United Methodists opened the annual meeting of the North Alabama Conference on Wednesday in Huntsville and on Thursday welcomed a report from the financially struggling Birmingham-Southern College, which is affiliated with the conference.
“Will you express your gratitude for an amazing turnaround?” said Bishop Debra Wallace-Padgett, head of the North Alabama Conference. Several hundred delegates stood to applaud before Birmingham-Southern College President Daniel Coleman approached the podium to deliver a report.
“It’ been a tough year, I’ll just tell you that,” Coleman said. “Miracles do happen.”
Coleman recapped the passage of state legislation, signed by Gov. Kay Ivey on June 16, that will allow the college to take up to a $30 million loan to help it stay open.
“We’re looking for about $40 million to bridge us,” Coleman said. “This will allow us to restructure some debt. Our endowment has dwindled significantly.”
Coleman said he plans to meet with City of Birmingham officials over the coming weeks and with Jefferson County officials. The school hopes to get $5 million in funding from the city and $2.5 million from the county, he said.
The college has lined up about $46 million in pledges from its donors and hopes to get to $75 million or more in pledges by October, when the fundraising campaign will go public, he said. The school needs to restructure debt, rebuild the endowment and rebuild student enrollment, he said.
Coleman said that despite 3,300 applications received from prospective students, news about the college’s financial predicament early this year dampened enrollment.
“When the news hit that we might not be around, you can imagine we didn’t get a lot of deposits,” he said.
More than 10 percent of the student body left, he said.
Coleman said 2023 fall enrollment will be in the range of about 750 to 775 students. With increased financial stability, he’s hoping the college will get back to an enrollment of about 1,200 to 1,500 students in the future.
“I want to assure you, we are the same Birmingham-Southern we’ve always been,” Coleman said.
Prospective BSC students continue to be high academic achievers, with a median 26 ACT score and an average 3.7 GPA in high school, he said.
BSC students are about 74 percent white, 14 percent African-American, 5 percent Hispanic and 2 percent Asian, Coleman said.
Several faculty members have left, but the college has hired 12 new faculty, he said. The student to faculty ratio will be about 9-to-1, he said.
“We are still very much a Christian school, which is of course very important, because we’re a Methodist school,” Coleman said.
About 70.4 percent of students identify as Christian, but 28.4 percent have no religious identification, he said.
“I think that reflects the broader society today and is something that concerns me personally,” Coleman said. “It’s a school where Christ is alive and well with people in their day to day lives and Christianity is practiced in lots of different forms regularly on our campus.”
BSC has been running deficits every year and draining its endowment. It has gone from a $48 million endowment in 2012 to between $20 million and $25 million in endowment now. The college’s debt has been reduced from $68 million in 2012 to about $27 million now.
Birmingham-Southern College formed from a 1918 merger of Southern University, dating to 1856, and Birmingham College, dating to 1898, both founded by the Methodist Church.
The United Methodist North Alabama Conference, which has its headquarters on the BSC campus, supports BSC by pledging $250,000 annually for scholarships, but is facing a crisis of its own and also had a tough year. Since last year, 333 of 638 churches have disaffiliated, leaving 305 churches.
