Letter from Chancellor Wells

We — the faculty, staff and students of this great institution — draw from the same deep well of creativity, entrepreneurship, team work and “can do” spirit that inspired and motivated our ancestors to survive and thrive in tough times. We all have struggled and met challenges, and we know how to think and act strategically.

As a member of an Italian-American, working-class family that survived a number of recessions, I often heard my grandmother say, “It’s time to polish the silver,” by which she meant that in tough times, it’s important to recognize, to value and build on what you do have. Inspired by her “silver strategy,” I remain confident that we will move UW Oshkosh forward strategically during tough times.

We addressed a $13.6 million biennial budget shortfall for 2009–2011 by not making dramatic “across the board” budget cuts, which would have meant very significant cutting of all budgets and eliminating approximately 250 jobs. Since such an option was unacceptable, the Governor, the State Legislature, the UW System, our campus administration and governance leadership worked to create some better alternatives:

• First, the state-imposed furlough days resulting in a 3 percent pay cut for full-time employees to cover $3.3 million or about 25 percent of the $13.6 million budget shortfall.

• Next, the state rescinded the promised 2 percent pay plan increase for non-represented faculty and staff to cover $2.2 million or 16 percent of the total biennial budget shortfall.

• Finally, the Board of Regents approved an increase in student tuition of 5.5 percent over the next two years — with an exception for students from families making $60,000 or less — to cover $3.3 million or about 25 percent of the budget shortfall.

These actions accounted for $8.9 million of the $13.6 million shortfall. To address the remaining $4.7 million, we used our strategic investment and rainy-day fund to cover $2.5 million, and we cut all unit budgets by 2.5 percent, which amounted to $3.7 million.

We identified a total of $6.2 million, which covered the $4.7 million and provided us with a cushion of at least $1.5 million in strategic reinvestment and rainy-day funds, along with additional funds generated by increased enrollment. These funds will be used to cover an anticipated mid-biennial budget cut and to invest in strategic initiatives that will make us more affordable, more accessible, more accountable and more competitive. These four major public policy themes, developed by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, provide a framework for defining our public purpose and the policy challenges we are facing.

Affordability

The first draw on our reinvestment fund was the launching of the Student Titans Employment Program (STEP) in fall 2009. The STEP initiative was developed by U-PLAN (a council composed of the governance group leaders, the Provost and the Vice Chancellors) and the College Deans. Through the STEP initiative, we will invest $500,000 in student wages to help engage students in educationally purposeful activities and to enhance their opportunities to interact with faculty, academic and classified staff and peers in substantive ways.

The STEP investment augments the $4.8 million we spent last year on student wages, stipends and assistantships, and it enables more qualified students to afford a high-quality college education while strategically addressing our three biggest challenges: the ever-increasing price of education, the real and potential erosion of high-quality educational experiences, and the lowering of morale from salary and workforce reductions coupled with an increased workload due to mandatory furloughs.

For more details about STEP, see my Opening Day Remarks at www.uwosh.edu/chancellor/communications.php.

Students and faculty from our College of Business have received a two-year, $296,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) to develop a pioneering electronic textbook (e-text) program that has the potential to save students hundreds of dollars each semester. College of Business professors are writing the core concept chapters for a 200-level statistics course to be offered in e-text format in fall 2010. The e-text easily could be updated and customized, thus accommodating individual teaching styles and the incorporation of timely, real-world examples. We expect many more e-texts to be developed at UW Oshkosh.

The UW Oshkosh Foundation is making a sizeable contribution to addressing the affordability challenge by raising funds for scholarships and collaborative learning initiatives. In the three years since the launch of our first comprehensive capital campaign, the Foundation has obtained gifts of more than $2.4 million for endowed scholarships and nearly $500,000 to support collaborative learning projects that emphasize high-impact educational practices. In addition, the Center for Community Partnerships provides $650,000 of paid internships for dozens of students.

