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STATE OF THE UNIVERSITY ADDRESS 10/22/19 AUDITORIUM

I do want to say good afternoon to everyone. I am happy to deliver my second State of the University Address and it is my honor to serve here at ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø, to serve the faculty, the staff and the students and the alumni that are here. I do extend my welcome to those who are live-streaming and who could not be here today. This afternoon, as Vicki said, I will focus on our achievements, our ongoing challenges, priorities and future directions as they were outlined in the Transition Committee report. I'll leave time and I look forward to whatever questions you have. I am joined on the stage by my cabinet, who I may in fact ask to help me as I address your questions. I want to start with just a few items that pertain to our recent campus achievements. First and foremost, I do want to acknowledge our new provost, Dr. Dennis Rome.

I also want to acknowledge the numerous awards, grants, honors that have been received by our faculty and our staff. Let's acknowledge all of that good work.

Thank you for the great work that you do each and every day. I want to highlight just a few other achievements that we are all proud of. We are as a university ranked number one in a number of areas. As you know, we are ranked number one for the lowest student debt; NEIU graduates its students with the least amount of debt in the Midwest among regional universities. We are ranked number one for social mobility among Illinois Public Universities, which demonstrates movement up the socioeconomic ladder. This is great for our students. We, of course, are ranked number one in Illinois for being one of the most secure campuses. We are ranked number one by Washington Monthly Magazine as one of the nation's best colleges for adult learners, and we are ranked number two for the nation's most diverse managerial staff. The Chronicle of Higher Education ranked ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø second in the nation among four-year public institutions for diversity among managers. So again, this is not one person, this is all of us working together to achieve these rankings.

The two primary goals that I stated during my inaugural address and my first State of the Union Address, those goals have not changed. They are access and opportunity, and student success. These goals, along with inclusion and equity, remain the most important. The question remains: how do we reach potential students whether they are first-generation students, students of color, adult learners, transfer students, veterans, students who have different ability levels and how do we reach them and bring them to El Centro, Carruthers and this campus location? Enrolling students is just the beginning. As an HSI, we want to work and provide the support to ensure success of our Latino students, our African-American students, our immigrant students, first-generation, all students who enter our portals. We must continuously ask: do we have the academic and student services in place to provide an excellent educational support that is necessary?

After a little over a year serving as president, we have made some strides but we have so much more work to do. As we all know, we need more resources. While we are appreciative of our five percent increase last year, remember that five percent increase was on about a little over a third of our overall budget. As you can see by this slide, we have not returned to our 2015 funding level. There is some optimism because we did receive an increase last year and because Governor Pritzker and the State Legislature are supportive of higher education. However, as the legislative session starts early next year, there are no early indicators at this time about how state university allocations might look. So we hope that arrow continues to go upward.

This next slide shows where funding comes from and our expenditures, 60 percent tuition and about 40 percent state appropriation and almost 80 percent of our total operating budget is dedicated to personnel costs. So this is just a quick way of looking at how the money comes in and how the money goes out.

At NEIU, about half our students are full-time and half are part-time. When we examine IPEDS data, it is the first time, full-time students who serve as the primary data point. From 2015, we saw an increase in students and then last year, 2018, a steep decline. This fall we are flat. It is these students who are tracked for our four-year and six-year graduation rates. There at the end you see that for next year we have a goal of increasing our enrollments at least five percent. We're hoping better but at least five percent.

So moving forward, how do we work together to increase our enrollments? Well, there are a number of things that have already been put in place and other things that we plan to do. First and foremost, we have to have the technology. Most universities have very advanced technology systems that automatically alert students as to when to do what, to welcome them, so we have started to purchase some of that technology last year and we're continuing it this year. We need to increase our application pool, expedite processing and increase yield. All three of those are very important. While we are processing applications, other universities are doing it at a much faster rate. So we need to be on the cutting edge of expediting that process and that will increase yield. Our yield, and when I say yield, I mean how many applications we received and how many students ended up coming to our university. So that percentage did increase this year but again we're not where we need to be.

