Announcing ESU's Year of Celebration

Emporia, KS (07/08/2025) — We are thrilled to announce the launch of ESU's Year of Celebration marking one of the most transformative eras in Emporia State University's history. This will culminate at Homecoming, October 31-November 2.

Over the last decade, higher education nationwide has faced significant challenges - declining enrollment overall, online & distance education becoming more popular, deepening deficits and years of inaction. Covid accelerated these trends but was not the cause of them. For many universities, including Kansas public universities, this meant fewer on-campus students, reduced on-campus activity and decreased tuition revenue.

To address these challenges at ESU, the Kansas Board of Regents (KBOR) appointed Ken Hush as interim president in November 2021. His charge was to analyze the total university enterprise, identify inefficiencies and, in tandem with KBOR, take action to reduce waste. When President Hush came on board, the trajectory of the university, like many others throughout the U.S., would have been no longer financially sustainable beyond June 30, 2024.

After serving eight months as interim, KBOR selected Hush - an Emporia native, ESU alum and business leader - to continue and serve as the 18th president of Emporia State University and to continue to lead a bold, trendsetting and unanimously approved turnaround. With a KBOR mandate to reimagine higher education and bring business-minded solutions to campus, change came quickly and decisively.

As then KBOR chair, Cheryl Harrison-Lee said, "We have to re-engineer education. If there's anything we learned from Covid, it is that we are not able to do business like we've always done it. That's not just in our business community; that's also in our academic institutions. And, so, what we believe Ken brings is that business perspective of looking at being results oriented, looking at metrics and measurements and scorecard, dashboard, making sure that as you are looking at serving the customer that you are also working to achieve certain goals. And that there's a high level of accountability."

After three and half years the university has turned the corner and is on a positive path forward. We have achieved a $30M financial correction that eliminated a $19M budget deficit. At the same time, we invested in people and programs. The majority of savings & efficiencies captured by the university have been immediately passed on to students and their families.

ESU's Year of Celebration marks the significance of this turning point in our history. It took all of us to get here - all employees, the ESU Foundation, students, alumni, community, state government leaders and a multitude of supporters. We will be celebrating all year in gratitude and in recognition of how far we have come together.

Highlights of our progress

University

Students - Students - Students

Unprecedented Student Support

KBOR Goal #1: Access and Affordability

Academic Programs

Thank you for being part of this extraordinary journey. Whether you're a student, alum, faculty member, staff, supporter or trusted advisor - this celebration is for you. More recently, the outgoing KBOR Chair talked again about the importance of leadership, and we totally agree. We have achieved the objectives that KBOR charged us with three and a half years ago. And that is what we celebrate today.

Specifically, we thank past Kansas Board of Regents Chair, Cheryl Harrison Lee who cast a bold vision for what higher education could be. Additional statements are from her public comments were our guiding light over the past three and a half years:

A special thank you to past Regents Cindy Lane, Mark Hutton and Wint Winter who were side-by-side with us throughout the initial analysis and action phase, and to our own ESU Foundation for their renewed dedication to increase support for students and the university. Their unprecedented support demonstrates their commitment to help current and future Hornets students

For over three years Emporia State has been asked to publicly share our focus on capturing efficiencies and improving value creation for higher education. Everything we do is designed to support students, families and to reduce risk exposure and burden for Kansas taxpayers.

We are grateful to have completed this work proactively, and to be able to uniquely demonstrate how leadership can bring positive change for the university, system and state. We now have a cleaned-up state agency that can focus on the exciting work of creating a differentiated, extraordinary university experience for our students.

Let's honor our progress. Let's build our future. Welcome to the ESU Year of Celebration.