistic look at operations and implement measures they believed would work, even if they went against the traditional practices of most universities.

Putnam said the amount they were targeting for savings at the time was around $5 million from an expense base he said was “north of $40 million” in order to reach and exceed a neutral cash-flow budget. The university achieved a balanced budget at the end of fiscal year 2025 in early July, he said, with a “10-percent structural realignment” in funds.

After having academic departments go through quantitative and qualitative data to determine how they could both evolve and sustain themselves, Putnam said the university has, in phases, brought its number of departments down from 18 to seven. This was done by integrating separate programs, like music and art and theatre, into singular departments, categorized by their similarities of subject.

This allowed the Pella university to save money and prompted further collaboration between faculty and staff, which Putnam said could lead to new innovations and efficiencies. The university also offered “voluntary separations” to certain employees throughout this time, he said.

“Having one mind looking across those various interests that are manifested within the campus, and increasingly through ‘Imagine More’ with the community, in partnerships that we’re beginning to form in that arena, well, suddenly this makes more sense, to have a more integrated, thoughtful design, rather than having them isolated from each other,” Putnam said.

The “Imagine More: It’s Central to Pella” initiative, launched in December 2023 to bring college and community closer together, was also factored into thinking about efficiencies on campus, Putnam said. Some Central facilities will be repurposed for projects undertaken through partnerships between the college and outside groups, Putnam said, and the college has taken some buildings offline and moved some operations around to save money and square-footage.

Other areas of integration have come from the business side of the university, Putnam said, including the creation of the executive director for retail management role. Iwan Williams — appointed to the new position in January — oversees everything from local business partnerships and retail services run by Central to catering, concessions, events, clinics and more.

When someone comes to Central hoping to put on an event or partner on a project, Putnam said they can now go to one person for all of their needs rather than having to jump between a bunch of different people to sort things out.

With three years of work now complete, Putnam said the university finished the past fiscal year with a balanced budget, successful fundraising and plans to retire short-term debt the institution still has. This was done through a mix of restructuring and increasing revenue streams.

Central’s advancement division also saw changes this summer, with the university announcing a realignment in a news release in order to support “A World of Good,” a comprehensive fundraising campaign launched in the spring.

Sunny Eighmy, vice president for advancement at Central, said there have been a couple of departures from the team that led to a downsize in the workforce and this summer several people were promoted in order to better integrate communications and advancement staffs and handle alumni engagement.

The “A World of Good” campaign will have Eighmy and other advancement staff working on fundraising, she said mainly for endowed scholarships, and going into communities Central is a part of and tracking the university’s economic impact, which includes recording volunteer service hours from members of the Central campus. According to its website, the campaign has already raised nearly $46 million of its $50 million goal.

“For us at Central, it’s always been about our students first, and they’re really at the heart of most of our decisions,” Eighmy said.

While Putnam said the job of reorganization may be done for now, he is still looking ahead to what could impact university operations in the future. One area which Putnam said could impact the university, and in some ways already is, is AI and its applications both in the classroom and business office.

Changes Central may or may not have to make in the future could come less from an internal need to shift things and more from society as it evolves and its wants change.

“Do I think there’s going to be more organizational development? Absolutely,” Putnam said. “I just don’t know what it’s going to look like.”

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[1] Url: https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2025/08/19/central-college-completes-shift-in-operations-for-cost-saving-efficiency/

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