We need to develop an aggressive recruitment calendar, notifying students of their acceptance but also about their financial package, and I know there are a lot of you that have college-age students and when they get their letter of acceptance, everyone is very, very happy, but the next question is: how much money did I get? And so we need to be able to package that and say, yes you are accepted and here are your scholarships and the awards that you have received.

We need to increase our international students. Increasing international students will increase the diversity of our campus but it will also help us with The Nest and we know that our occupancy rates in The Nest have been down and if we don't reach those designated occupancy rates, we have to pay and it is no secret, it was in the board report what we paid last year, two million dollars right? Two million dollars and we are at 40 percent occupancy this fall, which means we will have to pay. So getting students in that beautiful, beautiful complex, but international students is one way that we can increase that occupancy.

We must continue to fund strategic marketing campaigns. We have a campaign going this fall. We will have one in the spring. We have to be aggressive. Other institutions are very aggressive and not just institutions in Illinois, you see billboards from other states. You know people are coming in and recruiting from Chicago specifically because it is a diverse area.

We need to increase our overall outreach to diverse communities here in Chicago. I have visited many communities. I've tried to make myself known to many of those communities but there's still a lot of outreach work that we all are doing and need to do. We need to develop more innovative pipelines to NEIU and to that, we are very proud of that our recent is our MoU with ASPIRA graduates to come here to NEIU, and a pilot program at Roberto Clemente High School where two of our faculty members will be on site at Roberto Clemente teaching high school students, and our goal is to recruit those students from Roberto Clemente here to NEIU.

And we still need to come up with ways where we can strategically involve NEIU faculty and staff, and I thank all of the faculty and staff who have been active participants, and especially Faculty Senate for leading that initiative last year, and of course one of the best ways to increase enrollments is to in fact keep and retain the students that we have.

So let's look at retention. As you can see, our retention rates are climbing. Each and every one of you, each one of us plays a very important and strategic role in the success of our students. In fact, branding and marketing— the study that we had done last year, many of you participated, that study characterized the University as compassionate and hardworking. In other words, our faculty and staff care about our students and we work hard for their success, and whenever I'm out and I meet alums, they always tell me their NEIU story and it is a story of compassion and a story of hard work. So we must all continue to enhance the efforts of helping students thrive in college from admission to commencement and also to help them with career readiness as they go through and matriculate through the University.

We need to increase the number of internships that we provide for students. We need more research with faculty and students, whether undergraduate or graduate, and we need to develop culturally relevant pedagogy to enhance success. Active engagement with these practices will help our students succeed at a greater level. Our retention rates for African American students need to drastically improve. Before 2018, only one in four progressed from year one to year two. There are several reasons for this and I, you know, I can't give you all the reasons right now, but the one reason that I want you to understand is that the students can do the work. They can do the work. We're giving them an opportunity and they can do the work. Last year, I found out that many African American students had acceptable GPAs. We had a panel of African American students. They had acceptable GPAs but for whatever reasons, and you know, we don't have time to go into those, they did not have a 67 percent federal financial aid completion rate. So that impacted their progress to degree.

Other students on this very stage talked about the environment here at NEIU and how challenging that environment is. This year, as the chart indicates, because of several initiatives and the efforts of many of you, the rate increased to 49 percent. Again not where it needs to be but certainly better than what it was. For our Latino students, retention increased to almost 60 percent. While these accomplishments should be celebrated, we have a lot more work to do with our students. One other area where student progress is needed is really between year two and year three. Year one, we have a lot of services provided for students. Year two, some of those services fall off. So we need external funding to help us with implementing a second-year experience for our students. Our upper division students with declared majors in college have very strong retention rates. In the College of Arts and Sciences, 83 percent of students are retained year over year. In the Goodwin College of Education, the retention rate is 88 percent and in the College of Business and Management, the retention rate is 92 percent. Those are excellent retention rates. So it is year one, year two, making sure that we have wraparound services for our students, so that once they get in their majors, the