Accessibility

Fall 2009 marked the largest enrollment in our 139-year history, with more than 13,000 students attending classes. We have the highest number of transfer students of any UW comprehensive university (1,400 annually), and we had 3,077 students (1,847 undergraduate and 1,230 graduate) age 25 and older enrolled in fall 2009, which is 23.6 percent of our total student headcount.

UW Oshkosh and UW–Green Bay are the first campuses to receive UW System’s approval to offer the Bachelor of Applied Studies degree to improve transferability for technical college graduates. We have worked hard to remove barriers for adult, nontraditional students and students transferring to UW Oshkosh. Over the past two years, we have expanded the number of off-campus, hybrid degree programs we offer at UW colleges and technical colleges from three to 10 and almost doubled enrollment in off-campus programs. We currently are seeking Higher Learning Commission approval for new online and off-site programs in human services, organizational administration, and fire and emergency response management. Through the Graduation Project, we have helped 144 students who left short of completing their degree graduate, and we, at present, are assisting more than 200 additional students to graduate.

We also have increased accessibility for students of color, bringing our total students of color from 438 in fall 2000 to more than 1,000 for the first time in our history. We currently have 201 African American students, up from 162 last year; we have 291 Southeast Asian students, up from 248 last year; we have 243 Hispanic students, up from 219 last year; and we have 146 American Indian students, up from 130 last year.

We are in the design phase of a new suite-style residence hall, which will open in fall 2012 and will be platinum-certified by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). Construction of the new Student Success Center, at the site of the former Elmwood Commons, started in fall 2009. This facility will house the Student Counseling Center, Career Services, the Undergraduate Advising Center and the Center of Academic Resources. These departments all receive additional financial support through an investment by the students through differential tuition.

In line with our increased enrollments, we hired three dozen more tenure-track faculty in 2009 and developed and expanded programs in high-demand areas with the help of the $4 million from the 2007–2009 Growth Agenda funds we received. We take extreme pride in announcing that the Board of Regents approved our first professional doctoral program last spring. Through the Doctor of Nursing Practice, we will address the region’s need for advanced practice nurses and primary care providers.

Accountability

We are undertaking a general review and clarification of our strategic and operational planning process this year. We will examine the expression and alignment of our University and four colleges’ plans, procedures and strategic action initiatives; our Governing Ideas (mission, vision, core values and strategic directions); and the results of our integrated marketing and communications research and initiatives. We also will evaluate the need to update our mission statement and present the results of our strategic and operational planning review to the UW System Board of Regents in fall 2010.

In an effort to proactively enhance the safety of everyone on campus, we have upgraded our emergency communications. The newly adopted crisis communication strategy, using the e2Campus system, enables the University to send urgent messages about emergencies to students, faculty and staff via text messages, e-mail, the University Web site, RSS feeds and a telephone hotline. We also have installed LED signage and speakers, giving us the capacity to broadcast both written and audible messages to the entire indoor and outdoor University footprint. UW Oshkosh is one of the first institutions in the nation to adopt comprehensive emergency alert systems that provides redundant notifications to ensure that our campus community is aware of emergencies at the earliest possible time.

As an early adopter of the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA), we maintain a Web-based College Portrait, and we continue to review the proposed value-added instruments for possible adoption. We also are identifying other kinds of documentation of educational value added, such as ePortfolios. UW Oshkosh is proud to be a national leader in this endeavor.

Competitiveness

During these trying economic times, we protected the Salary Equity Fund, the Professorial Productivity Fund and the External Grants Expansion Fund, and we held harmless sabbaticals and Faculty Development grants from campus cuts. Through the STEP initiative, we will increase graduate assistants and faculty/student collaborative research. We also provided increased funding for the University Honors Program and the International Education Program. The library strategically has used its resources to support faculty research and student learning. As a result, it has added two dozen new databases, resulting in more than 500 new online scholarly journals.

All units that once worked in the Facilities Management Center — along with staff from Postal Services, Document Services, Central Stores and Receiving — moved across the Fox River to the newly remodeled Campus Services Center. This former Cub Foods building, along with three former Department of Military Affairs buildings, serve as our new Campus Services Center. The move paves the way for the construction of our new academic center, the first free-standing academic building built at Oshkosh since 1971.

