STATE OF THE COLLEGE ADDRESS
Alma College
Saundra J. Tracy, President
February 21, 2008
As we pause today to consider the status of Alma College 2/3 of the way through the current academic year, I ask that we place today’s snapshot in the context of what we did to get here and how where we are today positions Alma College for exciting advances in the future.
Let me read you some quotes from last week’s Morning Sun editorial describing Alma College today:
It’s certainly old enough but Alma College is not your grandfather’s school. As the college’s plans for expansion help it compete against other colleges and universities in today’s world, it’s also aligning its “outside” to match its “inside.”
Named one of the top 100 colleges in the country that encourage character development, listed in the Princeton Review as one of the “Best in the Midwest” and up for the Jimmy and Rosyln Carter Partnership Award, the college is gaining a lot of the right kind of attention.
(The facilities improvements) are all part of the school’s vision to keep up with changes in society, technology, and the students themselves……With that kind of planning and vision, it’s no wonder the college had its largest enrollment in years.
For more than 100 years, Alma College, recently named to the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll with Distinction has been responsible for putting Alma on the map.
How old is the school? The old school is doing just fine, thank you. And, it gives every indication that it will continue in that same way for the next 100 years.
The Morning Sun is right. Alma College is a different place, even than it was 5 or 10 years ago. And today, we celebrate our recent accomplishments even as we position Alma College for the next 100 (or 122) years.
We set ambitious goals for the College for this academic year, tied to the College’s long range plan. So how are we doing? Let me briefly bring you up to date on some of these key areas.
Enrollment: We all know that last year was an extraordinary year for enrollment, attaining the largest incoming class in the College’s history. Typically, we have seen peak years followed by downturns, sometimes steep. Our goal for fall 2008 is an incoming class of 400. I remind you we have had only 6 entering classes of this size or larger in our 122 year history. It is too early to accurately predict the fall, but we appear on target for a class of 400 or more. Applications are riding between last year and the year before, the two highest app years. Deposits are well ahead of last year and the momentum is excellent. This last Saturday we hosted more than 120 top academic students on campus for our Scholars Summit—the third such event this year. Thank you to our hard working Admissions staff and to the many faculty and staff that are giving time to these events and to meet with individual students. You exemplify the personalized experience which we promote. It is your contact with prospective students more than anything else that helps them decide Alma is the College for them.
Open Windows Campaign: Our goal is to attain 90% of the overall campaign target of $35.25 million by June 30, and we are well on our way. As of today, we have raised $29,485,111 in pledges and gifts or 83.6 %. We started this fiscal year at 71% of our goal.
Our expanded facilities improvement plans mean that we will keep rolling on fundraising for Hogan beyond the $500,000 originally stated in our campaign case statement and move directly from Hogan to fundraising for the academic improvements also on the drawing board.
Finally, expect to hear more very soon about the college community element of this campaign. We want to invite faculty and staff participation as individuals feel able. Our goal is strong community participation rather than a targeted dollar amount. We hope the campus will consider one of two special funds:
A student assistance fund for helping students with extraordinary and emergency needs. This might be used to buy books, provide food or transportation or help with other critical areas of support. Faculty and staff often dig into their own pockets in such cases. Let’s generate a fund so that such help is immediate and consistent.
The Collaborative Research fund to support one-on-one student research experiences with our faculty. Each of these exemplifies the caring and dedication to students that is a hallmark of this campus community.
Please expect to hear more later this spring.
Budget Status: The budget is tracking at or slightly better than anticipated so far this year. Alma’s endowment while down over the past couple of months has seen a smaller downturn than the overall market. We attribute this to our strategy in recent years to broadly diversify our investments such that the endowment is less vulnerable to market fluctuations.
Alma College’s most important asset is its people, and we committed via compensation plans for each employee group to improve our competitive salary position over the next several years. We were able to give an across the board 3.5% salary increase in the fall with the distribution of another 1.5% based on attaining the enrollment target for market adjustments to selected positions. In other words the overall salary increase pool was 5%. The 2008-09 budget now being finalized has these same salary parameters. We have a ways to go to attain our compensation goals, but this salary pool, pending attaining the enrollment goal, allows us to continue to make progress. It is coupled with similar increases in the pools for supplies and equipment budgets.
