January 15, 2026
Welcome Back! If I have not had the opportunity to speak with you yet, I hope you enjoyed a restful and fun holiday break and return with renewed energy and stamina for the spring semester. Commencement will be here much faster than we anticipate. Welcome back, also, to the Grunin Center. As you can see, the construction of both the Grunin Center expansion and the new admin building moved forward, and I am sure everyone is happy for these seats over the bleachers.
Congratulations to all the recipients of the service awards and the president’s awards. Your commitment inspires us all. I also want to thank College Relations for putting the event together, including providing refreshments and helping me prepare. I also must acknowledge the outstanding work of the Colloquium Team and the Achieving the Dream team, who together made today possible:
Alexa Beshara Blauth–Jan Kirsten–Donna Rosinski-Kauz–Debra Lee-Vasquez–Anthony Jordan–Melanie Parker–Dottie LaPosa–Kristen D’Amico–Casey Pellegrino
And the ATD Co-Chairs: Mark Westmoreland, Ana Wilson, Briana Cardinale, and Alexa Beshara Blauth.
We have two sign language interpreters with us today, Katie Harrison and Amanda Mancinelli. Thank you for helping us today with your fabulous skills.
I would like to acknowledge and thank some special guests in the audience today:
- Mr. Mr. Steven Zabarsky, Chair of the Board of Trustees, Ocean County College
- Mr. Hunter Mantz, Alumni Trustee
This is my third spring colloquium speech, and I would like to continue what I have done previously by sharing some highlights from this academic year to date. We continue to work on how best to foster good communication across campus—unless the information is a rumor, and that seems to fly on its own—so these highlights provide an opportunity for campus-wide acknowledgement and celebration. I will go through these very quickly, but they will be available by early next week for more leisurely appreciation of some of the great work occurring on the campus. I encourage you to read through these slides and celebrate the good work happening throughout the campus. This is just a fraction, even of what was shared with me.
- The Foundation— $2M in support
- Helping Hands
- Tutoring
- Collaboration—School of Arts and Humanities
- Grunin Center
- Novins Planetarium
- Early College
- Recruitment
- Success and Retention
- FIPSE
- Transfer Services
- School of Nursing
- Purchasing
- School of Business and Social Sciences
- VMRC
- TriO
- Grants
- Athletics
- School of STEM
- Institutional Research and Planning
While I have a captive audience, I would also like to share here some of the details about Commencement Week, May 18-21:
- The Sports Award Banquet on Monday, May 18;
- Tuesday, May 19, we will celebrate the Scholarship Awards, in the Grunin Center;
- The Nurses Pinning will occur on Wednesday, May 20;
- On Thursday, May 21, we will celebrate our graduates at two commencements to be held at the RWJ Barnabas Center. The first will occur at 4:00 p.m., and the second will occur at 7:00 p.m.
Student Life and the Registrar’s Office are coordinating to determine how best to divide our student body in order to accommodate the most guests and the identify the clearest rationale for the division. Working with College Relations, the Registrar will send out clear and personalized information to students and their families. Faculty will not be required to attend both commencement exercises, and staff will not be required to attend in order to accommodate the families of our graduates. You are, of course, always welcome.
We continue to make steady progress in advancing the goals of our Strategic Plan. This work is supported by the Institutional Effectiveness Committee, comprised of colleagues who serve on our Goal Committees, who meet regularly to share updates, align efforts, and coordinate expertise across the campus. We also recognize the importance of communication to keep the campus informed and engaged. To support this, we are launching digital briefs that highlight progress on specific goals and objectives while creating opportunities for feedback and continued dialogue.
In addition, we are intentionally overlaying the focus areas of Achieving the Dream with the Strategic Plan to reinforce and accelerate progress toward our institutional goals. The alignment between these efforts is deliberate and strengthens the long-term sustainability of the College. Based on the feedback shared this morning, we will further refine the strategies developed to advance our goals. These conversations are ongoing and I hope you will continue to be engaged in this work.
Each initiative—across all goals, including Achieving the Dream—serves as a building block within the Strategic Plan. Together, these building blocks show how we are building opportunity and strengthening community through intentional, connected, and shared work across the College.