In October 2009, Governor Doyle and major donors broke ground for the new academic center, which will be home to the College of Business and 10 College of Letters and Science departments and programs. It also will serve as the major classroom building on campus, and virtually every student will have a class in this building. The center will be the largest facility of its kind in Wisconsin to be LEED gold-certified. The 191,000 square foot, energy-efficient building will help us continue to improve the quality of life and education in northeastern Wisconsin’s New North and attract talented students and faculty to ensure we are able to provide a high-quality, affordable and accessible education.

Our Liberal Education Reform Team is building an understanding of what the learning outcomes mean and where they are covered in the curriculum. Additionally, we are reviewing ways to implement the high-impact practices identified by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) across the curriculum and the co-curriculum so that all of our students will benefit from a new framework for excellence. For further details, please see the Alignment of Learning Outcomes chart.

Conclusion

With everyone — students and employees — pulling together, we are addressing our major budget shortfalls as well as the cost, educational quality and morale challenges related to them. Through careful strategic planning, we have identified ways to invest our uncommitted revenue to leverage our ability to provide students with access to a high-quality and affordable liberal education that prepares them for socially valued work and for civic leadership in the future.

Our strategy to move toward positive change is to “polish the silver” — to recognize and appreciate the many things we have to be proud of and to remain committed to them.

Richard H. Wells,
Chancellor

Highlights

The scope of accomplishments at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh — given the budget cuts and tuition increases since 2000 — is astonishing, and it is a tribute to the unity, vigor and dedication of students, faculty, and academic and classified staff members.

These highlights present a few examples of the University’s success:

We have larger enrollments and full-time enrollment (FTE), and we have increased the number of students of color and adult students, degrees conferred and retention rates:

• Headcount enrollment increased by 1,318 to 13,002 students, up 11.3 percent.

• FTE increased by 1,277, up 13.8 percent.

• Enrollment of students of color more than doubled from 438 to 1,024.

• Enrollment of adult students age 25-plus increased by 461, up 33.3 percent.

• Degrees conferred increased from 1,712 to 2,139, up 24.9 percent.

• The retention rate for first-year students increased from 72.2 to 75.4 percent.

• The retention rates for students of color increased from 69.1 to 73.4 percent.

We secured more grants and more private dollars than ever before:

• Grants increased from $8.8 to $12.2 million, up 38.6 percent.

• Foundation endowments increased from $6.0 to $11.4 million.

• Foundation total assets increased from $7.4 to $19.0 million and acquired funding for 93 Academic Excellence Scholarships and 12 National Merit Scholarships, a more than threefold increase.

We raised the level of academic preparedness of our first-year students:

• The number of first-year students from the top quartile of their high school class increased by 11.3 percent.

• 12 of them are new Academic Excellence Scholars, and three are new National Merit Scholars, raising the total to 69 scholars.

We added tenure-track faculty positions and expanded support programs:

• UW Oshkosh received $3.8 million in Growth Agenda funding for 27 new faculty positions.

• The new Student Compact provides $1 million annually through differential tuition to enhance and integrate student academic support services.

• The new Center for Scholarly Teaching enhances student learning by inspiring and equipping the teaching community to achieve excellence through exceptional research.

We added new academic majors, graduate certificate programs and baccalaureate degree completion programs, including:

• Undergraduate majors in theatre arts and environmental studies.

• Accelerated Math and Science Teacher Education Program in collaboration with five UW Colleges.

• 11 new graduate certificate programs.

• Global MBA program.

• Collaborative master’s degree in social work with UW-Green Bay.

• Accelerated bachelor’s degree for non-nursing graduates.

• MBA Foundations Online Program.

• Wisconsin’s first Bachelor of Applied Studies and Fire and Emergency Response Management degrees.

• The University’s first doctoral degree, the Doctor of Nursing Practice.

We enhanced our facilities by completing approximately $100-million worth of building projects characterized by:

• $1.8 million in classroom and lab upgrades.

• $17-million Halsey Science Center renovation.

