Northern Kentucky University’s most recent financial audit showed a budget surplus of roughly $3.3 million in fiscal year 2025, about two and a half years after the university suffered a $24 million deficit.
Additionally, said CFO Chris Calvert, the university sported $7.3 million in positive cash flow in fiscal year 2025.
“We had decreased over $60 million in cash flow from fiscal year ’20 through fiscal year ’24,” Calvert told the Board of Regents on Wednesday. “So to begin to reverse that is another very significant accomplishment.”
Fiscal years run from July 1 to June 30. In June, the university passed a balanced budget for fiscal year 2026, at which time Calvert had predicted a positive cash flow for the end of the ’25 fiscal year. The completion of the university’s mandatory annual financial, which came back clean, bore out his predictions. The university had a $13 million deficit in 2024.
As part of the 2025-26 budget, the board approved a 3.9% undergraduate tuition increase for returning students, and Calvert’s report on the first quarter of the 2026 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 31, put net tuition revenue increases at about $10.25 million year over year.
Audited figures for the 2025 fiscal year put total actual revenues for the university at $217,551,527 and total actual expenses at $214,232,834.
In spite of the positive cash flow, both Calvert and Chief Strategic Enrollment Management Officer Ryan Padgett revealed a general decline in student enrollment, especially among graduate students. Calvert said the cash flow was actually about $1 million less than what he’d predicted.
“Our final numbers ended up at 184 [students], or just a little over 1% down,” Padgett said.
Full-time enrollment among students had also declined by roughly 1.4%, according to Padgett’s analysis. Retention (i.e., the rate at which students returned after their first year) and graduation rates, however, had increased. In fact, the university had broken a record for its graduation rate at 55.3%.
“We are very optimistic for where we’re heading for fall 2026,” Padgett said.
On the issue of attracting more graduate students, President Cady Short-Thompson recommended coordinating with businesses around the region that offer tuition remission as one site of recruitment.
“We really want to make our programs more clearly known to these organizations,” Short-Thompson said. “I just think there’s a lot of work to be done.”
She added that the university was planning on hiring a graduate education director to boost grad student recruitment.
Finally, Jenny Sand and Eric Gentry, two university liaisons who advocate for NKU in Frankfort, informed the board that they would be lobbying for greater allocations from the legislature in the upcoming session.
Public universities in commonwealth receive a base or general, as it’s also called, level of funding from the General Assembly, and “NKU receives the lowest percentage of general funding of all comprehensive universities,” said Sand.
Sand’s presentation indicated that revenue per student at NKU breaks out to roughly 65% from tuition and 35% from state funding.
“In comparison, you see, Morehead is quite different,” Sand said. “30% of their revenue comes from tuition, versus 70% coming from the general fund. Our hope is to bring that more into alignment with 50-50.”
This would require about $5 million from the state, Sand said.
Haley Parnell contributed reporting to this story.