Butler Reception Room The Xavierite
Saint Xavier University’s Interim President Rebecca Sherrick, Ph.D. held a Town Hall on Thursday, Oct. 19 to openly discuss university issues such as retention rates, financials, academics, and strategic initiatives. An update to the presidential search was also provided.
Sherrick opened by highlighting “three broad initiatives” that she and other members of the Saint Xavier community are going to be working toward this academic year.
The first initiative discussed was meeting the immediate needs of the students, starting with the Student Satisfaction Inventory (SSI).
Natalie Page, Ed.D. shared retention data with attendees followed by three initiatives on how Saint Xavier is working on strengthening retention and improving student success and inclusion.
She also provided retention data for the university, showing retention rates dropped in years past but has begun to rebound in recent years. Page noted that creating student success initiatives is imperative to continuing to improve retention.
The first initiative was assigning a first year SUCCESS coach and a peer SUCCESS mentor to each of the 763 freshmen. Page shared that students are “ten times more successful” if they have good measures in their first semester in college, making them more likely to graduate.
Another initiative, completed before the start of the school year, was merging The Office of Student Support with the Learning Center, creating the Center for Learning and Student Support, run by Joanna Nemeh, Ph,D.
The final initiative Page detailed was the launching of the EAB Navigate system. Navigate’s purpose is to improve retention rates by keeping students connected with progress tracking, giving access to resources, and monitoring involvement.
Further, Sherrick wants to answer as many questions about past university decisions as possible before her time as Interim President is over.
To do this, a “confidential group” of Saint Xavier employees has been brought together and will be given unrestricted access to all data and material outside of personnel information.
Alexander King Ph.D. is leading the efforts of this group, stating the goal is to answer and ask any questions they can to clear the air on past decisions.
A main outcome of this task force, King said, would be answering questions regarding university finances, specifically updating financial documents on the SXU website to provide transparency.
King also stated that bringing together this group of people will “create transparency where there wasn’t any” and help return Saint Xavier to its “prior form.”
Sherrick also pointed to academic advising and career improvement as being areas needing major improvement. To help these areas, Saint Xavier would look at bettering the adult and graduate markets by offering new products and improving existing programs to students.
Provost Saib Othman, Ph.D. delineated ideas the university is considering to better the academics at SXU. Othman mentioned a possibility for strengthening the Computer Science and Business programs would be by adding new tracks for students to study.
He indicated five “lucrative” programs which would be most likely to be added: Supply Chain Management, Human Resources, Health Care Management, Web Design, and Game Design.
The Provost also spoke about diversifying the graduate programs at the university and growing enrollment in existing programs. He expressed interest in adding “4+1” masters programs in Psychology and Social Work because they are in high demand.
Sherrick reported in order to pay for all of this, the university would take last year’s surplus and create a strategic initiative fund and build it up to $3 million. The university would have to identify potential trustees for building out of the annual fund and annual giving programs.
Interim Chief of University Advancement, Amy Amason, will be leading the strategic initiative fund.
Something Amason has planned on bringing back to Saint Xavier this academic year is an SXU magazine. She said the goal is to start bringing back certain things the university used to do, and doing them better.
There would be 5,000 printed copies of the magazine mailed out to various trustees, costing a total of $13,000. The magazine would provide updates of the university to keep people informed. There would also be a digital version available.
Sherrick was asked if the current freshman class being the largest in school history would bring in additional revenue. She said the class size does not equate to an increase in revenue because of the amount of discounts students receive to attend.
Sherrick made it clear all their points would have to be hit to reach these goals and in order to do all this, “we would have to change some of our ways of doing business” to be successful.
Erin Mueller, Chief of Staff, provided the update on the presidential search, which officially began on Sep. 22 of this year. She said the university is ahead of schedule in their search and they are being assisted by The Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB).
The first round of applicants closes Nov. 6 with the second round set to start on Nov. 20 to finalize the in-person search.
Mueller said the goal is to make a final offer before the end of the Spring semester but, with AGB’s guidance, the search could be done by the end of January at the earliest.
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