Staben talks improvement, enrollment at faculty meeting
University of Idaho President Chuck Staben addressed faculty at the University Faculty Meeting Tuesday with a simple message — everyone should work together to better the university.
“I think today is a day where we need to embrace both the challenges and the opportunities to some extent, and we need to do this together,” Staben said. “Let’s make the university better together.”
Moving forward, Staben said increasing enrollment by 50 percent is a necessary measure.
“We need to embrace that as a goal together,” Staben said. “We haven’t made any progress on that this year.”
Staben said many facets of the university should make worthy efforts of improving both recruitment and retention. He reaffirmed that UI’s mission is to provide education to Idahoans and increasing enrollment helps further the mission.
“Our state needs more educated people, and that’s fundamentally why we must do that,” he said.
Staben said although he considers UI to be stable, the only way to improve is to invest.
“We’ve achieved financial stability, but we’ve achieved it largely by cutting,” Staben said. “That is not the way to grow excellence.”
Staben said faculty should consider what they could do in their classrooms to improve the student experience.
“We can treat the students that we have better and focus on retention and success,” Staben said.
A valuable asset faculty members bring to the university is research programs, he said. Staben said although there is great research on campus, it should be increased and faculty need to be the driving force behind it.
“The faculty need to be bringing more ideas forward, more opportunities forward,” he said.
As far as retention goes, Staben said there is a lot of work to be done.
“This is an institution, when I look at it, is performing adequately but not well in the classroom in terms of retaining students,” he said.
Staben said graduation rates should be higher at UI.
He said he is happy minority undergraduate students have shown increased first-year retention rates. He also said UI is providing counseling and financial advising for minority students and it appears to be successful. He said the same counseling could be extended to all students.
However, he said despite the increase, graduation rates are still fairly low for minority undergraduate students.
“When you look at those students, they’re getting scared,” Staben said. “They need to know that the best investment they can make is an education and that we can help them get there.”
Staben said the implementation of a new financial counseling program could help with retention of students who opt out of continuing their education due to financial concerns.
For recruitment, Staben said a new opportunity for increasing students is offering scholarships for high school students with an incoming GPA of 3-3.4.
“We are pretty confident they can succeed here,” he said. “We can encourage people who aren’t yet seeing themselves as college students.”
Marty Ytreberg, Faculty Senate chair, said the Enrollment Management Council headed by Jean Kim, vice provost for Student Affairs and Enrollment Management, is developing a strategic enrollment plan.
“We have been spending quite a bit of time working on guiding principles and goals,” Ytreberg said. “In the fall, there will be a lot of opportunity to engage with faculty on these ideas.”
Staben said it is unusual for a university to not have a strategic enrollment plan and an annual enrollment plan, but UI was missing both when he arrived.
“We’re developing both of those,” Staben said.
As far as strategies, Staben said there is not a clear vision of what will be most effective yet.
“This is more reading tea leaves than making a mathematical prediction,” Staben said.
Katelyn Hilsenbeck can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @Katelyn_mh