By Chelsea Zhao
Staff Writer
DU approved a funding of up to $1.5 million to stimulate fall ’23 and ’24 enrollment.
According to an email from President Glena Temple sent to faculty and staff, the fund comes from a combination of philanthropic revenue, quasi endowment and the proceeds from the sale of Priory campus.
According to Mark Titzer, vice president for finance and administration, Dominican received a one-time estate gift of $1.2 million.
According to Titzer, the President’s Cabinet and Dean’s team met to identify “readily available opportunities” and identified seven to eight initiatives to drive “enrollment growth with very little investment in each of those.”
Among the strategies this $1.5 million funding will realize are goals of enrollment and marketing: recruitment for veterans, international students, and those from western suburbs; marketing fund for graduate programs; partnership between graduate and undergraduate levels; new programs to elevate the DU brand; and faculty engagement in enrollment strategies.
“The intention is to select a few enrollment driving opportunities that require some investment, with the hope that these will grow enrollments and pay back the investment in the very near term,” Titzer said.
Additionally, the fund will finance the launch of a new athletic program in stunt and cheer.
Titzer said that the new stunt and cheer program is an affordable potential to attract new students who might not have considered Dominican before.
“Some of what we are doing here you can characterize as quick-wins: small investments for increased enrollments,” Titzer said. “We believe that stunt and cheer, we can add without expanding our existing facilities, that’s obviously a multi-year expensive process.”
The recruitment strategies through marketing and the new stunt and cheer, according to Titzer, will help university grow thanks to this one-time gift.
“So it’s the timing of a new president, new energy, and new ideas, though many of these ideas aren’t, you know, brand-new” Titzer said. “And the opportunity to invest some monies that are new, which are from this generous state gift.”
