May 2016
Dear Alumni and Friends,
As Commencement time approaches, we’ve had another busy month at your University.
We’ve just concluded our most successful admissions campaign ever, receiving a record number of applications, more than 48,000. This coming fall, Purdue will welcome our largest freshman class since 2008, up about five percent from the fall 2015 freshman class, and our most academically prepared ever.
The number and proportion of Hoosier students is also projected to be higher than recent years. The same is true for underrepresented minority students.
International students, on the other hand, will make up about 13-14% of the freshman class this fall, down from 15.6% last year, and will represent a wider swath of our global population, including an increase in students from India and South America.
Zika Breakthrough
This spring, a team of researchers in our Structural Biology group made the exciting announcement that they have mapped the structure of the Zika virus for the first time.
This talented team, led by Dr. Richard Kuhn and Dr. Michael Rossmann, solved a very difficult puzzle in a remarkably short period of time. Their breakthrough illustrates not only the importance of basic research to the betterment of human health, but also its nimbleness in quickly addressing a pressing global concern. Significantly, it also opens the doors more widely for those working to develop vaccines and treatments for this devastating virus by providing a literal map to guide their way.
Their discovery has been featured by more than 700 media outlets globally, reflecting brightly on the great work all our researchers do at Purdue. I am glad to see their team’s hard work recognized so widely, and I congratulate Dr. Rossmann and Dr. Kuhn again on their tremendous success.
Competency-Based Education
We also announced last month that formal approval has been granted for the first competency-based degree program in the U.S., Purdue’s degree in Transdisciplinary Studies in Technology, which will be offered through the Purdue Polytechnic Institute beginning this fall.
In the competency-based education model, a skills-based study plan is created around the student rather than around a traditional academic schedule. Students work at their own pace through the program and, rather than focusing on traditional credit hours earned, come away with a proven skill set that is meaningful to employers in today’s business world.
Purdue Polytechnic Indianapolis High School
Purdue is making progress on our ambitious venture to start a high school in inner-city Indianapolis with the goal of building a pipeline for more minority, low-income and first generation students interested in STEM fields to attend college at Purdue-West Lafayette.
We took a big step forward in choosing Scott Bess as the first head of the Purdue Polytechnic Indianapolis High School. Scott is widely recognized for building a successful network of charter schools in Indianapolis that serve the same population we are targeting. He will take up his duties on July 5, in preparation for the school’s official opening in August 2017.
Back A Boiler
We are also officially the first major research university in the country to offer income share agreements (ISAs) as an alternative funding model to the Federal PLUS and private student loans, an announcement that has also garnered quite a lot of national media attention.
Back a Boiler, as we’re calling our ISA fund, is designed to offer students and their families a potentially less expensive option in which a student receives education funding in exchange for an agreed-upon percentage of post-graduation income over a standard payment term of nine years or less. An ISA has no principal balance or interest, so its payments adjust with the student's income over the life of the contract and don't begin until the student is employed at a salary agreed upon at the outset. For the right students, it’s an opportunity to receive an education without worrying about interest rates or decades of student loan payments.
Starting next academic year Back a Boiler will be available to rising Purdue juniors and seniors.
Questions from Alumni
This is your chance to have your questions about what’s happening at your University answered directly. Send me your questions for a future letter at purduepresident@purdue.edu.
- “What is being done to reduce Purdue’s dropout rate, especially among freshmen, and improve the overall graduation rate?”
Improving student retention and graduation rates is a big part of Purdue’s promise to deliver higher education at the highest proven value, and we’ve invested significantly in the programs and resources proven to help increase student success.
Some of our major investments include the Summer Start program, designed to help low-income and first-generation students adapt to the rigors of college-level work before the fall semester starts; Purdue Promise, a mentoring and scholarship program for low-income Hoosier students; Horizons, a mentoring program for first-generation and low-income students; and an expansive list of tutoring and supplemental instruction programs available to all students.
We’re also working to find the most effective ways to teach students, including ideas like Purdue’s IMPACT classrooms that promote a student-centered learning environment in which the professor talks less and teaches more — an idea for which we received a prestigious First In the World Grant from the Department of Education to study the effectiveness of so-called active learning classrooms.
Likewise, Purdue is taking the lead in researching several types of student success programs as part of the University Innovation Alliance, a group of a group of research universities dedicated to improving support services and student mentoring so that more students succeed in college and, most importantly, in their careers after they graduate. - “Is Purdue intentionally enrolling more international and out-of-state students in order to help fund the tuition freeze?”
Absolutely not. We’ve been able to hold tuition steady at 2012-13 levels thanks primarily to series of administrative efficiencies proposed and enacted by individual offices and departments across campus, as well as, at the university level, modernizing our operations, focusing on our core mission and negotiating certain operations contracts more aggressively.
It’s true that the strong demand for a Purdue education from out-of-state students helps us keep tuition lower for Hoosiers, but that is a positive byproduct and not a motive for the mix of enrollees we have chosen.
Awards and Recognitions
Finally, congratulations to College of Engineering assistant professor Arezoo Adekani and associate professor Milind Kulkarni, who recently received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from President Obama, and to our dean of library science James Mullins who received the Hugh C. Atkinson Memorial Award from the American Library Association.
Sincerely,
Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr.
President