��������

Good afternoon, everyone! It is wonderful to see so many of you here in Schneebeck Hall as we embark on another academic year at Puget Sound! Welcome also to those members of our community who are tuning in via livestream. Please note that a transcript of today’s remarks will be made available on the university website following this address for those who are not able to join us in person or online.

Before we begin, I want to first acknowledge that �������� is located on the traditional homelands of the Puyallup Tribe. The Puyallup people have lived on and stewarded these lands since the beginning of time, and continue to do so today. We recognize that this land acknowledgement is only the first step toward true ally-ship, and we remain committed to uplifting the voices, experiences, and histories of the Indigenous people of this land and beyond.

This is one of my favorite times of year, when you can start to feel the energy pick back up on campus, beginning with the return of our faculty, our scholar-athletes, and then the arrival of our new first-year and transfer students. In a few days, our continuing students will move back into their residences and before you know it, it’s the first day of classes. I want to express my profound thanks to our outstanding staff for their good and hard work over the summer, and I particularly want to acknowledge the contributions of our staff colleagues in Facilities Services for their dedicated efforts to prepare our beautiful campus for the start of the academic year. Please join me in giving them a round of well-deserved applause.

I am grateful for the opportunity for us to gather as a community to reflect on Academic Year 2024-25; to offer you an update on fall 2025 enrollment and the status of the university; and to discuss our institutional goals and hopes for the year ahead and beyond.

I want to first acknowledge the national landscape that we face in higher education. There are significant headwinds as a result of federal directives and changes to education policy; the passing of the Big Beautiful Bill Act; the continued softening of college enrollment nationwide; questions in the public square about the value and return on investment of a college education; and economic headwinds. There are many challenges ahead, but I believe we are uniquely positioned to respond to them and believe even more strongly in the importance of liberal arts education and the unique type of education we offer at the ��������. Through our continued collaboration to realize the goals laid out in our Leadership for a Changing World strategic plan and our A Sound Future strategies, I remain steadfast in my belief that we can meet this moment and take advantage of the opportunities before us to advance our mission and position the university for continued success. Puget Sound is an institution that has successfully navigated its way through difficult moments in its past and we will do so again.

In academic year 2024–25, our work in several key areas advanced institutional excellence, academic distinction and the visibility of the university; we continued to innovate our curriculum and promote student success; and diversify and expand the university’s lines of revenue. To name just a few of our accomplishments, we successfully launched our new core curriculum, Grow, and the Department of Environmental Studies & Sciences, and we are making final preparations now for our new, interdisciplinary minor in Data Analytics, which launches this fall. We entered into a partnership with Seattle University’s School of Law to bring legal education and programming to Puget Sound students and aspiring legal professionals in the South Sound.

We completed our Total Compensation and Benefits review project, a 19-month endeavor to align our compensation practices with the wider job market and best support all of you — the staff and faculty who support and guide our students to make sure they leave here equipped to succeed. In May, the Board of Trustees approved five key proposals brought forward by the Total Compensation and Benefits committee, which will allow us to continue to recruit, retain, and support a high performing workforce and ensure our compensation structure keeps pace with the market. This included a pool for salary increases for faculty and staff, which were distributed over the summer.

And, as I shared in a campus message last week, the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities reaffirmed our accreditation. Thanks, again, to everyone who contributed to this critically important work. The members of the commission commended us for our highly collaborative culture and decision-making processes, the implementation of high-impact experiential learning as a baccalaureate graduation degree requirement, and our commitment to expanding access to a transformative liberal arts education through the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound.

We are excited to welcome Dr. Chelsea Herman as our new director of athletics this summer. Puget Sound Athletics had a strong year last year, particularly in track & field, rowing and volleyball…and our baseball team achieved its first postseason appearance in the Division III era. Overall, we finished 4th in the Northwest Conference standings, which was a notable improvement over our 8th place finish in academic year 2023-24. We look forward to the next chapter in athletics under Dr. Herman’s leadership. Fostering a championship culture on campus remains a strategic priority for us, and a successful athletics program is a key driver of enrollment, retention, and campus and community engagement.

And lastly, our institutional profile and visibility continues to ascend. We continue to be ranked among the top liberal arts institutions in the country by U.S. News & World Report, Forbes and the Princeton Review, which regards us as being among the nation’s 391 best institutions.

