Gloria Arcia
CFO & VP for Finance & Administration / University of the Ozarks / Clarksville
Within months of Gloria Arcia joining the University of the Ozarks in Clarksville, COVID-19 hit.
After the pandemic was declared an emergency, the school’s spring classes were moved online, said Arcia, who had started the job in November 2019.
“We had to make a lot of shifts in accommodations in order to open our doors … in August,” she said. The university braced itself for about a 30% dip in enrollment, but it saw only a 10% decline, to 826 students, which was the second-largest enrollment in the school’s history.
Arcia, a native of Nicaragua, graduated from Florida International University in Miami with a bachelor’s in criminal justice and earned her MBA from Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida.
Arcia said she’s attracted to finance because the numbers “just make sense.” She also enjoys management, rooting out deficiencies of an organization and searching for ways to improve performance.
Arcia came to the University of the Ozarks after working for Broward College in Pembroke Pines, Florida, where she was hired in 2017 as the school’s first woman dean of business affairs. She and her family wanted to move from south Florida for an improved quality of life and found it in northwest Arkansas.
At the University of the Ozarks, Arcia’s duties include being responsible for the school’s endowment of about $110 million, its $24 million operating budget and its $1.7 million real estate trust.
She also will lead an $18 million construction project that includes the building of a new wing of the school’s Smith-Broyles Science Building. Construction is set to begin in April.
Arcia’s management philosophy is to motivate and inspire employees, which leads toward “the overall success of the university.”
She attributes her success to treating people as she would like to be treated.
Outside of the school, she is on the board of the Johnson County Community Foundation.
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