 Good afternoon. Thank you for joining me today for this important announcement. As we know only too well, the coronavirus pandemic has had an enormous toll, not just in terms of the tragic loss of lives, but also its devastating impact on livelihoods. The effects of COVID-19 will be felt for years to come, and rebuilding will be challenging. But we need to stay focused on the future, and that future rests in the hands of our young people, our students. It's critical that we do all we can to clear the pathways to their success. Student loan debt remains one of the major hurdles faced by students in the United States. It's the second highest category of consumer debt in the nation. Second only to mortgage debt and higher than credit card debt. Funding a college education is one of the largest expenditures families face. It is an expenditure that is increasingly important to securing a young person's future success, but one that is becoming out of reach for many families. This is why today I am announcing that I will recommend to the Board of Trustees a zero tuition increase for next year. No increase for undergraduate students, none for graduate students, no increase for in-state students, and no increase for out-of-state students. But that is not all. Tuition is only one part of the impact on cost of attendance. As part of our continuing effort to minimize the total cost of attendance and help ensure UVM remains accessible to all students, I will also be recommending to the Board of Trustees that we freeze the cost of room and board. The average increase in room and board over the past eight years has been 3.2% annually. For the first time in more than three decades, there will be no increase in room or board. As a third component of our announcement today, I will be recommending to the Board that the comprehensive fee be reduced. And that the previously approved increase of $140 for recreation and wellness be postponed, even while substantial athletics facility improvements are underway. These moves on behalf of our students are an investment in our future. And if endorsed when the trustees meet in the spring, will mark three consecutive years of tuition being frozen at the same rate. It's also reflective of who we are as an institution. At the University of Vermont, our driving force is our commitment to our students. Our most sacred responsibility is to provide an excellent education that is accessible and affordable. A zero tuition increase aligns with the priorities I outlined at the start of my tenure and is a core component of the University of Vermont's three-part amplifying our impact strategic vision. When I made this tuition recommendation last year, UVM had not frozen tuition in more than 40 years. It was a historic announcement. This year, it's perhaps even more significant. Universities throughout the nation are struggling. The economic impact of COVID-19 has been enormous. But it has also laid bare a financial model that must adapt to current realities and serve the best interests of our students. As I noted last year, annual tuition increases, even modest ones, are not the solution to the budget pressures facing higher education. And it is not prudent nor is it practical to expect students and families to absorb continually rising costs. The endless spiral is also counter to our common ground values. It is our deep responsibility to do all we can to ensure that a UVM education is accessible and affordable to a broad diversity of students, including those from across the socioeconomic spectrum. We have made some good progress in this area, including devoting nearly $160 million a year in scholarships and financial aid to reduce the cost of attendance and making it possible for 45% of Vermont students to attend tuition-free. 45%. This has taken hard work and sacrifice, especially in the face of COVID. It has been extremely expensive to safely provide both the in-person educational offerings our students requested, as well as an at-home option. All told, our COVID-related costs far exceeded the funds provided by the state and federal governments. The majority of our staff have taken wage cuts of 5% and senior leaders have taken an even larger cut by giving up a month's salary. This reflects the commitment of our university community to do all we can to help maintain affordability for our students. Keeping college affordable increases the likelihood of graduating in a timely manner. Timely graduation decreases the cost of a degree and enables the student to join the workforce earlier with the skills necessary to contribute to the states and the nation's economic development. The freeze in tuition and room and board and cuts to the comprehensive fee are critical at this particular time. But that's not all. As another key aspect of our effort to promote student access and affordability, I'm excited to announce a new fundraising initiative focused on financial aid. The Student Opportunity Access and Recruitment Campaign, SOAR for short, like the EGLE, will launch today to raise $150 million in financial support for both undergraduate and graduate students. An especially important component of this initiative is the President's Common Ground Scholarship. This scholarship will support underrepresented and underserved students, making it possible for them to attend UVM and focus on their education rather than whether they will have sufficient resources to buy books or even food. This initiative will materially advance the central feature of the strategic vision articulated in amplifying our impact, ensuring student success. While our starting goal for this initiative is $150 million, given the passion of our alumni and the achievements of our students, I'm confident we can exceed this amount. In fact, we've already raised $18 million to support student success. And the momentum continues to grow. If you're interested in improving our world and looking for a good investment, our students are hard to beat. We'll be sharing more information on this initiative in the days to come. In summary, these initiatives represent a proactive pathway for us to galvanize our efforts to empower excellent students from all backgrounds. When you consider the financial burdens facing so many of our students, this is the right choice. We will all benefit as our students realize their potential and their achievements will help to keep UVM strong. Thank you for your time. I'm happy to take some questions. Thank you President Garimella. We have limited time and a lot of people to get through so I'm going to ask that you please limit it to one question. I'm going to start with the TV crews in person starting with WCAX. Yeah, thank you. We always give WCAX the first question. You