This is also a good time to remind everyone of the important work regarding the Title II mandate on accessibility and compliance. Over the past year, a subcommittee of the IT Governance Council, made up of representatives from across campus, has worked to address the Title II WCAG 2.1 mandate. This federal requirement calls for ADA compliance across all digital content by April, 2026, and it touches every area of our institution. Training and professional development are available to support this work, with centralized tools and guidance housed at go.ocean.edu/WCAG—see the card you received this morning. I ask everyone across our campus to work together to ensure compliance and to demonstrate our ongoing commitment to access, equity, and belonging, so that our digital spaces truly support all members of our community. Everyone received a card this morning that provides a link to assistance and support.
A topic that should be on our minds is the impact of artificial intelligence on higher education. Technological changes are transforming the basic understanding of teaching and learning. Institutionally, we must also embrace this new age, called, varyingly, the Experience Age, The AI Age, the Intelligence Revolution, or the Data Age. Except for the very young among us, most of us earned our education through reading books and articles, researching in libraries, regurgitating ideas through essays or exams– often with ever-increasing assistance from computers, data bases, and such. That form of learning is from another century, and as a college, we are struggling to keep up with the impact of Generative AI on every part of education. One of the major initiatives we will pursue for this calendar year is exploring collaboratively how we can teach students how to use AI responsibly, ethically, and productively, and how we can challenge ourselves in how we engage students and rethink how students demonstrate learning.
Many of our students arrive at college aware of what AI is and how to use it as a crutch. Our obligation is to teach students that AI cannot be a method of avoiding writing or thinking. The former federal Office of Education Technology recommended that:
“Institutions should . . . begin equipping students from all disciplines with the AI literacy skills (i.e., the knowledge and skills to understand, use, and evaluate AI systems critically, promoting safety and ethics), and AI-specific courses they are likely to need for their careers.”
Purdue was the first US university to require students to demonstrate AI competency as a graduation requirement. The SUNY system has implemented both a civic discourse and an AI competency requirement beginning with the incoming class of 2026, and we see more colleges implementing this approach.
As noted by others, the Generative AI genie will not return to the bottle. We must recognize the impact of Generative AI on how people learn and how people work. Many scholars have written about the ways this new technology fundamentally shifts how students and colleges must think about what constitutes learning and the demonstration of learning. Jason Gulya, a professor of English and media communications at Berkeley College, recently wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education about how he works to push students away from “doing college” to actually learning:
“For my students, learning is rarely the focus of the classroom. Putting it front and center (talking about how they learn and why they learn rather than focusing on what would be due in the class) felt strange, like we were undoing decades of conditioning that repeatedly suggested that college is about acquiring degrees and certifications and, ultimately, jobs. After all, grades and degrees have been marketed as keys to social mobility and financial security. How could we do anything but focus on getting the highest grades possible?”
He links his concerns to the work of scholar Susan Blum and her assertions about “schoolishness,” a system that rewards the trappings of learning rather than learning itself. For students who have bought into schoolishness, which approaches education as a way to get the highest scores as efficiently as possible, and who experience education as a transaction, Generative AI provides the means to be highly efficient at “schoolishness.” We need to rethink how we help students genuinely learn as we determine how to get this genie to serve us. Thus, we have three committees that will differently approach Generative AI:
- IT Governance Committee: Teaching and Learning Technology Committee (TLTC)
- Senate Subcommittees: Instruction Committee (pedagogy and instruction) and Academic and Student Affairs Standards and Policies Committee (policies and academic integrity)
- AI Community of Practice: comprised of faculty from all schools that started in the School of Arts and Humanities last summer. I will ask this community of practice to develop a list of the challenges and potential solutions to AI as educators. I would also like some people in student support positions to join this discussion. I also ask that we built a student group to generate the same list of concerns and possible solutions.
In addition, Kean University has assembled a team that is focused on what AI means in higher education, and we will reach out, at the Chancellor’s suggestion, to Mike Fagioli, Director of Learning Design and Academic Technologies, and Dr. Charles Campbell, Associate Vice President for Transformational Learning and External Affairs, to share and learn with them.
I know many of you are frustrated, and so are students. I have heard that students may be questioned about their use of AI in the classroom and then stop attending. We are not talking about a faculty member accusing them of doing anything wrong—just sharing that half the students were flagged and wanted to help students use AI ethically. Other students are pushing back and fighting some charges. Other faculty have had extremely productive conversations with individual students to help them understand how to use AI appropriately. We have to help students from day one understand this technology and how they can use it appropriately. I anticipate the teaching and learning institute as well as our next Colloquium to focus on how we reinvent our approach to teaching and learning. We must address this critical opportunity to rethink education. From my perspective, we are facing a change as great to education as the GI Bill was almost 100 years ago with respect to the impact on all colleges and universities operations and our approach to education.
