Message from the President

Excerpted from the update provided by President Philip A. Glotzbach during the faculty meeting on Wednesday, May 16, 2018.

Our Admissions team has been hard at work over the last two weeks contacting students from the waitlist in order to reach our first-year enrollment goal.

Even as we have celebrated the increases in our applicant pools over the past few years, Mary Lou Bates, vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid, notes that we also have seen a steady growth in the percentage of applicants seeking financial aid—and a corresponding decrease in the percentage of applicants not requesting aid. Thus, affordability remains a significant issue for applicants and their families, and this issue will not go away in the future.

The immediate challenge for the College is a significant increase in the additional financial aid needed to bring in the new class. We also are facing a sharp increase in the cost of health insurance, stemming from an unpredicted spike in the cost of care for our employee population.

While we have the financial resources to handle these increased costs in the next academic year, we will need to change our financial model for the future to accommodate these requirements for additional financial aid and health insurance. It is clear that solving these challenges will require us to find cost savings in the budget that will go beyond “business as usual.” The President’s Cabinet will do this work over the summer. We will engage the Institutional Policy and Planning Committee (IPPC) and keep the community updated as we move forward.