know, many of us believe that this year our enrollment held to the levels it did because we froze tuition for this year. I truly think this is not some theoretical construct. Families are struggling, you know, and UVM has, when we last looked, the fourth highest tuition of any public university. So it is critical that we do all we can to keep our tuition in check so that students are able to attend. So our hope is that more students see that UVM is a good bet, not only because we're making it financially feasible, but because, as you know, we are probably among the top universities in the country in terms of handling COVID. And so, you know, with the positivity rates we have, which are effectively zero weeks and weeks into our semester, I think that parents and families have a lot to look for when they come to UVM and we hope that it has a positive effect on enrollment. Thank you. We'll go to Local 2244. Hi, President Guermilla. So the difference in value has caused students to demand reimbursements early on in the pandemic by shifting to online classes and an online experience. How has UVM responded to those lawsuits and student demands of reimbursements? So thanks for the question. You know, I have talked to a lot of students. I try to join as many teams meetings or however I can meet the students. And I'm really pleased, first of all, that they are so happy to be on campus. As you know, we offered an at-home option for those parents and families and students who were perhaps uncomfortable coming back to campus with the uncertainties. Remember how things were back in June or so? Nobody knew what was going on. Well, I guess I say with some pride and some caution that I'm very proud of what we've done on campus. Our students are doing everything right. We keep reminding them that the semester is not over. The cold weather is coming. The flu season is here. But we're able to pull this off and we have in-person teaching. I believe we have about 1,400 students that chose at-home, the at-home option. And I suspect more of them will come back to campus. So we're doing the best we can under very challenging circumstances and offering our students the best education possible and something of an in-person experience, which of course is not the same as they would have had in any other year. But I'd really like to think they're getting so much more at UVM than almost any other university. Thank you. We'll go to NBC5. Hi, President. Nice to see you. Can you speak a little bit more about the fundraising initiative? Is it to make up for some of the financial losses caused by the pandemic? So that's a great question. You know, I wish I wish I had the press release has a link to the website for the SOAR Scholarship Initiative. Anyone who's heard me speak even before I came on campus over a year and a half ago and ever since I have come here, they've heard of my focus on student success and student experience. It is the core of our strategic vision moving forward. It's one of three pillars. And so I truly believe that we wouldn't be a university if we didn't focus on our students and their success. And so a critical piece of that success is, you know, is their experience while they're here that we offer them internships and service learning and research and all of that and affordability. So it is very important that we make education as accessible as possible to our students. Over 80 percent of our students, I believe, get some kind of scholarship support. As I said, 45 percent of Vermont students attend tuition free. Of course it costs a lot of money and as the university faces more financial challenges, we would like to keep up that support and to the extent possible enhance it. And so I also know in speaking to alumni and other friends, our donors, that they're all anxious to help with our student success and do whatever it takes. So we're really sending the message that the university's highest priority for fundraising now is for financial aid so that we can achieve this goal of student success through affordability and accessibility. Thank you. Moving on to our remote participants, starting with Lisa Rathke, Associated Press. Thank you. So UBM had some budget cuts earlier this summer and I see that, you know, colleges are trying to figure out how to handle the pandemic and making, flashing their budget currently and suspending some programs, cutting staff. Do you expect UBM to have any cuts in the future, in the near future? So, you know, thank you for the question and I would just say, how could we not be doing this, right? When so many families around the nation are struggling, it's the right thing, it's the only thing we can do. Yes, we have a budget shortfall and COVID has exacerbated our expenses for sure. But we also have had systemic structural budget realities that are not new. And so, we truly believe that increasing tuition continually is not the answer. As I said, we're the fourth highest in terms of tuition. And in fact, I believe also that if we keep increasing tuition, it will not actually increase our revenue. We are at risk then of students not coming to UBM. And I believe that our frozen tuition has actually helped in keeping up our enrollment. So, the announcement I'm making today, should the Board of Trustees accept it and approve it, which I'm hoping they will, is for next fall because this fall we already had frozen this semester, this year we'd already frozen tuition. So, it's hard to anticipate how things will be, how the rest of the world will look for next fall. But we will continue to minimize impact on our employees. The piece that the Financial Aid does is a part of our search for additional sources of revenue as well. We'll continue to do all we can to raise more money through partnerships, through certainly fundraising, through research grants and such. And so, we'll do all we can and even if additional steps become necessary, we will do it in a way that protects our employees as much as possible as we did even this year. Go to Pat Bradley, WAMC. Are you there, Pat? Looks like Pat doesn't have a mic, but he put a question in the reading chat. It was there and disappeared. He asked, what is the comprehensive fee and how much will students potentially save as trustees approve the freeze? Say that one more time. What is the comprehensive fee and how much will students potentially save if the trustees approve the freeze? Right. So, on the two aspects, our room and board averages about $13,350 and so we're freezing that. We're not increasing room or board and our comprehensive fee included in the SGA fees and things is $2,670. So, because the semester has just started and we're handling the COVID expenses and such, we're just, we're modeling now, we're