Another important initiative is that of inculcating a culture of civility on this campus. I have been stunned by the many exchanges and behaviors on this campus that fail to recognize the humanity of another person. People send emails and communication to others laced with accusatory and hurtful language, that lack common courtesy, and are more likely to create or escalate a situation rather than solve a problem and further good working relationships. This kind of uncivil communication and behavior happens in many forms, not just in writing, and it occurs student to student, student to faculty, faculty to student, staff to faculty, faculty to staff, and staff to staff. We are surrounded by this type of discourteous and harmful behavior in the world writ large, but we owe it to students and one another to model civility and respect. Cara Dubitsky is building a taskforce to assess our current climate and to recommend workshops, policy changes, and other approaches to creating a civil campus, one that demonstrates the OCEAN values so clearly part of our strategic plan.
Of upmost concern is the financial health of the campus. Our FY 2027 budget prioritizes new programs, providing support for faculty and student use of technology, expansion of current programs through better room utilization, using data to guide decisions about the structure of degree pathways, addressing the increasing costs of personnel-related expenses, and supporting the initiatives of the strategic plan and Achieving the Dream. While many expenses are increasing without our ability to control them (e.g., healthcare premiums, energy costs), the College must contain other costs while being mindful of the need to maintain our excellent reputation. Realignment of our academic priorities and offering provides us one of the means to offset ever-climbing expenses.
Online programs continue to grow in response to student demand. 2025 was the first time that more US college students earned a degree entirely online as compared to being on a campus and earning the degree. OCC continues to see a steady increase in online enrollment. Building schedules for online offerings is easier than for campus offerings, but there are numerous considerations: length of the semester (e.g., 7.5 weeks, 15 weeks), the desirability of offering a number of courses or sections as hybrid (students take part of the course online and part on campus), and hyflex (students can take the course as online or on campus). This modality is not less expensive due to the increasing expenses of technology and student support, but it does require less campus classroom space. With fewer potential students, we must offer what they want and can build into their busy lives. We will work on how we help students understand these choices and monitor how their choices continue to impact how, when, and what we offer.
As we continue to see the growing percentage of the US population who do not see a college degree as part of achieving the American Dream, we must provide students the kind of education they see as important: the programs, policies, and degrees that lead directly to careers that provide a sustainable income. These programs tend to cluster in the health sciences: nursing, occupational therapy, dental hygiene, etc. Many of these fields do not require a bachelor’s degree for career entry. These programs are expensive to build and expensive to run, as they require highly skilled and well-paid administrators and faculty, and they are taught in highly specialized, single-use classrooms and facilities. These are, however, essential programs that are responding to community demand and need.
The addition of healthcare and workforce ready programs marks a shift in how we position the college in the marketplace and how we are perceived. We will continue to offer strong transfer degree pathways, but as we attract new students and support new programs, we must focus on transfer programs that are aligned with student interest and demand and ensure students can transfer baccalaureate ready and with the appropriate sixty credit hours. We cannot continue to offer boutique offerings that faculty are interested in but serve few students, and we cannot continue to offer the plethora of courses that are more appropriate to a university. We must streamline, and we do that by providing what students want and need. The good work you have done on the refined pathways for students will continue. We will monitor enrollments and adjust. This process of using enrollment data by course and pathway will continue, and we should anticipate additional streamlining of our curricular offerings while we simultaneously grow in high demand areas. I anticipate student demand will help us determine what gen ed courses to offer, and to offer those that serve multiple programs. We cannot afford to keep doing the same things when data can help us make better decisions.
Although greater confidence in a two-year degree persists, that, too, has shifted: students and families are interested in degrees that lead to defined careers with good lifetime wages. As Ocean County College responds to these market pressures through the development of new programs, the College must do so as state support continues to shrink. As operational costs continue to rise, particularly the cost of instruction, it is imperative that the entire mix of academic offerings, student support services, and administrative oversight also be reviewed to ensure that we continue to provide appropriate academic offerings in a fiscally responsible framework. The goal is to operationalize this realignment effective July 1, 2026. The strategic goals of this realignment include:
- Fiscal sustainability
- Academic alignment
- Operational efficiency
The need to change is driven by the need to restore our fiscal balance in light of declining enrollment, rising expenses, and shifting instructional delivery models. Enrollment has fallen approximately 15% since FY2020, with modest stabilization in FY2024–FY2025. However, more credits are now delivered through eLearning (35%+) and embedded high school programs (11%+), reducing traditional campus-based tuition revenue.