Each of these accomplishments underscores the fundamental strength of our university and the success we have experienced with the implementation of our Leadership for Changing World strategic plan and the initiatives associated with A Sound Future. With that said, we continue to experience headwinds that challenge the university. 
It was an absolute joy to welcome the fantastic and enthusiastic Class of 2029 to campus this past Friday. With the exception of Commencement, first-time-in-college move-in day is one of the happiest and most exciting days of the academic year for me. The Class of 2029 stands at 385 first time in college. Although the headcount is short of our initial goal, this class stands out from others in years past in several notable ways. This class is shaping up to be our most diverse class to date, representing 30 states and boasting an average unweighted cumulative GPA of 3.7; 38% of our incoming class are student athletes, 35% are minoritized students, and 20% are first generation. And this group is already demonstrating their enthusiasm and commitment – we experienced no “no shows” at move-in day on Friday. That is, we had a 100% show rate for the new student population to arrive on campus. We believe this is a first for the university and speaks very strongly about the partnership and diligent work of teams across the institution, particularly those in Admission, Student Accounts, Student Affairs and the Office of Institutional Equity & Diversity. Please join me in congratulating and thanking our campus colleagues.

Our new transfer student enrollment sits at 43 students today; however, we continue to experience new deposits and believe we may realize a class of nearly 50 transfer students before the fall term begins.

This year’s smaller incoming class is indicative of a changing environment for higher education, and decreasing undergraduate enrollment is not a challenge that is unique to Puget Sound – it is a trend affecting colleges and universities nationwide. The so-called demographic cliff means that each year there is increased competition for fewer high school graduates. At the same time, the demand for post-graduate education is rising, with many jobs requiring additional training and education. This demographic reality, alongside the rising demand for graduate education, is why we are leaning into the success we’ve realized with our current suite of selective graduate programs. While we will continue to bolster our core identity as a liberal arts institution with preeminent undergraduate education experiences, we will also look to expand our offerings into new, innovative graduate programs with strong, emerging markets. The clear demand for graduate education is reflected in the strength of our graduate enrollment. The incoming graduate class currently totals 131 students, which is 10 students above our fall 2025 enrollment goal for new graduate students and 25 more than last year’s entering class. Enrollment in our MAT and M.Ed. programs were particularly strong this year.

In the coming year, Provost Kerkhoff, in close collaboration with faculty, will be exploring actionable paths for curricular innovation to best serve the educational needs of our community, including adding low-residency hybrid graduate program options to some of our stellar graduate programs to increase their accessibility for (and the enrollment of) learners of all ages and backgrounds, including working professionals.

I am also happy to share more good news with you. Our fall-to-fall (first-to-second-year student retention) projections suggest we may come in at 88%, which would be 2% ahead of our goal for fall 2025 and reflects an 8% increase from fall 2023. This, too, speaks to the great work being done across the university to promote the success of our students. Every member of our faculty and staff played a role to achieve this milestone on our way to our aspirant – and within reach – goal of 90%.

So, collectively, we anticipate total enrollment – first time in college, new transfer, new graduate students and returning graduate and undergraduate students to be 1,887 this fall. We are pleased and grateful to have every one of these students with us; however, we will experience a net enrollment shortfall this year, which will have ramifications for us for the near and intermediate term as we work to return to financial equilibrium.

Our new Vice President for Enrollment Tim Whittum and his team have been working with campus stakeholders to revise our strategic enrollment plan with a dynamic and forward-looking approach toward sustainable growth in response to shifting student priorities and changes in federal and state policies toward higher education. Specific strategies are in development that focus on first-year, transfer, graduate and international students. I am very excited about the creative, cutting-edge and industry-leading approach and tactics that are outlined in the plan to achieve our primary objectives and key developmental needs:

• Increase the volume of qualified applicants;
• Lift the admit-to-enroll yield rate;
• Increase operational efficiency;
• Better leverage financial aid to ensure a competitive market position;
• Cultivate partnerships and pathways that support admission pipelines; and
• Achieve or exceed our enrollment targets.

Tim will provide members of the campus community with the opportunity to learn more about the strategic plan and offer input on it in the coming weeks. And, as we look ahead to the future and academic year 2026-27, I am cautiously optimistic to report that applications for fall 2026 are up over 100% compared to this date last year.

