Joining me today are Steve Crawford, Vice Chairman for Mansfield - - PDF document

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Narrative for Action Plan presentation by President Hendricks to the BOG in Harrisburg on April 6-7, 2016. SLIDE 1

Joining me today are Steve Crawford, Vice Chairman for Mansfield University’s Council of Trustees and Dr. Steve Siconolfi, Provost. The Action Plan update I will share with you today builds upon the measurable successes achieved to date while also addressing the challenges we face. This plan stays true to our strategic plan and is in alignment with our Vision. Helping us assess our plan’s financial impact is FORECAST. FORECAST is a 10-year forward- looking predictive analytic tool adapted by Dr Siconolfi. FORECAST displays predictive financial outcomes based on change both within and beyond our control. Using a targeted enrollment

• f 3000 students by 2020, we predict we will move from a deficit

position to surplus in FY 2018. To cover the interim deficit, we will use internal auxiliary reserves through a line of credit. Bridging from deficit to surplus will require various actions and time to allow them to produce the desired results. One of those actions is an understanding of what is Mansfield’s brand.

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SLIDE 2 & 3: Claiming Our Brand Mansfield has a distinctive brand. Per the financial risk dashboard, you will recall that Mansfield’s brand is strong. While we agree, we also feel our brand has the potential to attain a much wider

• recognition. The high quality of our programs is well documented

through distinctive accreditations and competitive honors, but not well publicized. Our faculty is sought out and highlighted in national publications. Our students compete and win on the national and international stage. Our graduates lead successful lives and are influential in their chosen professions. Telling these great stories will give the public a better understanding of the high quality and value of a Mansfield University degree. To that end, we reinvigorated our marketing efforts with some notable early wins. We redesigned of our website and enhanced

• ur presence on social media. In the past three months our social

media affiliation has increased an average of 21% over the three major platforms; Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In alignment with our vision, our marketing strategy is to promote Mansfield University’s brand identity as an affordable, personalized high quality liberal arts based education. This brand identity is supported by our membership in COPLAC, the gold standard for public liberal arts institutions. Our strategy also includes expanding our reach beyond our specific region. The dashboard clearly showed the huge pipeline we have developed through the center of the state from Mansfield to Philadelphia. Through smaller feeder veins we presently draw students from 82% of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties.

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Through focused marketing and our TEAM tuition pilot, this past fall we attracted 74 high merit students from eight different states. In reading our action plan update you will note our reach is also expanding internationally. Through a new partnership with Shaanxi University of Science & Technology in China, eight graduate students recently completed three months of course work and cultural immersion at Mansfield. These are but a few of the many initiatives we have in play as we claim our brand and carve out our niche. SLIDE 4: Programs of Distinction Last year we highlighted various programs of distinction to include Music, Health Sciences and Biology. In the Action Plan update you will see each of these has continued to raise the bar of academic excellence for which they are noted. New to the list this year is Criminal Justice Administration. Graduates from this program are well represented from entry through senior management levels of federal, state and private

• agencies. Two of our graduates, Ali Soufan and Jim Reese, are

respected national and international experts in counter-terrorism. Recent outreach with them and others has produced visiting lectures, internships and early discussions on establishing a Security Institute at Mansfield. Mansfield’s CJA program was recently ranked in the top 10 schools in Pennsylvania supporting careers in criminal justice and corrections by correctionalofficer.org.

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Emerging Programs: All of our emerging programs support Mansfield’s commitment to an integrated, interdisciplinary, liberal arts education. The proposed World Languages & Cultures program and the Sociology program are reorganized versions of degree programs currently in moratorium. The Environmental Studies and Geosciences programs are new proposals for which Letters of Intent have already been submitted. The Liberal Arts & Sciences degree is still at the conceptual stage and is part of our effort to develop stackable certificates at the graduate level. SLIDE 5: Budget Realignment Highlights Strategic Investments in FY 15-16 totaled $1.6 million. Working in conjunction with our investments are our efforts to reduce cost. Adjustments to the complement of Faculty and staff in the past year reflect a total employee reduction of 7.0, FTE which followed a 14.4 FTE reduction in 2014-15, with an annual budget reduction of >$3 million. We further reduced our expenses by putting two degree programs and five minors into moratorium. Strategic investment in Advancement and Marketing resulted in a newly designed website. We did this project in house at no

