State of the University—Reunion 2007
Daniel F. Sullivan—June 2, 2007
A warm and hearty welcome to you all to this reunion of the classes,
a gathering of the clan! There is nothing more pleasing to
the eye of a St. Lawrence president than seeing you all here.
It is always a daunting thing to try to summarize the “state
of the University” in just a few minutes to an audience as
devoted and attentive to what goes on here as you. The simple
answer, of course, is “we’re still open!” But
I think you know that we are not just open—we are thriving
and full of energy from the great work we get to do with some of
the nation’s most wonderful college students. And you’ll
learn more as we go along how important alumni support has been,
is, and will be going forward if we are to keep our momentum.
Our Mission
With regard to the “state of the university,” let me
begin where we must always begin, and that is with our mission, which
is “to provide an inspiring and demanding undergraduate education
in the liberal arts to students selected for their seriousness of
purpose and intellectual promise.” From that mission
statement flows a set of goals for our students, which include: “breadth,
depth and integration in learning,” . . . . . . . “the
cultivation of those habits of intellectual and moral self-discipline
that distinguish a mature individual,” . . . . . . . fostering “in
students an open, inquiring and disciplined mind, well informed through
broad exposure to basic areas of knowledge; an enthusiasm for life-long
learning; self-confidence and self-knowledge; a respect for differing
opinions and for free discussion of those opinions; and an ability
to use information logically and to evaluate alternative points of
view.” The
education we seek to provide our students at St. Lawrence is not
professional education, or technical education, or vocational education—it
is education for a life, education that inspires students to be lifelong
learners, education that prepares students to make a difference in
a wide array of careers, education that encourages students to find
meaning in what they do, and to better understand the great issues
and questions that are at the center of the quest to be a learned,
educated person.
We at St. Lawrence and our colleagues at the other
highly selective liberal arts colleges in America have always argued
that this kind of education is the most practical of educations. It
is not education for a first job, but an education for just about
all jobs you can think of. And as globalization requires of
all of us the ability to adapt to changing circumstances, thinking
and analyzing on our feet as we go, it is the only kind of education
that ensures a high probability of lifetime success. National
survey data show that parents of students getting ready to go to
college, and their children, increasingly get this.
That is one reason, I believe,
why applications to colleges committed to liberal education continue
to grow at such a rapid pace. Demand
for liberal education in America is strong and growing, and that
is good news for America’s future.
Admissions
Demand for St. Lawrence is even stronger and growing even faster,
and that is the first thing I want to say to you about the state
of the University. Last year at this time I was able to report
to you that St. Lawrence had received an all-time high number of
applications for the fall of 2006—3,192 of them to be exact. This
year’s number is 4,647—a 45% increase. We admitted
2,031, or just under 44%, down from 59% the year before, and 680
deposited, a yield of 33.5%. With the normal summer melt, we
anticipate a class of 615-625 in August when first-year students
arrive. Very importantly, given that applications were up at
a lot of places this year, our yield—the percentage of acceptances
who deposited—stayed essentially the same. This increase
in demand for St. Lawrence was real, not the result of students submitting
more applications.
An indicator that I monitor very closely, of course,
is our success in attracting children of alumni (we call them “chips”),
and brothers and sisters of current students and alumni (we call
them “twigs”). Indeed, I telephone personally all
alumni with a child admitted to St. Lawrence, to congratulate them
and their child. We have some great conversations, and I enjoy
them no matter where their child ends up attending college. Applications
from “chips” and “twigs” were also way up
this year, and so we have in the class arriving in the fall 106 chips
and twigs, also an all-time record. We monitor interest in
St. Lawrence by alumni children so closely not because we assume
that all children of alumni should come to St. Lawrence—though
that would be interesting—but because these are applications
coming from families who know us intimately. When we are growing
warts, they know that, and when we are developing more and more patches
of beauty, they know that also. If you ever see declining interest
on the part of children of alumni, that is like the miner’s
canary. So this is all very good news, as is the news about
class quality—another year of steady improvement.
Concerns in
the incoming class are primarily two. We spent
a full year with the position in the admissions office that takes
leadership in the recruitment of students of color unfilled, having
been unable to fill it with the right person, and so U. S. students
of color make up only 9% of the incoming class, down from 12% the
previous year. We have just made an outstanding hire in this
area who will start in two weeks, and so we look to get back on track
here quickly. Second—and this is a real shocker for
St. Lawrence, where gender balance in the student body has been a
given for so long—women in the incoming class make up 61% of
the total. This kind of gender imbalance is now typical at
selective liberal arts colleges nationally, but we have not experienced
it until now, and it was a sudden change for us. Understanding
this better is a high research priority for over the summer.
Finally,
there is good news to report again this year on student retention. By
the end of the summer the four-year graduation rate for the Class
of 2007 should reach 76% or 77% (it is currently 75%), on the way
to what we hope will be the first 6-year graduation rate of 80% or
more for a very long time. A decade ago, the
four-year graduation rate at St. Lawrence had dipped below 70%. This
is a huge improvement, and we are not done. A high graduation
rate means that you are enrolling students who are capable of doing
the work, for whom the fit with St. Lawrence is good, and it means
that you are delivering on the reasonable expectations of students
and their parents. It is, in my view, one of the most important
indicators of the health of a university, and it continues to move
in the right direction for us.
In summary, demand for St. Lawrence
is at an all-time high and continues to grow, and the students who
enroll increasingly stay until graduation. That
is good news indeed!
