Communiversity — What Pendleton Community Bank and WVU Tech Built

The college in your market is probably one of the largest employers on your commercial list, and most community banks have no relationship with it. T. Ramon Stuart, president of WVU Tech, and Bill Loving at Pendleton Community Bank built one anyway, out of a lunch for three that came to about sixteen dollars. They call it Communiversity — the community is the university, the university is the community.
Key Points
Start with the payroll:
309 full-time employees at WVU Tech
roughly 849 across a year, counting part-time and contract work
"Imagine if the majority of your deposits from payroll went into a community bank."
Stuart calls colleges "the modern-day factories of town." Most of his own profession dislikes the comparison. He makes it anyway.
Why the community bank is the right partner: It can look under the hood. A loan without clean comps still gets made, because the bank knows the borrower and knows the employer. And students who bank locally come back for the first mortgage — the cheers effect, where you go because somebody knows your name.
Financial literacy is the way in: Most people learn about money after the mistakes, once credit is damaged and the rate is higher. First-generation students are the clearest case. On the credit card tables that used to line campus walkways — hand someone three thousand dollars who has never had a dollar and call it a free line — "I think that's very predatory."
The co-branded card, and what it did: A Tech employee was checking out at a local business when the cashier recognized the card. She was a Tech graduate with an engineering degree working retail, because she had never managed to navigate the job market. They exchanged information. Less than a month later she had an engineering job.
What holds it up: "Nobody really wants to talk finances." And inertia is the real competitor — if you open the app and the money is there, you do not go looking for a new bank.
What To Do Monday
Call the campus and offer to teach a class. Byron: "It's like asking a teacher or a professor, hey, can I come talk to a class? Absolutely, that's one time I don't have to lecture." Stuart's own reaction is puzzlement that this is not already everywhere: "It just fits, it flows."
More on the initiative: [CONFIRM URL — wvutech.edu/communiversity]
About the Guest
T. Ramon Stuart, Ph.D. is president of the West Virginia University Institute of Technology in Beckley, where he has led the campus since January 2023. He is from McDowell County, holds degrees from West Virginia University and a doctorate from Ohio University, and became a college professor at 23. He previously served as president of Clayton State University and provost at Fort Valley State University, both in Georgia.