Facilities: Each year the list of facilities improvements accomplished gets longer. Thanks to our hardworking physical plant staff and the good humor and patience of the campus community, we continue to make significant progress on making Alma’s building and grounds attractive and functional.
If you have not yet done so, please stop by Reid Knox and see the significant improvements. And let’s not forget the several service areas that not only underwent major facilities work but functional changes as well this year—The one-stop Student Services Center, the Counseling, Health and Wellness Center, and the Academic and Career Services office now beginning major facilities upgrades.
The facilities improvements contained in the $18.75 million package approved by the Board of Trustees early this month will be funded by a combination of gifts and bond issue funds. The largest single component is the renovation and addition to Hogan.
Included in this package is more than $4 million of academic improvements. The renovation of the lower level of the library is the starting point for these. Other major components are being identified via a prioritization process currently underway in the academic sector to include upgrades in our science facilities among other projects.
Emergency Planning: A less visible accomplishment this year is the revision of our emergency plan. We have had such a plan for many years and update it every couple of years. However, we conducted a significant revision over the summer and early fall in light of the Virginia Tech tragedy. The recent similar tragedy at Northern Illinois University, the tornados in Tennessee all remind us that no college or university is exempt from crisis. We can never fully anticipate what crisis that might confront us, but we must prepare. Key elements of the plan are on our website and training on the revised plan is underway.
Academic Sector Accomplishments: A perhaps underappreciated achievement in progress thanks to our faculty and the leadership of the faculty Educational Policy committee is the redesign of Alma’s general education curriculum. I have seen this process take 7 and 11 years respectively at two different institutions. I am very pleased that Alma’s faculty has chosen to spend months rather than years in this process, setting an ambitious timeline and moving forward well on this project. The faculty anticipate voting on the proposed changes yet this spring.
Our Center for Responsible Leadership soon will select the third class of leadership fellows. The CRL recently conducted a full review of its programs with plans for ways to make them even better and with expanded involvement in the year ahead. I am pleased to announce that the speaker(s) for next year’s Swanson speaker’s series have just been confirmed. We will welcome Vincente and Marta Fox, former president and first lady of Mexico, to Alma College on September 24, 2008.
Last but not least under academic sector updates, progress on our emerging and unique partnership with Alpha College in Ecuador continues. Several Alma College faculty from our environmental studies program will be in Ecuador next week working on curriculum development. Alpha College is now offering classes and is officially accredited in Ecuador. Alpha College will bring in its first class of first year students this coming fall. They have modeled their academic calendar and curriculum after Alma’s for ease of working together. All of their marketing materials include reference to Alma College with their messages capitalizing on the Spanish translation of the word Alma—soul or spirit.
Alma College also has been officially recognized by the Ecuadorian government through the Ecuador Fulbright Commission. We hope to have Alma faculty review and approval of their curriculum completed by this summer. Such approval would allow Alpha College students to transfer their Alpha credits to Alma for their senior year. If this occurs, we could welcome the first cohort of South American students to campus in 2011.
In preparation for this, we have invited up to 6 South American students to participate in the CRL Ghost Ranch experience this summer and intend to build a variety of other connections with them, including spring term courses we might share, prior to 2011. The possibility to internationalize the Alma campus as well as engage many Alma students, faculty and staff in international study and work is very exciting. We know of no other institution developing an international partnership quite like this.
There are many other initiatives underway this year of which we can be proud. Forgive me for not mentioning them all. I hope each of you take pride in the ones I have mentioned for truly, they represent the collective heart, talent, and dedication of this campus community. No one individual, office, or sector alone can accomplish what we have done so far this year.
Now let me turn to what lies ahead for Alma College:
The exciting news is that what this community has accomplished now positions us to take Alma College to the next level. Without this strong base of accomplishments, we would be poorly positioned to raise Alma College’s quality and visibility.
MacTaggert, in his book on college and university turnarounds, contends that institutions that transform themselves go through three stages—they first get their financial houses in order, making the tough decisions necessary to live within limited resources. We certainly did that a few years ago though it was not fun; we have shown we can model Scottish thriftiness well!
