May 30, 2024

Faculty and Staff,

Over the past several years, I have sent out communications around topics of high interest and importance to the university. These have included series during the budget compact, COVID, and, most recently, R1. Today is the first in a new series of briefings on areas of need and opportunity in the area of enrollment. When I say enrollment, I don’t mean just enrolling students. Enrollment includes pre-college programming, recruitment, admissions, advising, academics, retention, and graduation. It includes all the things that contribute to a student becoming a graduate of UAF “...with all the rights, privileges, honors and responsibilities pertaining thereto.”

The purpose of this series of communications is to share my thinking with you on how we are going to navigate a challenging enrollment path and how decisions we make today will shape the UAF of tomorrow. I am confident that we are in a good position, we have the right tools, and a supportive Board of Regents. Our Regents, like us, want more than anything for this university to succeed. They, like President Pitney and your leadership, faculty and staff want to be able to look back one day with pride and satisfaction on the decisions we made.

This is the first of six installments with the following five to be on the following topics:

1. Enrollment at UAF

2. Graduation rates/retention as an input metric to determine who we recruit to UAF

3. Developing the enrollment pipeline (Non-resident/international/dual enrollment) to capture those students who are identified in “1”

4. Differentiation/student experience

5. Academic programming

6. The path forward. 

Next week, in the second installment I will share some of our thoughts about graduation and retention rates. These two metrics are in the same bucket. And while most people think of these as outputs, they are really inputs. The graduation and retention rates have a lot to do with our student support services, but they are also affected by who walks in the door – and we have strategic decisions to make in this space.

For the third week, I’d like to discuss how we develop the enrollment pipeline – such as pre-college programming and dual enrollment. Here again we have choices. Where is our best return on investment? Do we focus on 3rd to 8th grade programming to prepare students early for a college-ready high school career or focus primarily on high schoolers – summer programs. In state or out of state?

And next, for the students that we have now and will have in the future, what student experience results in their greatest success? We know on campus housing, for example, positively impacts retention. What is our target percentage of students to have on campus? How do we position ourselves now to get that housing built over time?

In the fifth week we’ll talk through academic programming and the role of academics in enrollment. In particular, what are the best ways to think about how our academic programs are organized and laddered? How do we increase programs that are growing and support those that aren’t?

And finally, how do all these pieces fit together in our path forward? We have the luxury (right now) of some options. I can imagine several different paths that achieve our mission and vision. But which one is the right one, what are the puts and takes, what decisions must be made now and later?

Let's talk.

—Dan White, chancellor