Resources
At the same
time, it takes resources—human, financial, and physical—to provide
an excellent liberal education to students. The most successful teaching
and learning environments at any level are those that engage students actively
in the learning process. That means getting students into close interaction
with faculty and with each other, because the peer effects
on learning in a college environment are large and important. It means
having faculty and staff who are motivated to do the much harder work that
providing an engaged learning environment entails, and so they need recognition
and support, and they need to be compensated fairly and competitively. It
means designing and maintaining physical environments that nourish and facilitate
engaged learning. We have 1.8 million square feet of physical plant at
St. Lawrence and have been able to invest $180 million in new construction
and renovation over the last decade to improve it for teaching and learning. Johnson
Hall of Science is the latest, most magnificent example, thanks to the incredible
generosity of Sarah Johnson and her family, and many others.
All of this
takes a level of financial resources per student that is significant. But
think about this issue with me very carefully for a few moments. If you
change the ratio you are monitoring from resources per student to resources
and expenditures per graduate, all of a sudden selective liberal arts colleges
with high graduation rates look very efficient and cost-effective indeed. If
you calculate not what it costs to have a student at St. Lawrence for a year—and
I mean “cost” here, not the average comprehensive fee students
pay after financial aid—but what it costs per graduate, and compare institutions
with high graduation rates and those with low graduation rates, the costs become
very similar and sometimes even less for selective liberal arts colleges. A
few years ago the 6-year graduation rate at the University of Minnesota’s
College of Arts and Sciences was below 20%. St. Lawrence would have to
cost almost four times as much per student before that low-tuition public university
would equal our cost per graduate, and we are a long way from that.
“Expensive” highly
selective liberal arts colleges are among the least costly institutions
in America per graduate,
even if you don’t take into account the opportunity costs for students and families
from time delays in achieving the level of earnings graduates ultimately achieve
when they complete their degrees. Americans are smart micro-economists. I
believe they get this. No one at St. Lawrence needs to apologize to America
for having a high comprehensive fee.
Nonetheless,
in the relentless pursuit of improvements in the experiences of our
students and in their educational outcomes, having adequate resources
is critical. How
well we invest our growing endowment, and how willing our stakeholders are
to invest in us with their charitable gifts, are therefore critical to St.
Lawrence.
Here too
we have good news to report on the state of the University. Current endowment
market value is about $275 million, up strongly from last year on the basis
both of very competitive investment results and increased gifts to endowment. The
endowment will provide $12 million in income for the operating budget next
year.
And gifts
to St. Lawrence also remain strong and inspiring. Campaign Momentum St.
Lawrence is now over $100 million toward its $200 million goal; the trustees
have already exceeded their $50 million goal and their gifts are still growing;
and we have a shot between now and June 30 at exceeding last year’s all-time
record cash giving total of over $22 million. Reunion giving results
we will see in a moment will give us a clue about our chances. St. Lawrence
alumni are the best. This is tough, complicated work, and you lift our
spirits every day with your incredible generosity.
Strategic Issues Going Forward
So what
are our most critical strategic issues going forward? Let me put it to
you this way. In the last decade our job was in many ways a turnaround
project. The question was straightforward: could we return St.
Lawrence to the ranks of the best liberal arts colleges in America? We
have done that.
We ought
to feel terrific—we should be glowing with pride at our success. To
be sure, in a way we are. Our resource base has grown substantially;
demand on the part of prospective students is skyrocketing; our increasingly
sophisticated assessments of student learning outcomes show strong results;
and students, alumni, and parents of St. Lawrence students are enthusiastic
and pleased about what is going on here. And yet there is an impatience
on campus—a feeling that relative to our top competitors things should
somehow be even better.
At first
I thought this was just a piece of the irrationality that besets
university campuses every spring, especially in the North Country
after a long winter. It
is not just the leaves and the blossoms that come out here in the spring! And
then I remembered conversations I have had many times with Joe Marsh, who coaches
Saints men’s hockey. Joe says that what he hopes is that each
year his team will be in the hunt. Like St. Lawrence as a whole, his
team will always be somewhat under-resourced relative to the nation’s
hockey powerhouses—we are, after all, the university with the smallest
enrollment playing Division I hockey. He knows that there will be years
when maybe he isn’t in the hunt, but then he will be again. When
they come back after an absence at the top there is always that moment in the
ECAC playoffs, or the NCAA playoffs when you come face-to-face with what the
best in American college hockey looks like. If you want to win, and you
are under-resourced, you need to find a way through the thicket—you need
to be smarter, you need to work harder, and you need to allocate your resources
in an optimal way to maximize the impact.
That is
where the University is strategically just now. We can’t
afford to compete with Williams, Middlebury, Colgate and Hamilton
head-to-head on faculty and staff salaries, generosity of our student
aid packages, funds allocated for maintenance and enhancement of
our facilities, academic and co-curricular program enrichment, providing
students with paid opportunities to do research with faculty or take
an internship, or study abroad—all at the same time
and to the same degree. Those institutions have in some cases
six times our endowment and far less commitment to educating low-income
students, which means that their net revenue per student is higher. At
the same time we must get more competitive in all of those ways,
we must do it smarter, and we must continue to work harder and hustle
more on behalf of our students. I
like where we are in this game, but it is truly challenging.
The tremendously
good news is that we are very much in the hunt—we are competing
well with the right colleges and universities again. We feel
great about that. But
we also look out onto the ice before the game and see just how strong
our competition is, and so there is no resting, no pausing for refreshment,
just continued anxiety about the future, and about how to continue
to get better faster than the competition at all the things that
matter the most in the education of our students.
That,
I think, is the state of the University! Thank you.
St.
Lawrence University Catalog, 2006-07, 5.