MacTaggert’s second stage of turnaround is marketing and branding—getting the message out of what Alma has to offer and communicating our distinctive nature. You worked through this stage with us as well—the development of our Only One Alma logo, the dramatic changes to our website, the new print and TV and radio ads, and the editorials with which I began this talk. Yes, we have embraced this second stage of transformation too. We can say been there, done that for both of MacTaggert’s first two stages.
His final stage of institutional transformation, the stage most critical to the long term health and quality of Alma College, is strengthening academic quality and redefining the culture. This is the most difficult and lengthy stage but the one that determines whether the transformation is complete. To accomplish this next stage requires Alma College to set the bar higher in three ways:
PROPOSITION 1: Increase Alma’s already Good Academic Reputation.
This goes far deeper than better visibility and marketing or tweaking of curriculum. The academic agenda Provost Selmon put before the faculty in January is a major rethinking of academic purpose and faculty work. This agenda increases academic reputation through:
A select number of signature programs—programs strategically developed and nationally recognized.
Reputation also is increased via the reputation of our faculty. This includes a reputation for quality teaching—indeed I would suggest for innovative pedagogy. But it is coupled with a strong emphasis on faculty scholarship—scholarship that is recognized by national academic communities of the various fields our faculty represent. For Alma, teaching and scholarship are not an either/or proposition. We must have both. Such reputation requires greater flexibility in use of faculty time. Perhaps developing and perfecting new pedagogies at one point in a career and emphasizing scholarship at another.
Why academic programs and faculty scholarship? Institutional reputation is slow to change but the reputation of an academic program and its faculty can be built relatively quickly. And academic quality is after all, at the heart of the Alma College mission.
PROPOSITION 2: Attain an Enrollment of 1800 by 2020.
Yes, I know that we have not yet achieved the 1400 goal in our strategic plan. With Ecuador a growing probability and strong recruitment and retention efforts underway, 1400 now is within our sites and there are several important reasons to continue to grow past that target:
Larger institutions (under 10,000) continue to be the preferred size for the majority of students. The institutions with which we compare ourselves, all strong Midwest liberal arts institutions, average size is 2000.
We will always rely heavily on student generated revenue so growth helps generate the resources we need to attain the quality we desire.
Growth sends an external message of strength and momentum that in turn feeds quality and reputation.
PROPOSITION 3: Change our Financial Model by Diversifying our Revenue Mix.
We will do this through:
More and more varied student markets like Ecuador and other yet to be identified markets and strategies, and through
New non-student revenue sources.
The Change and Innovation Task Force last summer was one means to identify these potential new revenue sources. We are moving forward with their recommendation to offer high school summer institutes this coming summer and to pursue a Hispanic cultural emphasis, i.e. Ecuador. I have charged Jerry Scoby to work with me, the Trustees, and the senior leadership team to identify other non-student revenue strategies. My target is that we generate 10% of our operating budget from revenue sources not currently in our budget by 2020—a large challenge. But we must diversify this aspect of our fiscal health just like we have diversified our endowment to protect us against market fluctuations.
There are a number of ripple effects of these three propositions. We must make investments in our academic area for our academic reputation to truly grow. Enrollment growth has many other implications—facilities, staffing, services, etc. The current plan for new and improved facilities over next 3–4 years is only a beginning. I also shared a longer term facility planning process with the Trustees early this month that includes a new master plan, development of sustainability principles, and facilities priorities from each functional area of the campus. I anticipate this beginning shortly after we complete the re-accreditation process in 2009.
We do not have all the strategies for these worked out nor do we know what financial investments will be necessary or the precise tasks and timelines though we have elements of each.
In closing, our challenge as a college community is to finish what we have begun (1400 students, facilities projects for next 3–4 years, athletic plan, etc.) while at the same time beginning the work of taking the College to the next level.
Thank you to each member of this campus for the tremendous progress we have made this year, and over the past few years. Stages one and two of transformation were not always easy but we can be proud of this community’s hard work to make them happen. I cannot promise that the propositions I have set before you today will be any easier though I expect they will be more fun to accomplish.
We have a great year underway—still to be completed so we cannot not get complacent! And I have presented three propositions to focus us on the future—Alma College 2020: academic reputation, enrollment growth and a new financial model.
The message we have sent to the outside world is that Alma College is on the move. Now it is up to us as a community to maintain the self-assurance and determination to carry forward what we have begun.
