Office of the Chancellor

Forward Together Strategic Planning Session

October 30, 2023

Good morning, everyone.

What a great video! And what a great way to set the stage for the important work that all of us will be doing together today.

Thank you all for being here today. I’m so pleased to see such a large turnout. I know it’s a tremendous time commitment when we’re all so busy, but I truly believe our time here today will be time well spent.

We are off to a tremendous start this fall semester. As some of you heard me tell our donors and community partners at Celebrate PFW a couple of weeks ago, Purdue Fort Wayne is not only doing well, WE ARE THRIVING!

Which means we are well positioned for the work that we’re embarking on today — as we celebrate shared accomplishments and transition to our next phase of strategic planning.

We’ve been here before! Many of us were together here in this same room in 2019, when we met to envision the current strategic plan — Empowering Transformation. Throughout the day, we will be discussing our success in advancing the four aspirations of that plan — Championing Student Success; Enhancing Quality of Place; Embracing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; and Promoting Engagement with Our Communities.

And while our progress has been remarkable, I think it’s important to point out that we’re not here to celebrate the success of the strategic plan itself. Instead, we are celebrating your success. Everyone in this room is responsible in some way for all that we have achieved during the past few years. Each and every one of you should take great pride in Purdue Fort Wayne’s collective implementation of the plan we created and adopted in 2019.

I have every confidence that we will maintain our growing momentum as we develop even higher aspirations and additional strategies — as we continue to move FORWARD TOGETHER.

I’d like to begin by thanking our colleagues who have worked so hard to plan today’s agenda. Our Design Committee has done an outstanding job of putting together today’s meeting.

Their names are on the screens, and I’d like to especially thank the co-chairs: Farah Combs, Joel Givens, and Shubitha Kever.

As we begin the update on the state of the university, I’d like to review just a few of the accomplishments we have achieved together during the past few years.

First and foremost, Purdue Fort Wayne turned the corner on declining enrollment this fall. After more than a decade — punctuated by the height of the pandemic — we achieved an upturn in enrollment this fall that hopefully signals a reversal of the trend.

New undergraduate enrollment is up 6.6 percent from last fall. Retention reached 64.3 percent, up from 57 percent two years ago. Direct from high school students is up 14.2 percent. New graduate student headcount is up for the sixth year in a row. And we saw gains in every category in the diversity of our students.

Our entire university community pulled together to achieve these results, and it will take the focus of everyone in this room to build on this success in the years to come.

As we have been working so hard to improve enrollment, we have improved other critical measures of student success.

As I mentioned, freshman-to-sophomore retention rates are improving. Even so, we still have significant work to do to bring our retention rates up to that of our peers. We must be persistent to actively retain the students we’re working so hard to enroll. As we saw just this past year, if we focus on it, we have the wherewithal to change it.

Graduation rates have a direct correlation to student retention. And while Purdue Fort Wayne has shown recent signs of improvement, we are still significantly underperforming in both 4-year and 6-year graduation rates. We must continue to be tenacious in ensuring that our students have the resources, support, and attention they need to earn the degrees necessary to pursue successful careers.

Central to our efforts to improve all of these metrics has been the re-envisioning of the way we approach academic advising. We started intensive discussions about changes to advising even before we embarked on our strategic planning efforts, and it has been a high priority throughout that process. This has been a significant undertaking in terms of organization and technology, and I’m certain our efforts will continue to pay off going forward.

Likewise, having the financial resources necessary to attend and graduate from Purdue Fort Wayne is essential to the success and well-being of our students. While we provide significant financial aid to help offset the cost of attendance, many students still need to take out loans to help fill the gap. However, our students still graduate with significantly less debt and with lower loan default rates than the national averages.

The average debt a PFW undergraduate student carries after graduation is just over $12,000, while the national average for public university graduates is more than $20,000. And while the national average for loan default rates is 7 percent, the default rate for our students for the most recent year available was only 2.6 percent.

The dynamics of the Purdue Fort Wayne campus have changed dramatically during the past few years — with more and more students attending full-time here from outside the region, both nationally and internationally.

So, what’s attracting undergraduate and graduate students from all over the world to Purdue Fort Wayne?

A significant driver of our success is in our name — being aligned with Purdue University for the past six years. We are reaping the benefits of the considerable value and recognition that comes with such a powerhouse global brand.

During the past few years, we have also transformed the university’s website, creating an outstanding digital presence that meets students and families where they are — and that provides them with the information they need. For the past 12-month period alone, our website had almost 7 million unique pageviews. Importantly, visitors to the site were able to find what they needed to make critical decisions about our academic programs, admission, financial aid, and numerous other important resources.

A huge attraction and asset is Fort Wayne itself. We’re as proud to have Fort Wayne in our name as we are to be so engaged in the city and our community. Our faculty, staff, and students are part of the fabric of Fort Wayne and are involved in many ways that provide mutual benefits.

Fundamentally, though, our students are attracted to the wide variety of outstanding academic programs we offer—and the incredibly talented faculty members who are on the front lines of teaching, research, and service. I’ve often said that faculty are the beating heart of our university, and our faculty prove that each and every day.

And once they’re on campus, our students are treated to a broad range of engaging student activities and experiences.

Whether it’s kayaking on the St. Joe River, sharing S’mores around a campfire, cheering on the Mastodons at a game, talking one-on-one with an Omnibus speaker, or attending one of the literally hundreds and hundreds of campus events, there’s always something exciting just ahead on the calendar.

