I mentioned in an earlier post that last week saw the Fall Faculty Conversation, where President Thomas, Dean Bartanen and other members of the administration spoke about where we are now and where we are heading as an institution.
As always, there are good developments and challenges. And these two things are tightly connected. The university is getting better all the time, with a stronger set of applicants and, I think, a greater set of expectations in what we teach and expect our students to learn.
But as a result, it also means we are trying to punch above our weight. Whereas in past our prospective students might have been considering us over local state schools or liberal arts colleges, what the administration is now hearing is that when we lose a prospective to another school, it's a school much higher ranked than ourselves.
And therein lies the problem. If we want to compete against prestigious liberal arts colleges, we are going to need to offer more financial aid. As it stands, we can't offer as much as many of our competitors, a number of whom rely on merit-based aid to grab the strongest applicants (irrespective of their financial need).
So a stronger set of competitors, and tighter competition. The university's challenge in the coming years will be to build that financial base to improve our financial aid to get a strong and diverse incoming class. If you're an alum, no doubt you'll be hearing more about this in coming years. And to that end, I was also happy to hear that the entire alumni relations structure will be dramatically revamped to better tie our alums to our campus and current students. That, I think, is absolutely crucial.