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additional cost. We estimate we saved $150,000 and completed the project 9 months faster than had we contracted it out. Efforts to highlight our brand and expand our reach have resulted in new partnerships with several Chinese universities. We are also currently exploring collaborative relationships with universities in Belize and Cuba. We engaged local and regional law-enforcement entities, and reinstated the Police Academy in order to meet the law enforcement needs of our eight surrounding counties. Since reopening the doors last May, we have graduated one full-time class and have a part-time class in session now. Our investment in TEAM, the tuition pilot for incoming students based on Merit, resulted in an average SAT score that was 100 points higher than that of their respective incoming classmates. This year TEAM is on track to bring in more students than last year. To increase enrollment smartly, we contracted the services of Royal, an enrollment management firm. SLIDE 6: Enrollment Through our partnership with Royal and in-house efforts, we have seen a >20% increase in applications. Our deposits this year have been continuously higher than last year and are currently up 10. This slide indicates where we are as of today and where we anticipate being at freeze.

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Through our contract with Royal we have already begun mining

• perations for future classes.

SLIDE 7: Emerging Opportunities & Challenges Enrollment is just one of the many prongs of the strategy we are using to address Mansfield’s most pressing issue of fiscal instability. We recognize Mansfield did not get to its present fiscal dilemma

• vernight; it has been years in the making. We further concede

there are no silver bullets or quick fixes. To maximize our potential and output for the Commonwealth and the Nation, we are actively seeking new opportunities to move

• ur vision forward, while also making adjustments due to

challenges. Some of the OPPORTUNITIES identified in the Action Plan include: Interdisciplinary Studies…Our BA in Liberal Studies is being redesigned with an "integrated studies" option to enable our students to construct a Liberal Studies degree that combines focused areas of study from different disciplines into one coherent, integrated program. International Engagement…In our Strategic Plan, we commit

• urselves to attracting more international students to our campus

and to expanding opportunities for our students to study and travel abroad. To fulfill this commitment we are building on our measureable success of engaging universities in China and by exploring new engagements with universities in Belize and Cuba.

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We have already seen an increase in the number of students studying abroad over the last two years by expanding our short- term study abroad opportunities. FIT is our tuition pilot which freezes tuition for 8 semesters over 5 years and goes live in fall 16. We thank you for your prior approval and continued support. Parents of incoming students have favorably embraced FIT. We do have a request before you to keep currently enrolled students at their 2015 tuition rate. Rationale for this request is multifold. It is in direct response to

• ur discussions with our students, faculty and staff. It is to offset

their sizeable tuition increase. It is to insulate against possible decreases in persistence and retention. It mirrors other per credit pilots that rolled back tuition rates at inception. As such, we ask for similar support on our request. Our on-going discussions with employers in the region have highlighted the need for Stackable certificates. These will further prepare the active workforce for industry needs while aiding in their degree completion. With opportunities come challenges that must be recognized and managed. Challenges such as support and time. Before I get to them, let me address Mansfield’s most obvious challenge…one that you hear about often…that challenge is financial distress. We recently published a 22-page plan that addresses how we aim to fix this dilemma. As the university’s fiscal issues are long

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standing, the document also contains the history of actions taken thus far and their effectiveness. The plan lays out the actions we will take and the analytic tool we will use to assess success. An accompanying timeline and needed resources are also addressed. For this plan to succeed, we need support and time across its various sub components and its totality. For instance, We need the time and support for our tuition pilots to take hold. Our merit pilot (TEAM) is doing what we intended it to do. We are attracting high merit students, thereby increasing our academic

• profile. We expect TEAM to positively impact our retention,

persistence and graduation rates. Our tuition freeze pilot (FIT) has seen increases in applications and deposits year over year. Feedback from visiting families of perspective students has been favorable. FIT is also a centerpiece

• f our marketing efforts.

We need support and time to claim our identity and fully realize

• ur potential to successfully compete in Pennsylvania’s small

school, liberal arts niche. We have the distinctive programs and we carry higher ed’s gold standard designation for public liberal arts from COPLAC. Infinite opportunities happen at Mansfield in the same manner as they do at private schools of similar size and focus, but our high quality brings greater value to the family and student. As such, Mansfield provides the state its best and sole

• pportunity to match the 42 other similarly- sized private liberal

arts schools across the state, head to head. A challenge Mansfield accepts and embraces. We are committed to this path and ask

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you to join us in educating others about our high quality and exceptional value. We seek support and time for our niche in Pennsylvania’s higher education landscape to take hold and to take advantage of known

• pportunities and to discover new ones.

In closing allow me to leave you with two endorsements for a liberal arts based education. “….. technology alone is not enough—its technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities that yields us the results that make our heart sing.” Steve Jobs, at iPad 2 introduction – March 2011 “The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks." Albert Einstein, Physicist, Einstein: His Life and Times, p 185.