December 17, 2005

Purdue University President Martin C. Jischke made these remarks Saturday (December 17) during a meeting of the Purdue University Board of Trustees.

President Jischke's comments to the board of trustees

Good morning.

The campus is quiet this morning as we begin our semester break. But there has been a tremendous amount of activity on campus the past several weeks. And tomorrow will be a very exciting day for many Boilermaker families.

In West Lafayette, we will be celebrating commencement during two ceremonies on Sunday. Also, on Tuesday, Dec. 20, we will celebrate commencement on our Purdue Calumet campus.

In West Lafayette this weekend there are 2,942 candidates for degrees. Of those candidates, 2,135 are undergraduates. Eight hundred are graduate students and seven are professional candidates.

At Purdue Calumet, there are 667 candidates for degrees ranging from associate's to master's degrees.

Congratulations to all of these students and their families. Commencement is a celebration of success and accomplishing goals. It is truly a happy time not only for our students and their families but for our faculty and staff.

As President of Purdue, I take particular joy in seeing these students fulfill their dreams, knowing they have received among the best educations available anywhere in the world. We now welcome our graduates to their continuing participation in the lifelong Boilermaker family.

Our progress in Discovery Park continues.

We have opened the Birck and Bindley centers this fall. We are getting construction under way on our $12.4 million Mann Hall.

Mann Hall will home to the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering, which has tremendous potential to impact our state and nation. By 2013, U.S. health care spending is projected to reach $3.4 trillion, or 18.4 percent of Gross Domestic Product.

This is an issue that must be addressed or its impact on lives and the economy will be enormous in the years ahead. The Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering is a research initiative focusing on ways to improve health care delivery and reduce costs.

I am very pleased to tell you we now have a director for this important work. Steven Witz is taking over leadership of the Regenstrief Center in mid-January.

For the past three years he has been president at St. Patrick Hospital and Health Center in Missoula, Montana. Before taking the helm at St. Patrick's, he was senior vice president and chief operation officer at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics in Madison.

A native of Minnesota, Steven Witz has 26 years of experience in hospital administration. He has held administrative roles at the University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City and Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, Illinois. He also taught health administration at the University of Minnesota and the University of Utah College of Pharmacy, and public administration at Brigham Young University.

In Steven Witz, Purdue and the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering are getting a proven leader with nearly three decades of experience in America's health care system. He is ideally suited to lead this center in realizing its ultimate mission to minimize costs, improve service and re-engineer health care delivery in America.

Joe Pekny, director of the e-Enterprise Center and a professor of chemical engineering, has been acting director of the Regenstrief Center since it was launched at Purdue in January. We appreciate everything he is doing with this important effort.

At Regenstrief, Purdue experts are applying the principles of technology, engineering, supply chain management and more to health care delivery. Initial areas of research have included improving the safety and efficiency of patient care; providing more efficient deployment of physicians, nurses and other health care personnel; and better coordinating inpatient and outpatient treatment.

Literally every college at Purdue is involved in Regenstrief activities.

Last April, Regenstrief and Indianapolis-based St. Vincent Health, which operates 16 Indiana hospitals, began a strategic partnership that is developing projects in several areas. This is very exciting work.

Finally, earlier this month I had an opportunity to participate in the National Summit on Competitiveness at the Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C.

This summit addressed the impact of four converging trends in our nation: first, declining numbers of U.S. graduates in engineering and the physical sciences; second, declining federal research support for engineering and the physical sciences; third, declining international enrollment at American universities; and fourth, increasing research funding and STEM enrollments at universities in other nations.

Simply put, we have a very serious shortage of people in science and engineering in this nation. In four years, 90 percent of all engineers and scientists in the world will live in Asia.

At a time when science, engineering and technology hold enormous promise, the number of American students entering these fields is declining. At the same time, the number of students entering these fields in other nations is on the rise.

What are we experiencing?

Purdue had the first computer science program in the nation. Undergraduate enrollment in that program has dropped 47 percent in four years.

Purdue is a top 10 engineering college. Every year applications to our engineering graduate programs decline another 25 to 30 percent.

In recent years the shortfall of U.S. students and workers in science and engineering has been met by internationals who studied in the U.S. and joined our work force.

Where would we be without them?

Thirty percent of Purdue faculty members are foreign-born – including 47.9 percent of our engineering and science faculty. In science alone, 52.3 percent of the faculty members were born outside the United States.

In a post-9/11 world, the way people in other nations perceive us, coupled with our immigration policies, is negatively impacting international enrollment and the U.S. international work force.

U.S. international enrollment dropped 1.3 percent last year and 2.4 percent the year before after many years of steady growth. Purdue had 4,921 international students enrolled in the 2004-05 academic year, down from the 2003-04 all-time high of 5,094.

The number of international students enrolled at Purdue this fall is 4,831.

In international enrollment, Purdue continues to rank second in the nation among all public institutions, behind the University of Illinois. We rank third in the nation among all institutions, behind the University of Southern California and the University of Illinois.

U.S. universities are facing enormous competition for students from Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Canada.

I have been to India and China in the past year to see the tremendous advancements in their universities and research. They are not only keeping more of their own students, they are attracting international students from throughout Asia and even Europe.

These nations that historically have sent us the largest number of international students are now competing to bring the best in the world to their universities. And more international students who studied in the U.S. are returning to their home countries to pursue careers.

In what author and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has described as a world made flat by technology, you don't have to live in the U.S. to work for a company such as Microsoft anymore.

Purdue and other universities have implemented programs to address all of these challenges. But clearly a national effort is needed. There will be quite a bit more discussion about this in 2006 as we prepare to move forward with national initiatives.

The United States is still the world leader in science, engineering and technology. We have the capability to continue that leadership.

What we need today is a national consensus to address the enormous potentials of this exciting, new century. Higher education will be at the center of this effort.

It is has been a very exciting semester at Purdue.

Our Campaign for Purdue has now reached $1.275 billion. Thank you for all you have done.

We are proceeding toward our strategic plan vision for preeminence.

As always, the only thing more exciting that everything we have already accomplished is what we are planning next.

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