From the President

Town Hall Meetings 2008

Oct. 31 and Nov. 3, 2008, at RMU's Moon Township campus;
Nov. 4, 2008, at the Pittsburgh Center

Thank you, and thank you all for coming today.

After I became president in 2005, I decided to hold these annual town hall meetings to talk about what we’ve achieved over the past year, and what challenges lay before us. Today I’m going to do the same and show you some videos we recently produced about the university—but I also want to encourage you to ask questions and to engage in a discussion with us after we make our presentation.

This year, as you are all well aware, we face many challenges due to the economy, some specific to Robert Morris University and some shared by our peer institutions. I’ll talk about some of these challenges, how we plan to address them, and what we need you to do to help.

First, it is important to note that the 2007-08 academic year did bring some significant achievements. I’ll mention just a few briefly:

We launched the Student Engagement Transcript.
We received two major corporate gifts, from the PNC Foundation and the United States Steel Foundation, toward two new buildings for the School of Business. I’ll talk more later about our fundraising.
We continued to add to and strengthen the university’s academic programs.
- The School of Education and Social Sciences earned its TEAC accreditation.
- The School of Business submitted its final self-study for AACSB accreditation and is preparing for the accreditation team’s visit this coming February.
- The School of Engineering, Math and Science added a biology degree, signed linkage agreements for its Pre-Medicine Program with Drexel University College of Medicine (and Allegheny General Hospital), Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine, we are also about to finalize another agreement with Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, and SEMS has an agreement with the Palmer College of Chiropractic Medicine—in addition, SEMS obtained a NSF-funded scholars program.
- The School of Nursing and Health Sciences added the DNP and bachelor’s degree in nuclear medicine technology.
We moved forward with the first phase of the campus master plan, including major renovations to Hale Center, the residence halls and the downtown building, as well as the construction of the loop road and other campus infrastructure improvements (re-paved roads, sidewalks and curbs, stairs, landscaping, and soon to be completed new parking lot).

Everyone here has contributed to these many achievements, and I want to thank you.

We have, and will continue to have, ambitious goals for this university and one of the most important is to increase our enrollment and boost our retention. We remain highly dependent upon tuition for our operating funds, and when we fail to meet our targets, especially enrollment targets (as we did this year), it creates a challenging budget situation, which then requires us all to make sacrifices — (as we are doing this year).

In addition, the current economic crisis makes our job that much harder. Many of our students pay their own way, with little help from their families, many of whom have lower incomes than at our peer institutions—in fact, of all the PA private universities within the masters level category, our students have the greatest level of financial need. At the same time, the nation’s credit crunch will translate into fewer sources of private and government assistance for higher education. Our task, therefore, is not just to enroll students at RMU, but to ensure that they have the resources to stay and complete their education.

So, what do we need to do? First, I’ll tell you what as an administration we are doing — and I’ll be joined by Provost David Jamison and Dean of Students John Michalenko — and then I’ll discuss what each of you as individuals, no matter what your job is, can do to help.

Every department and office on campus has been charged with helping us meet our enrollment goals, and many of you are already doing very good work that I’m convinced will bear fruit. Our Enrollment and Financial Aid departments are now working together to make the admissions process as informative as possible to prospective students and their parents so that cost and financial issues are addressed early in the admissions process to ensure that a higher percentage of accepted students enroll and that the students are in a stronger position financially to complete their education at RMU. We are also trying to identify and reach out as quickly as possible to current students who are facing financial and academic difficulties to provide them the help they need. The sooner we can reach out to these students, and help them find additional resources or work out manageable payment plans, the greater chance we have to keep them here. We are contacting parents now to let them know where they can turn for help.

These are important steps, but there is a larger issue here, and it is something that we have to confront not only as an institution but as a society, and that is college affordability. With the costs of operating a strong academic institution continually rising, tuitions have significantly increased over the years. But beyond the measurable cost factors, there is also the issue of tuition elasticity and perception. In other words, a portion of the tuition increases experienced in this country in the recent past is related to the simple fact that there is always someone willing to pay them. In higher education, and particularly among private institutions, price is often seen as a proxy for quality. A hike in tuition just makes an institution more appealing to a more elite—for lack of a better term—demographic.

Now the big question is—what happens to those students who can’t keep paying more and more? What about them? Robert Morris University has, in the past, been the place where many of those students have turned for the benefits of a private education but at an affordable price. Now more than ever, it is imperative that we do everything we can to deliver a high-quality, high valued education at the lowest reasonable cost. That means—

We are going to be creative and flexible when we set our tuition every year.
We are going to have to hit our enrollment targets, and hopefully surpass them.
We are going to have be as lean as possible, and, as we have always done, stretch our dollars farther than our competitors.
We are going to have to re-allocate current budgeted funds to areas of growth on an ongoing basis.
We are going to have to make more tough decisions to reduce costs.
On the revenue side, beyond increased enrollments, we are going to need our faculty to seek out and obtain more funded research dollars.
And we need to raise more and more money for scholarships and other forms of student support and academic resources.

