The Tennessee Tech Board of Trustees approved a 1.7 percent salary increase for President Phil Oldham.
Vice Chair Fred Lowery said the raise is based on a high-performance evaluation for the 2025-2026 fiscal year. Lowery said the increase will be retroactive to September 1, 2026.
“You don’t have to read the report frankly if you’ve listened to the last two presentations,” Lowery said, “Clearly, the university is performing at a high level, and certainly that has a lot to do with our leader.”
President Phil Oldham said the university reached its largest enrollment in more than a decade this fall and set a sixth consecutive record for externally funded research at over $50 million.
“We are a university that continues to put students’ interests first in what we do, and hopefully that’s always the case,” Oldham said. “But also a university, and this is particularly valuable I think in today’s world, a university that continues to focus on teaching students how to think, not what to think.”
Oldham said the university is moving forward with a parking garage to provide more than 800 additional spaces by the fall of 2028. He said the school also expanded its shuttle system this week with a fourth vehicle to better serve the campus community.
“Any successful university is gonna have challenges as you get better, as you grow, as you expand programs, and we continue to work through those and with this board’s input being very important,” Oldham said. “We want to bring more parking online for our students, faculty, and staff.”
Oldham said the university is preparing to launch the Tech to You event series to recruit students in Franklin, Murfreesboro, Mount Juliet, Chattanooga, and Knoxville. He said the competition for student recruitment is fierce due to a national enrollment cliff caused by declining birth rates.
“While Tennessee, particularly Middle Tennessee, is not impacted in the same way due to the influx of new residents our state continues to attract, it does mean we need to be proactive in meeting students where they are and not waiting for them to find us on their own,” Oldham said. “Because other universities where enrollments are declining are coming into our backyard to recruit more heavily here.”
In other business, the board approved a proposal to expand in-state tuition opportunities for select students in Kentucky and Alabama effective fall 2027. Trustees also approved a revised capital budget, an organizational chart change, and a disclosed project for a farm office building at Shipley Farm.
