By Betsy Carreño and Angel Dominguez
The Dominican Star met with President Glena Temple and Chief Financial Officer, Mark Titzer, to discuss pressing questions that students and faculty have had across the semester.
Q.How does it feel to be president of DU
A. TEMPLE: It’s a tremendous honor, absolutely. Every day is an honor and when I came in I said it’s a dream job because of the mission and the students and the work we do, and it’s still that same thing. Now that I’m in my fourth year I still believe that.
Even when the work’s hard, with the quote of the sisters, “We go where the work is great and difficult,” and no doubt, the work can be difficult. Great and difficult, but I still love being here and doing the work we’re doing as a community. It’s not just about me. It’s the work we’re all doing.
Q.When it comes specifically to freshman enrollment, what is the university doing to match the retention rate, whether it’s from fall to spring or from freshman year to sophomore year?
A. TEMPLE: We’re pleased that we have seen fairly steady retention rates, as you mentioned, and freshman to sophomore retention rates. I really attribute that to, one, our amazing students coming in, but two, the work of the SSE unit and the faculty. [They] have taken great strides for systems that help identify students who might need some extra support in whatever method they’re in. So we’ve been able to scale those, respond to those student needs in a similar way, and I think that comes from the success we knew worked.
We had classes of four to five hundred and we’ve been able to continue those efforts with the larger class, but we can’t speak enough to the great gifts and attributes our students bring to help achieve those retention rates.
TITZER: Equally or even more important to maintain high levels of retention as it is high levels of incoming students. We don’t want to grow the incoming population just to lose those students down the line. So I think making sure that we’re admitting students who are interested and equipped to succeed here and then helping them out however we can through faculty advice, through success engagement advice, [through] on-campus jobs, through embedding career, [and] career education throughout, the four years here.
TEMPLE: [Also] engagement activities, like the STAR. We know that’s also important, that people find people to be part of within community, whether that’s the STAR, whether that’s, campus ministry, whether that’s an athletic team. We also know that’s an important factor in retention methods as well. But, I think it’s just trying to grow what we know works.
Q. One thing that a lot of students were concerned with was the dorms and the spacing. There were a number of students who were taking classes in River Forest but were placed on the Pilsen campus. Is the goal to have students who are taking classes from River Forest, also be in the Pilsen campus?
A. TEMPLE: Well, this fall we had extra capacity on the Pilsen campus, so we were able to provide that as an option. We might not have that in the future as the Pilsen campus grows but we’re trying to provide housing for students too, for those who wanted an on-campus experience through that route. So we have a limited number of spaces on the River Forest campus and, this year we had more students that wanted to live on campus than we had spots for unfortunately.
A good problem from the institution’s perspective, but not good for students who weren’t able to get the housing there. So we don’t have any immediate solutions to that gap but certainly, we are keeping our eyes and ears open as to what might be ways that we might be able to address that. But we don’t anticipate, I don’t think, a waitlist into the spring semester.
TITZER: Yeah, we usually have some attrition students who leave between fall and spring. Or people who graduate in December, or who transfer in the spring. But, we’ve always been about a 75 [to] 25 commuter resident campus. As Glenna said, in this year we had fewer students enrolled for the Associates program than we had space there, so we gave an option to some of the students here at River Forest.
But that’s not something I think, to Glennon’s point, will continue because the intent would be to have a full dorm in Pilsen for that associate’s program and as many students here that we can house and the rest commute to River Forest.
TEMPLE: This is a relatively new problem for us to try to work through.
TITZER: It’s a good problem to have, to have too much demand than supply.
Q. There were students in River Forest who want more shuttle times options in order to get to campus. Once the maximum number of students is reached in the Pilsen campus, does that also guarantee an increase in shuttle times for going from the Pilsen Campus to the River Forest Campus?
A.TEMPLE: It’s something we will certainly listen to and look at.
TITZER: I think if both of these campuses are working independently then there’s less of a need for shuttle service back and forth. The 80 or so students who are there on the Pilsen campus should be doing their work there, living here, doing city as campus, etc.
And so, the students here [might go] once a week or something, but it really shouldn’t be a daily or multiple times a day shuttle service need. But we’re just going to have to sort of adjust and adjust and listen to the students.
TEMPLE: [The students] also got public transportation cards as well with the ability to be able to come and go, [we can] ask them if that’s a valued thing. These will just be some of the questions.
TITZER: I think there’s just things we have to kind of figure out over time and find the most efficient way to move people around.
Speaking on how the Pilsen campus looks:
A. TEMPLE: I love the way that that works. The resource building with the classrooms and how it looks like Dominican. The, and we’re going to try to take some of that signage and bring it here so that it’s consistent across the campuses.
I [also] love the Dominican University on three sides of the building that lights up at night. I think that’s great for our reputation and brand. So there’s, there’s a lot of good and I think we are just compelled to keep staying in conversation with the students about what they need, and how we try to meet that.
Q. Is the goal then with the Pilsen campus and the River Forest campus to keep them more independent or to be able to bridge them more together?
A.TEMPLE: Well the intent is to have a strong cohort feel among our associate students in the Pilsen campus, but they are Dominican university students.
