By: Philippe Buteau/News Director
After presenting the outcomes of the University’s 2010-2011 goals, University President Mark Rosenberg laid out the goals for the 2011-2012 academic year.
In addition to increasing percentages and dollar figures University-wide, this year’s goals also included completing a plan to acquire the land the Miami-Dade County Youth Fair uses.
“I believe this year we can get it done,” Rosenberg said during the Sept. 8 meeting. He added the 86 acres the fair takes place on from March 15 to April 1 would be a “game changer” for the University.
In terms of dollar figures, the University wants to increase their “philanthropic revenue,” or donations made to it, to $37 million – a six percent increase from the previous year.
The total fund raising goal for the University is $750 million.
Rosenberg said during an interview with Student Media in August the University has not met its fund raising goal for the last two years.
In 2010-2011 the University raised about $35 million and had a $57 million goal, and the year prior raised about $35 million with a $45 million goal.
However, Rosenberg does not want to lower the end goal of $750 million.
“It’s okay to have high targets. It’s okay to have high expectations,” Rosenberg said in the August interview. “And we’re not going to scale that back.”
The board chair on the other hand disagrees.
“Considering the economic times we’re in I think we [the University] are unrealistic about our fund raising goals,” said Albert Maury, chair of the Board of Trustees, during the meeting.
Apart from dollars the University also wants to improve student retention rate, the number of students who re-enroll from one semester to the next.
The retention rate for first to second year students in 2010-2011 went from 84 to 85 percent.
While not much of an increase it did meet the University’s goal for that year.
For the 2011-2012 year, the University wants to improve the retention rate by one percent for all student levels – from first to second year students to third to fourth year.
Another goal, in line with the University’s Strategic Plan, is to add an additional 2,000 students a year to the total enrollment until it reaches 60,000 students.
But the 2011-2012 year saw not only 2,000, but 3,555 extra students.
If retention improves as the University hopes and as the Strategic Plan continues, more professors will have to be brought on to lower the student to faculty ratio, which in 2010-2011 increased from 26-to-1 to 27-to-1.
However, in the same year the University hired 46 new faculty members.
But with a goal of hiring 47 additional faculty members, Rosenberg wants to come up with a faster and better process to hire them.
He said the searching and interviewing of new faculty could take up to 10 months to hire just one new professor.
The task of coming up with a better process fell to Douglas Wartzok, University provost and executive vice president.
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