The FY2026 budget was rebalanced in Fall 2025 to address unexpected revenue shortfalls and expense increases. This was done through a combination of expense reduction and use of fund balance. For several years, the College has relied on fund balance to close the gap between revenue and expense. While this approach has provided short-term relief, it is not a sustainable practice. Fund balance is a finite resource, and using it to cover recurring operating deficits does not address the underlying structural imbalance between revenues and expenses. Over time, this erodes financial flexibility and weakens the institution’s ability to respond to unforeseen challenges.
Moreover, the College’s fund balance is fully allocated to projects and strategic initiatives that cannot be supported by the operating budget. These allocations include capital improvements, technology upgrades, and other long-term investments essential to maintaining institutional competitiveness and student success. Continuing to divert fund balance to cover operating shortfalls jeopardizes these commitments and undermine the College’s long-term sustainability. For FY2027, the College must reorganize, implement program consolidation, reduce electives, and optimize space to achieve economies of scale.
Expenses continue to outpace revenue. The College continues to experience significant financial pressure from rising health insurance premiums under the State Health Benefits Plan (SHBP). In preparation for the FY25 and FY26 budget cycles, the college proactively informed all employees about how their plan selection would affect their personal contributions. This transparency led to a notable shift in enrollment: employees have steadily migrated away from the highest-cost plans. However, the overall upward trend in premiums across all plans, ranging from 30.7% to 37.4% increases in calendar year 2026, continues to challenge the college’s financial planning.
Despite this shift, the overall cost of providing health benefits continues to climb. The projected FY27 gross premium cost is $11.47 million, up from $10.07 million in FY26 and $8.58 million in FY25—that’s a 34% increase in two years. After accounting for estimated employee contributions of $1.2 million, the net cost to the college in FY27 is projected to be $10.27 million, a $1.42 million increase over the prior year.
This escalation in health benefit costs has a direct impact on the college’s operating budget. With a total FY26 operating budget of approximately $71 million, the projected FY27 net health benefit cost represents over 14% of the college’s budget. This marks a significant increase from 12.5% in FY26 and 10.3% in FY25, reflecting the growing share of institutional resources required to maintain employee health coverage. In addition, utility costs have also trended upward, further straining the operating budget.
As noted above, revenues are projected to increase by $1,276,195 and expenses are expected to increase by $3,768,180 creating a FY2027 budget shortfall of $2,491,985.
We must include personnel restructuring in meeting this budget shortfall. To date, we have taken certain actions:
- We are reviewing all vacancies and when possible, hiring part-time employees rather than full-time employees
- We have also not filled certain positions, particularly those positions currently or recently held by people who have elected to retire
- I have developed a restructuring plan for the college, working alongside Sara Winchester, to make sure the changes will provide the cost savings and efficiencies we must achieve. The Board has received and reviewed the plan. We will share the plan with the College by early February.
These are not easy times in higher education nor at Ocean County College. No president wants to deliver this type of message, but acting now will allow us to continue to thrive. OCC’s reputation, being of and for the community, continues to be enhanced during a time when many colleges and universities are undergoing tremendous reductions in order to remain vibrant institutions. The costs of offering an academic experience that students need for success continue to increase: students today need many wrap-around services to discover their potential, and the expenses associated with technology, with personnel, with facilities, and with benefits increase year over year. We will remain vital to our community if we innovate, which means investing in new academic programs and technology. We will remain vital if we prepare our students for the changing workforce needs. We can innovate only through fiscal resiliency. Our fiscal resiliency depends on the willingness to review our academic offerings and structure, our current operations and expenses and make reductions as appropriate and realignments as needed. It will not be easy for anyone, and we must demonstrate our individual and collective willingness to embrace these changes and evolve into a college that has adapted while continuing to serve all residents of Ocean County. I look forward to working with you to emerge a stronger college.
I now ask for questions and conversation.