July 3, 2024

Faculty and staff,

Thank you to all of you who joined this 6-week look at enrollment. I so appreciate every person who is leaning into enrollment. Enrollment is all of our jobs. Teddy Roosevelt said that the greatest gift in life is the opportunity to work at work worth doing. This, my friends, is work worth doing! 

As a recap, I started this series laying out the problem we need to solve; university enrollment in Alaska and the nation is shrinking overall. A college or university closes its doors every week in America. At the same time, enrollment is critical to UAF’s vibrancy, our financial stability and the economic future of Alaska. In an increasingly challenging enrollment landscape, we (all of us) need to act now to continuously improve our approach to university education and advance our sustainable enrollment and retention strategies. We can do something, but we can’t do everything. So our efforts need to be based on sound fundamentals - return on investment, greatest impact, and transformation.

Following my introductory message five weeks ago were four more installments identifying some different paths we could take to address the enrollment and retention challenge ahead of us. I shared thinking on how to focus our recruitment efforts, streamline our matriculation process, modernize our academic offerings, and improve the student experience. The beautiful thing about these strategies is that we have the ability to do them now. Oh, and the other beautiful thing is that they are not mutually exclusive. We can do them all. 

The Board of Regents continues to be supportive of efforts to increase enrollment and retention. In the face of projected enrollment challenges, we have the opportunity to act. It’s an exciting prospect! In the coming months, it will be our task to communicate more broadly about the opportunities available to us. 

In my second enrollment message, I floated an idea of how to increase our retention rate by creating separate enrollment tracks. In this model, students who meet a certain high school (or transfer) GPA that is “4-year degree ready” will matriculate into the UAF Troth Yeddha’ Campus. Meanwhile, students that need to take college classes to get to that “4-year degree ready” level will enroll at CTC and earn certificates, associate degrees and microcredentials on their way to a lucrative spot in the workforce or on to a rewarding 4-year degree. 

For UAF to make this change in our admissions process, it will require faculty, staff and administration to come together to update our student support services and academic programming. But it’s something that we, as UAF, have the agency to do. With the expertise of our faculty and abilities of our staff, we could transform the structure of UAF’s enrollment and retention landscape. What an amazing opportunity! 

In subsequent messages, I wrote about how modernizing our facilities and our academic programs have the potential to completely transform the student experience at UAF and make a big impact on our ability to recruit and retain students. These messages have come in a few installments, but the reality is these strategies to modernize our processes, facilities, and academic offerings are connected and mutually dependent. We can’t pick just one, because they all rely on the other to be successful. In order to recruit new students to UAF, we need modern facilities and top-tier academic programs. In order to retain them, we need efficient processes and student support services. Then, in order to ensure they successfully graduate and apply their degree, we need robust academic offerings. Students need all of these things in order to have a positive experience at UAF. 

In order to get there, we need to each lean into enrollment in our own part of the UAF enterprise. Everyone at this university has the opportunity to affect the future of enrollment at UAF. I look forward to continuing this conversation over the summer and into the fall. 

Thanks for choosing UAF. 

—Dan White, chancellor