Some institutions are considering pulling back on their fundraising given the current financial climate. We are not, and next fall we hope to go public with what will be the largest campaign in our history. Since June 2006, we’ve raised nearly $11 million, the most RMU has ever raised in such a short period of time. Our annual giving rate for individuals has risen, and so has the average gift — from $86 to $104. We continue to have outstanding participation by faculty and staff, far and away better than most other institutions. Not only is your participation in the annual giving program impressive (164 annual donors), but 43 of you are also members of the President’s Council, which means you give at least $1,000 each year. Thank you.

True, this is a challenging time in which to be raising money. We are going to make the case to our donors that the money they give to RMU will have a direct impact on students. It will change students’ lives in specific ways; namely, by allowing us to give them the resources necessary to earn a college degree. Stated more directly, it will allow us to provide a high-quality, high-valued private university experience to a growing number of talented students who otherwise would not have economic resources to make this critically important investment in themselves and society.

But there’s more at stake than just the bottom line of this university. Not all of us at RMU work on a regular basis with students, and sometimes we can get so caught up in our daily tasks that we can lose sight of why we are here. Before I turn things over briefly to David Jamison and John Michalenko, I want to take a moment to remind you what it’s all about.

(Note to readers: At this time, a video was shown and Provost David Jamison and Dean of Students John Michalenko spoke.)

I think those videos are great, because of the way the students talk about our faculty. There is a reason why our students find success at RMU. There’s a reason we have a 93 percent job placement rate. There’s a reason why our nursing, education and actuarial science students pass their professional exams at astounding rates. There’s a reason why our graduates hold top front-office positions at professional sports franchises across the nation. There’s a reason why they win College Emmys. There’s a reason why they are well placed in the Big-4 accounting firms. There’s a reason why more and more of them are becoming lawyers. And there’s a reason why in the near future we’ll see an increasing number of physicians who are RMU graduates.

Because whether it’s Maria Kalevitch driving a student to Philadelphia for medical school interviews, or Dana Hackley working the phones with the presidential campaigns to get the Sentry and RMU-TV into campaign events, or Paul Spradley working to create a climate of inclusion on campus, we are all changing lives.

Remember our core values, and in particular, “Individuals Matter.” When we say that, we often refer to our students. We exist for one reason — and this is to provide the education and opportunities for success that will launch young men and women into rewarding professional lives.

But that phrase, “Individuals Matter” also applies to you. It means that we value you, every one, as an important part of the RMU family, and it means that each of you plays an important role in ensuring that we fulfill our mission. It doesn’t matter what your job is at this university — whether you are a dean or an administrative assistant, whether you work in IT or admissions or facilities, or a member of the faculty or a sports coach. Each and every one of us is the difference between success and failure. This university has ambitious goals, goals that may seem too lofty at first glance. But why bother setting goals that are easy to achieve? Meaningful accomplishments result from setting high standards and then meeting them.

Tom Whitford, a member of the RMU Board of Trustees, recently told a story that I think speaks perfectly to this. Tom is chief administrative officer for PNC Bank, and he recounted for me and his fellow trustees something he recently told his employees. Everyone, Tom said, has a responsibility to sell this bank. No matter what your position, your job is to bring PNC customers, because everyone has a stake in the success of the bank.

So today I am telling you: We are all enrollment officers. We are all retention officers. It is not solely the job of the people who work in the admissions office to convince students to come here, and it is not solely the job of Student Life and Academic Affairs to make sure they stay here and succeed. It is your job too. We are here for the students and only for the students. I expect each of you, when you set your goals for each day, as well as for the year, to ask yourself what you can do to bring students to Robert Morris University, to ask if what you have been doing helps this university attract and retain students, and how you can do it better.

But it doesn’t begin when you come to work, and it doesn’t end when you leave. If you believe in Robert Morris University, if you believe that Robert Morris University can change lives, than you need to be an ambassador for Robert Morris University. You need to be an active, vocal advocate for Robert Morris University. Tell your friends about RMU. Tell your neighbors. Tell the babysitter.

RMU gives our students the tools to succeed. And I want to make sure that we give them to you as well. We’ve recently created a program that allows alumni to endorse the application of prospective students, and if those students are admitted and enroll at Robert Morris University, they will get a $1,000 scholarship for each of their four years here.

Now, we are opening this program to all of you. We will provide you with an endorsement letter that you can sign and give to a student to submit with their application. If that student is admitted and enrolls, they will receive a $1,000 Endorsement Award each of their four years at RMU as part of their overall financial aid package.

And you can do this as often as you like, for whomever you like, just as long as they are a prospective undergraduate student who is accepted and enrolls as a first-time traditional freshman. Talk about changing lives. Think of everything our graduates have accomplished. You heard some of the testimonials from our students. Four years from now, when we watch another one of those videos, you’ll be able to turn to the person sitting next to you and say “They came to RMU because of me.” Now that’s changing lives...

Thank you for coming today.

Now, we’ll open up the event for your questions.

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