" Our academic enterprise is top-notch. We've moved up to an 80-plus percent retention rate. Our students are going right across the country after graduation," he notes. "The story is there. We just have to do a better job of telling it. " - DR. WARMACK
circles is a data platform his team developed to give university leaders real-time visibility into student success metrics, financial health, and retention indicators. The platform is now being piloted at three HBCUs, offered free of charge. "Oftentimes, what happens at our HBCUs is that we don't have the right data to make the right performance decisions," he says. "Presidents are a lot more informed when they have all this data in one space. When it's time for accreditation, or when the budget isn't balanced at the end of the year, well, the information was right there. You just didn't have it." He is also pushing the broader HBCU community toward a model of shared services and collective purchasing power. If 17 HBCUs are each individually contracting with the same learning management system vendor, he argues, they are collectively leaving negotiating leverage and real money on the table. For all its institutional momentum, Claflin remains anchored to a constituency that cannot afford for its college to become unaffordable. More than 72 percent of the current freshman class receives Pell Grants. More than half are first-generation college students.
Warmack made a decision early in his tenure that ran counter to conventional financial management: he did not raise tuition for five consecutive years. Last year marked the first modest increase, between 3 and 5 percent. "It probably wasn't the best business model by conventional standards," he acknowledged. "You don't keep up with inflation. But I just refused to put it on the backs of our students." The alternative, he adds, is relentless fundraising. On the day we spoke, Warmack estimated he had slept in his own bed just three times in the month of April, consumed by cultivation events, a national alumni convention, congressional meetings, and outreach to Silicon Valley donors. "If you're not going to put it on the back of students, and especially with everything happening around DEI right now, your fundraising has to be times 10," he says. "You have to be everywhere, do everything, be everything to everyone." Despite all of it, the rankings, the endowment growth, the construction boom, the philanthropic momentum, Claflin remains underknown to the wider world. It is ranked the No. 1 HBCU in South Carolina by U.S. News & World Report, No. 1 in annual alumni giving
among all HBCUs, and sits in the top 10 nationally among HBCUs for 13 consecutive years.
Academic excellence, Warmack insists, is Claflin's compelling story.
"Our academic enterprise is top- notch. We've moved up to an 80-plus percent retention rate. Our students are going right across the country after graduation," he notes. "The story is there. We just have to do a better job of telling it." On July 1, Warmack will begin his eighth year at Claflin and his 13th as a university president overall, having previously served five years at Harris-Stowe State University in Missouri. He is, as he puts it, "one of the old heads now," in an era when average presidential tenures have grown short. He seems at peace with that distinction. The work, he says, has never felt like a burden. It feels like a calling. "I love it," he says when asked about mentoring newer HBCU presidents. "I try to just be an ambassador, share the good, the bad, the challenges, to help folks navigate some of what we had to go through before them."
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