We are one university and we want to slowly build the sense of belonging on the River Forest campus for those students as well. The goal [is] that those who want to will continue and get their bachelor’s degree here. So there’ll be some intentional efforts to get the students involved on the River Forest campus and make sure they understand they can come to the library and they can come to the clubs and activities.
But we do want to form a strong bond and a strong sense of community in the Pilsen campus that doesn’t exclude them from feeling welcomed and part of this community as well, not necessarily completely seamless that there isn’t that sense of community built in the associate campus.
So I think you can try to do both, is my answer to you. We can build community and build close-knit groups, and make sure that the students from the Pilsen campus feel a sense of belonging on this campus through intentionally including and encouraging them to be part of activities.
TITZER: That’s more eloquently said than what I was trying to say. I don’t think the intent is to have Pilsen just be a dorm where there’s a daily shuttle back and forth, I mean, logistically, that’s just not all that great. So the amount of travel and use of resources back and forth, what is the right frequency or cadence of that, I think we’ll figure out over time. I think the rub that we’re having is some of the River Forest-based bachelor’s degree students who’ve opted to live there.
That’s not something that we’re kind of expecting to continue where they need daily transportation back and forth. That’s kind of what I meant by them being separate experiences on a day-to-day basis.
TEMPLE: On a day-to-day basis, the goal was never to have that just be a dorm for the rotor four and stop the operations. We’ve been trying to set things up so that isn’t the approach because that’s nine miles away in Chicago traffic [and that] would make that a little interesting.
TITZER: So we had [more] vacancy there and more demand here. It made sense to say if you want, you can live there and we’ll facilitate the travel.
And that’s been not perfect. But it was an unexpected kind of year one. Too much demand here, not as much as we had planned there, so it creates some day-to-day logistical challenges.
TEMPLE: Another part of the design for the campus in Pilsen was to build on the beautiful assets that exist in Pilsen and surrounding neighborhoods.
We know there are tremendous resources through our partners in the Pilsen campus that can help support our students in retention as we’re trying all the points of this conversation together.
Being the drivers forward, it’s just going to be a slightly different approach and to respond to our community partners, respond to the community, and respond to what the students need. But we’re learning, we’re learning, we’re learning, [and] we’re learning from the students, we’re learning from the community and I think that’s the most important thing, [to] keep listening, keep learning, and when possible adjust.
Q. As far as admissions because the enrollment is increasing does that affect how selective the university is? Will tuition go up? How does that affect students?
A.TEMPLE: Our admission criteria haven’t changed. We went ACT optional a few years back and that hasn’t changed. The simpler answer to the question is we haven’t changed our admission criteria at this moment in time.
I can’t necessarily predict forever that will be the case. I think it’s looking at a yearly basis and looking at who succeeds and who doesn’t on both campuses and how do we help ensure that the students who come are provided [with] the support to succeed.
Just like there has been [in] the last couple of years an inflationary increase in price point, we’re not predicting a big jump just because there’s more demand.
TITZER: I think we might see earlier cutoffs in the applications. The deadlines of May 1st or June 1st might be earlier than what we’ve had rolling emissions through the summer. It’s a good problem to have more demand than we can supply but it has potential consequences.
Is it harder to get in? Is it more expensive? Can everybody come if they want to? Well, not if a thousand people want to come, so I think we’re kind of wrestling with some of this increased demand. It’s a good problem to have, but we don’t want to make the place more exclusive or expensive. That’s not really in keeping with our mission either. I think you’ll see small shifts over time and we’re also predicting high school graduates to sort of fall off over the future. The demographics are intending [for it] to fall off, so then maybe this surge that we’re seeing will also level off. Predicting exactly how many students you can service in any given year is a tricky business, unless you’re super selective and only [taking] 500 of the smartest.
TEMPLE: The Sisters came to Chicago, brought Dominican from Wisconsin to Chicago to help meet the emerging needs of the city. So your question of will we continue to get more elite or hard to get into, that would, and Mark said this nicely, it wouldn’t be fitting with who we are as a campus, [and] with what our mission is.
TITZER: [points to the theatre department article]
Similarly, I can’t wait to read this whole article, but it’s always been our mission to infuse the fine arts in all that we do. Is that what students want to consume and want to study and want to pursue or how many of them do? How do you be more pre-professional, and embed career prep into the curriculum but not lose this?
It’s just [the] times, they are changing and how do you save something like this or can it be vibrant for a subset of the population or maybe as an elective? It’s just one of these sorts of individual things that creates worry or consternation as our student population and [the] cost of education and need to get a job to pay that back. So [I think] the sisters, administrators, [and] faculty express concern about how do you keep the arts when more and more students maybe want the nursing degree. Can you have both?
TEMPLE: The sisters who sometimes in making hard decisions will say to me, “You have to keep our values and our mission at the heart, but you also have to respond to the times and the needs,” and so, it’s not that you stay the same. It’s that you try to live that mission and value in the time that you’re in, and that’s hard, to do that work, but how I try to make decisions is with that advice and frame from the sisters in these times.
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