August 5, 2024
Dear Colleagues,
As the calendar moves into August, our thoughts naturally turn to the start of the academic year, now just a few weeks away. I hope you all found extended time over the summer to catch up with family and friends.
I’m writing today to offer some reflections on the year ahead. As set out below, I’m deeply proud of our community’s response to a period marked by intense competition and change. We have taken important steps—steps that are making a difference—and we must continue to act with urgency and boldness to respond to an increasingly challenging market and to ensure that our College remains a top choice for the very best students.
To that end, and with the support of the Board of Trustees, the coming year will be principally focused on further strengthening our case to current and prospective students and their families. We will do so in many ways, including through additional targeted investments that build on and complement our Strategic Direction. So that the campus may unite behind that work, in both time and energy, we will simultaneously place less emphasis than we have in recent years on rethinking our budgets.
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When the academic year begins, we will greet an extraordinary class of students. It will be joining us at a time of necessary change and evolution, and also one marked by significant accomplishments:
- Over the summer, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education gave the College a clean accreditation—a powerful statement about the quality of the education we provide our students.
- Last year, we implemented a Strategic Direction that has received national attention for its relevance and impact.
- We have started scores of initiatives designed to create new, high-impact experiences for our students.
- We have significantly improved our already strong retention rates, with increases as of today equaling 2% for rising sophomores and nearly 4% for rising juniors.
- Our friends and alumni have responded to all of this with record-breaking philanthropic support.
To everyone who has made these and many other successes possible—faculty, staff, alumni, and friends—thank you. They are tangible signs of the importance and impact of the Strategic Direction we have set and that each of you is helping to bring to life.
As I write this, our incoming first-year class stands at 527 students (against a goal of 550) and hails from 30 states and 35 countries. Built from a year of record applications, the class comes to us with a vibrant range of curricular and co-curricular interests, talents, and aspirations. The students will add immeasurably to the fabric of our learning community.
Our work, and the progress we have made together, has never been more essential. We can’t let up given the significant financial and enrollment pressures brought about by the most challenging higher education landscape in our lifetimes. Even with the important steps we have taken together, the financial and demographic challenges we face have further intensified this year.
This underscores the importance of approaching the coming year with a redoubled commitment to the experience of our current students and to further strengthening the case (who we are, what we offer, the outcomes we deliver) to prospective students and their families. The response to an increasingly competitive market is to compete yet more effectively.
What does that mean in practical terms? Over the past several years, the College has taken steps to ensure that we are using our resources as effectively as possible—whether through position control, programmatic or curricular adjustments, or restructurings. This year, while some of that work will continue, our principal emphasis will be to build on the path we’ve set to foster a dynamic and compelling student experience in and out of the classroom. Simply put, we will focus less on how we might reduce expenses and more on strategic investments and our overall campus culture and environment.
This is everyone’s responsibility, from every corner of the campus. From faculty engagement with students to campus infrastructure upgrades. From the consideration of new academic offerings to ensuring that the Gettysburg Approach is fully taking root. From efforts to enhance the social life of our students to the creation of more experiential opportunities that will shape our students’ understanding of themselves and the world. From making sure the College is meeting the needs of today’s students to asking hard questions of what a Gettysburg education should be at our bicentennial in 2032.
We need to approach this work in a spirit of openness, innovation, generosity, and confidence. We need to appreciate the progress we’ve made and its promise for the future. Most of all, we need to act with the urgency that the moment demands.
To support these efforts, I will be allocating up to $1 million in philanthropic funds in three key areas: our admissions and communications teams, to permit them to amplify our messaging to prospective students; the Office of the Provost, to identify with faculty input investments in lab equipment, teaching tools, and other non-personnel areas where upgrades will significantly improve the student experience; and College Life, to further enhance the social opportunities for our students. These resources—all one-time expenses for the coming year—seek to accelerate our ongoing efforts to create a compelling answer to the question “Why Gettysburg?”
Let me end with this. Five years ago, I had the privilege of joining this special community and I have since come to see in very tangible ways our extraordinary commitment to a mission that matters. COVID, demography, economics, and politics have presented us with an unusual mix of issues to address, and it hasn’t always been easy. But, through the hard work of so many, we are setting a course that will permit us not only to navigate these headwinds but to emerge a yet stronger institution.
In various meetings over the fall, my colleagues and I will speak more to the themes I’ve outlined above. For now, however, I’ll conclude with my excitement about the students returning and bringing our campus more fully to life. Thank you for everything each one of you does for the College and for how you will help make this a transformative year for our students and for the entire campus.
Best,
Bob Iuliano
President