• $19.9-million Reeve Memorial Union renovation and addition.

• $13-million renovation of Taylor Hall.

• $10-million transformation of the Oshkosh Sports Complex.

• Purchase and renovation of the 30,000-square-foot Newman Center for Academic Support and Diversity and new Women’s Center as well as the Credit Union building for the University Police Department.

• Campus beautification project — landscaping, lighting and signage.

• $21-million Student Recreation and Wellness Center.

• $7.7-million, 400-stall parking ramp.

We secured another $100-million worth of capital projects on the near horizon: 

• 191,000-square-foot Academic Center.

• Student Support, Development and Success Center.

• 350-bed, suite-style residence hall.

• Campus Services Center.
  

We won national recognition for our commitment to “green” principles by decreasing negative environmental impacts through water and energy conservation, pollution reduction and recycling:

• Reduced water consumption by 24.5 million gallons/year, an annual savings of $130,986.

• Reduced energy consumption by 563,017 kilowatt-hours, an annual savings of $27,600.

• Reduced emissions of coal/natural gas boilers by constructing a $2.8-million heat plant stack.

• Reused light poles, resulting in more energy efficiency and less light pollution and saving  $300,000.

• Ranked 23rd among all U.S. colleges and universities for use of renewable energy.

• Received the Environmental Projection Agency’s highest leadership award in 2003.

• Received the 2004 National Wildlife Federation Award, the 2005 Energy Star Award and the 2006 Wisconsin Clean Air Award.

• Became the first Fair Trade University in the country.

• Conducted an analysis of the University’s carbon footprint.

We were recognized as a national model for developing and highlighting exemplary campus-wide liberal education programs:

• Adopted a set of student learning outcomes in May 2008 based upon the Essential Learning Outcomes of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, developing definitions and performance indicators for each.

• Featured online by the American Council on Education’s Solutions for Our Future.

• Lauded by the Association of American Colleges and Universities for linking its Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) initiative to the ACE’s Solutions for Our Future.

• Devoted three issues (Spring 2006, Fall 206 and Spring 2007) of UW Oshkosh Magazine to a three-part series on the value and importance of a liberal education.

We are establishing an emerging national reputation for the way we engage and partner with all types of individuals and organizations to better serve our region:

•  Founding member of NEW ERA (Northeastern Wisconsin Educational Resource Alliance), a consortium of executive leaders of northeastern Wisconsin’s 13 public universities, serving 1.2 million Wisconsin residents with quality, seamless education.

• NEW ERA also is a founding member of New North, a consortium involving northeastern Wisconsin’s chambers of commerce, workforce development boards, economic development professionals and CEOs of major corporations. New North’s vision is to be nationally and globally competitive for advancing job growth while maintaining a superior quality of life for the region’s citizens.

We are especially proud of the accomplishments of our faculty and students:

• UW Oshkosh has won more Regents’ Teaching Excellence Awards than any other UW institution. Five individual faculty members and three departments have received this prestigious award.

• UW Oshkosh has the most successful Model United Nations Program in the world, receiving 25 consecutive Outstanding Delegation awards at international competitions.

• Since 1999, the College of Nursing graduate students’ pass rate on the American Nurses Credentialing Center–Family Nurse Practitioner Exam has been above 99 percent.

• Senior business majors at UW Oshkosh taking the ETS business knowledge assessment test ranked in the top 16 percent nationwide, while MBA graduates ranked in the top 5 percent nationally on the MBA students’ assessment exam.

• UW Oshkosh students who took the CPA exam placed the University in the top 10 of schools nationally.

• The Advance-Titan has won the top national award for student newspapers five times.

• More than 200 UW Oshkosh graduates have gone on to receive the Herb Kohl Teacher Fellowship of the Year award for excellence and innovation in teaching.

• The best graduate programs in the nation covet our College of Letters and Science graduates.

• UW Oshkosh has won 42 national championships, including 27 NCAA Division III and three NCAA Division II competitions.

- Alignment of Governing Ideas

- Alignment of Learning Outcomes

- UW Oshkosh Facts