As has been shared previously in campus messages and the work of the Budget Task Force, enrollment directly impacts our budget. Our net enrollment shortfall made it necessary to revise our budget for this academic year. Last week, I met with the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees, who approved our modified budget for FY26. I am grateful to the board for their oversight and guidance as the university continues to take a phased approach to reach financial equilibrium following the financial shock of the pandemic and its wake, through our A Sound Future strategies and initiatives. As a consequence of the university’s disciplined approach to fiscal management over time, we have a strong balance sheet in spite of softening enrollment. And through our collective undertaking to realize the strategies and initiatives laid out in A Sound Future, we’ve built contingencies and made necessary expense reductions along the way that allow us to align our operations to this smaller class. We have also seen increased revenue from conferences and events like the Mary Bridge Children's Festival of Trees and Special Olympics that support our core educational mission and facilitate partnerships that deepen ties to our local community. Our balance sheet has also been bolstered by the philanthropy of our generous Logger families, alumni, and friends. This past year, we raised $12.1 million through the generous support of our donors, who firmly believe in our mission and are eager to advance the goals of our strategic plan. This comes on the heels of two consecutive years of historic levels of philanthropic support. Thanks to our donors and thoughtful financial investment over many years, we have a healthy endowment, which puts us in a better position than many of our peers across the higher education sector.

Our endowment has allowed us to weather the storm so far, but we cannot live off our savings indefinitely and we must move from a primary “cost containment” framework to a growth and transformation mindset. I believe it is time for us to move into what I am calling A Sound Future 2.0. Building on the framework of goal No. 1 of the Leadership for a Changing World strategic plan and the success of the adaptive strategies outlined in A Sound Future, this next phase of our plan will move us beyond response, recovery, and renewal toward transformation to address the structural challenges before us: lower undergraduate enrollment, rising costs, deferred investments in our infrastructure, and a reliance on drawing from our quasi-endowment to address budget shortfalls. A Sound Future 2.0 will allow us to shift our focus from primarily containing costs to building capacity through accelerated curricular innovation, academic program expansion and revenue diversification into areas that will allow us to meet the needs of today’s and tomorrow’s learners at the undergraduate, graduate and professional levels. We will hold fast and tight to our liberal arts identity and continue our push to be recognized among the best liberal arts institutions in the country, but we have opportunities to reimagine our approach to attain that goal and remain competitive, relevant and sustainable in a changing world. This fall, I will be meeting with the Board of Trustees, Faculty Senate, Staff Senate, ASUPS, and other campus groups to gather input and feedback on this next phase of our plan to invest in our shared future. I look forward to your collaboration and insight in the coming months.

I’ve already mentioned one area where we could build capacity through innovation: graduate and professional enrollment. Another area that I am excited about is generative AI. As I have said before: a well-rounded education grounded in the tradition of the liberal arts prepares our students to succeed in a rapidly changing world. Like many of you, I have been tuning into podcasts and reading a great deal about generative AI. I concur with Jeffrey Selingo, a higher education author and strategist, who notes that students entering college today will graduate into a job market where AI fluency is not optional. It will be essential. As an institution, I believe we need to do all that we can to prepare our students for this brave new world. Our focus on depth and breadth of knowledge, interdisciplinary thought, critical thinking and ethical awareness suggests to me that we can become an AI-ready university that can become known nationally for teaching students how to use AI ethically and effectively, and to make sure they are robot- and AI-proof in the years ahead. I am excited about the work our AI Work Group has been doing over the past year and look forward to the recommendations they will share with us this fall to take advantage of this opportunity for us to lead in this space.

As we look toward the future, I see Puget Sound continuing to chart a path to long-term sustainability through innovative curricula, rigorous academics, and deep community ties. Earlier this month, we hosted the Civic Leaders Gathering, bringing together 150 local leaders for an afternoon of building connections and sparking conversations about how to best serve the South Sound community. This fall, I am also looking forward to more opportunities to foster civic engagement, starting with the Pierce County Chamber of Commerce Candidate Forum, which will be held on campus on Sept. 8.

There is no easy path ahead, but we are here because we believe in the transformative power of a liberal arts education, because we know that when we give our students the tools to make a difference, they can reshape the world. Though the path before us is challenging, I am reminded of the resilience of this university and all the obstacles we have overcome in our 137-year history. Together, we remain undaunted and will reach higher and further than ever before. To the heights!

Thank you for being here today and for your commitment to the vital work we share and have in front us. I hope that you’ll join us outside for refreshments and music. Thank you, everyone, who joined us via livestream. Let’s make this a great year!