And with our strategic focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, our campus continues to become a more diverse, welcoming, and inclusive campus at a time when universities in other states are headed in the opposite direction. According to our shared vision and plan, we created a Cabinet-level Chief Diversity Officer and an Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

As a result of all of your dedication and hard work, Purdue Fort Wayne has rapidly become a destination campus.

And, as you well know, we have also become a crowded campus, experiencing a tremendous crunch for student housing in recent years. It’s no surprise that our student housing has been at full capacity for the past six fall semesters!

This fall, 22 percent of our students — 1,599 of them to be exact — now live on campus or in university-contracted housing in neighboring apartment complexes and the Holiday Inn.

Having sufficient on-campus housing to meet the growing demand is critical to our ability to continue recruiting more students from outside the region and to create the residential campus environment our students and their families have come to expect.

Fort Wayne and Northeast Indiana need more people coming to the region — living and working here — and we are actively helping to accomplish that. Purdue Fort Wayne is an essential conduit for making that happen.

So, what are we doing to address the urgent need for student housing?

Some of you may know that we are moving forward with plans to create a public-private partnership to construct a new apartment complex off of St. Joe Road on the North Campus near Ginsburg Hall.

We recently issued an RFP to private developers, and now have five proposals in hand for consideration. Construction of these new apartments will add up to 900 new beds.

We are moving aggressively on this project and plan to break ground this coming spring, with a goal of welcoming the first students in fall 2026.

Additionally, we are continuing with implementation of our Campus Master Plan with the addition of several planned — more traditional — student dorms on the Main Campus that will continue to fuel the growth of both Purdue Fort Wayne and this region.

You’ll be among the first to hear more about these projects in the coming weeks and months.

We are also extremely excited that our dream of constructing a music technology building on campus is coming true.

This impressive new facility will house our rapidly growing music industry, popular music, and music technology programs. These programs are among our most popular academic offerings and provide us with tremendous potential for future growth. So many of our new students attracted to these programs are coming from out of state to Purdue Fort Wayne, which underscores our need for additional student housing.

With $6 million in private philanthropy and $15 million from the Indiana legislature, the funding for this project is now essentially complete. We look forward to breaking ground on the new building next summer — with a planned opening in time to welcome students in fall 2026.

There have also been some significant changes in Indianapolis that have opened up new opportunities for growth here at Purdue Fort Wayne.

As you probably know, Purdue University and Indiana University are currently going through a major realignment of IUPUI that has many of the same characteristics of the realignment that took place here at Purdue Fort Wayne five years ago.

As a result of the realignment in Indianapolis, the noncompete clause between Purdue Fort Wayne and Indiana University Fort Wayne — which was a major component of the realignment here — was eliminated this past July.

With the elimination of that provision, Purdue Fort Wayne is now free to pursue any curricular changes that are a good fit for the university, that are in demand by students and prospective students, and that connect to business and industry needs in Northeast Indiana and beyond.

Given these changes, we have been hard at work developing strategies for creating new academic programs.

For starters, Purdue Fort Wayne is pursuing the addition of three healthcare degree programs that we plan to offer this coming spring semester — an MBA with a concentration in healthcare management, as well as two undergraduate programs in healthcare administration that we announced last Thursday. We also plan to offer a minor in healthcare decision making, both online and in-person, to students from any major.

These new offerings, as well as others that are actively underway, will create new opportunities for our students and will address pressing healthcare needs in our region and beyond.

I’d like to circle back to something I talked about at the beginning — our progress in terms of student enrollment.

It’s impossible to understate the challenging financial impact that enrollment declines have had on Purdue Fort Wayne over the years.

Our institution is heavily dependent on tuition revenue, and the decline in revenue for successive years has resulted in budget cuts that have drastically affected our ability to invest in the institution, while also straining our ability to maintain — indeed, to increase — our services and support for students.

Nowhere is this more evident to most of you in this room than in our ability to provide consistent and meaningful annual merit increases for faculty and staff — which has been a tremendous challenge in years past. But that’s changing. For the past two years, we have implemented a university-wide merit allocation that we are determined to continue in the years ahead.

Providing regular merit increases is just one of the many tangible ways that we have been working to make Purdue Fort Wayne a wonderful place to work. But there is more.

We have also implemented flexible work schedules, diversity programs, conflict resolution pathways, and employee-focused events that not only add to the richness of the work experience and quality of place, but that also create a stronger sense of purpose and belonging.

We believe these changes — and many more — are making a difference for our faculty and staff that ultimately contributes to a positive student experience, as well.

And finally, I don’t think we can discuss our strategic planning accomplishments without acknowledging how quickly it could have all come completely undone in March 2020.

Just as we were starting to hit our stride in implementing important aspects of the plan, our world — the entire world — was turned upside-down by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even so, we kept our strategic plan alive, adapted as necessary, while ensuring that our university moved seamlessly from PFW Prepared to PFW Ready. It was a moment that tested our resolve and our university — and thanks to all of you, we stepped up and proved what it means to be a Purdue Fort Wayne Mastodon.

I am so proud of how our entire campus rallied to tackle this challenge of epic proportions. You responded with compassion, enthusiasm, and creativity. And everyone worked so tirelessly to ensure that we did everything possible to continue providing our students with the education, services, and support they needed.

Well, that’s just a brief overview of some of the exciting things that bring us all here today. I could talk all day about Purdue Fort Wayne, and I almost did!

I hope I have provided some context and urgency as we consider the next Big Ideas that will transform our university.

Let’s continue to work together — and continue moving FORWARD TOGETHER — to maintain the upward trajectory we have set for our institution, while continuing to build a university that meets the needs and expectations of our students and our community.