looking into how much we can cut the comprehensive fee. We will reduce it. We don't know yet the amount, the extent to which we will reduce it. I will say, though, that as I said, our room and board has increased each year, each of the last eight years by about 3.2%. And it's never been held unchanged for 30 years now and so that is an enormous benefit to our students as well. So, the exact numbers will become more clear as we're able to model further and look at all the efforts on campus that are supported by the comprehensive fee. But we'll definitely cost less to attend UVM next year than it did last year. We'll see if we can go to Tim McQuiston from Vermont Business Magazine. Hi, President Garimella. Thanks for holding this press conference. I was wondering, you know, in a private business, sort of these stop-get measures aren't a long-term solution. I'm wondering if you've, you know, at the same time you're doing these intra-measures, are you thinking long-term of the financial health? Obviously, you can't keep the salaries and those other mitigation methods permanent. So, I'm wondering what you're looking for in a long-term financial solution. Yeah, Tim, thank you very much for the question and it's certainly astute. So, this has been a start of this presidency like no other. As you might imagine, no one told me that, well, no one told anyone that COVID was coming. So, it's been a challenging time, Tim. We're obviously trying our best to address the immediate issues at hand. We've made a lot of, and we've discussed them at different times. We've frozen hiring by and large except for some very special cases. We've exploited efficiencies wherever we could on the administrative side, for instance, for planning for this year. I think we had about 11 and a half million dollar reduction in our expenses. So, we're doing all we can avoiding expenses that can be put off. And so, I think that's critical. That's critical for this year. We're planning for next year. But you're absolutely right about what's the longer-term perspective. So, I think we just need to imagine and reimagine education. Think about how we can refresh our offerings so that students can take them in different modes and in different sort of spheres of life, non-traditional learning, credit, non-credit. So, as we gear up to offer new kinds of educational offerings, we also, of course, need to look at our structure. We've already got a very, very lean administrative structure. I think we have like 5.6 administrators per thousand students, whereas the average of our peer group is 9.8. And then we've reduced our offices of administration from 55 or so, 56, I believe, in 2011 to 44 in 2017 to 33 today. So, we're doing all we can on the administrative side on a structural basis. I think we do need to continue to look at our academic offerings and see how the structural budget realities can be addressed. And so, it's definitely never far from our mind, Tim, and you're absolutely right. That's a critical thing. Colin Flanders from Seven Days. Hi, yeah. Thanks for doing this. So, I think you mentioned the last eight-year average of room and board increases was about 3, 2.2%. I think last year you said the average tuition increase had been roughly the same. Do you have an estimate of how much money the school would have brought in if they did not freeze those two rates for the next year? So, I guess I would say that the average room and board cost is 13,350. So, it's 3% of that. Is the room and board additional money that we've gotten if you take 3.2% of that? Tuition, right, each year if our tuition were going up at about the rates it was before, it's several million dollars extra we get on the order of 7 to 8 million dollars, I believe. Of course, it all depends. Tuition at a place like UVM is quite complicated to calculate, tuition revenue, because it's not just plain numbers. Our in-state students, as you know, have a very good, we try very hard to support them. As I said, 45% of them pay no tuition at all. And so, the mix of in-state and out-of-state students makes a difference in the net tuition revenue. But those things give you a ballpark. Emma Pinesch from CINNIC. Hi, President Caramella. Thank you for your talk today. I'm wondering, so currently the university is looking to compensate for budgetary shortfalls, $10 million of budgetary shortfalls through academic cuts, which has led to this current in-pass. And so I'm wondering with this money that you're talking about that won't now come in because of these freezes and this decrease in student costs, how will compensating for that potentially lead to more cuts in the academic department? Yeah, thanks, Emma. So, Emma, you, I'll say this directly to you almost more than anyone else that I think that UVM has always been focused on its students and the student success, the student experience. So anything we do, any decisions we make must be seen through the lens of how it impacts our students. As I said, of course we have had a budget model, a financial situation that has sort of over time been a structural challenge. UVM is among the lowest in terms of state support and of course the state is struggling. So I understand that too. We get very little support from the state and our costs keep rising. So what gives, right? And that's the question that Tim McQuiston was asking earlier too. And so as I said, a majority of the staff have given back or have taken cuts of 5% and it's a progressive scale. It's up to 5%. All senior leaders have taken a cut of not only that 5%, but an additional voluntary 3.3% cut, which means they've given up a month of their salary. And so we're all contributing. I would hope that the faculty who are represented will also contribute because I know we all care about our students and we want our students to have an education that's high quality but also affordable. And so you'll notice also that this year I was driven by, to the extent possible, not having permanent employees lose their jobs. So there are two ways to do this. You can let go some people or everybody contributes a little bit so we all stay employed. And I'm afraid the choice is very clear to me and it's the second one of those. And I would hope that everyone at UVM, all employees, feel the same. Thank you. I think we may have one more that was not on my list earlier. Ellie French, are you there? Because not. I think that wraps it up. We're good? Great. Well thank you all very much. I think this is great news. It's very difficult for us to do, but it's the right thing to do and we'll keep looking to see how we can enhance the student success, student experience and affordability. Stay tuned and if you have good ideas, send them my way. Thanks all. Thanks very much.