 We meet today, near the beginning, of a very important year of transition for our university. Yesterday you received a State of the University report that provides a detailed overview of the current work going on throughout RWU. Very extensive. You can get a really good sense of all that we're doing. During today's talk, I won't repeat its contents, but rather will frame the State of the University with a wider perspective than is normally the case. I do so because I think it is important to place this year in the context of what we have accomplished in the recent past and what we must do together to create a thriving institution positioned for long term success. Despite our lingering sadness over the passing of Don Farrish and concerns about the financial challenges that we face, this is not intended to be a somber message, but rather one of hope. We have come very far since Don Farrish started as president of RWU in 2011. Then the campus was still reeling from the abrupt departure of a previous president and suffering from deep financial strains. Although there were many fine academic programs, the institution as a whole did not have a strong identity. It was perceived to be very similar to its competitors in the region and had a reputation among many, deserved or not, as a second choice university. A look behind the public face revealed even graver problems. Our enrollment management program was in need of improvement. Our academic co-curricular and student services, although excellent in areas, were scattered and uncoordinated. Basic IT services were antiquated and unreliable. The School of Continuing Studies did not deliver as high a quality of education as it might have and had a shrinking base of students. And the university as a whole suffered under deep debt and a weak balance sheet. This is not to say that all was grim or that the student experience was bad. Indeed, our staff and faculty worked very hard despite the obstacles to educate and support our students. And some moves had been made to address the physical concerns. On the whole, however, the university was not positioned for long term success. The last seven years have seen a great deal of positive change. It is worthwhile to briefly describe this so as to remember what we can accomplish by working together. The greatest threat we faced at that time was being too expensive relative to the perceived value of an RWU degree. Our response to the problem was affordable excellence. And in many ways it succeeded in addressing this core threat. Affordability was our key issue because measured by net costs that cost people actually pay. RWU was near the very top of the list of the most expensive universities in the nation. And in fact, there was a list. It was 60 pages long. We were number six on page one. Although it had been feasible to maintain that level of price for a number of years, tremendous new competitive pressures from both public and private universities have made that now impossible. We simply could not have continued to raise our price every year and expected to maintain the size or the quality of our student body. We're now able to move up in price for the entering class as we have done for the last two years and as I will discuss in a few minutes, are reimagining our pricing strategy for the long haul. But we could not have done this without the initial price reset of affordable excellence. Any tuition locker freeze constrains revenue growth. We know this from other schools that have implemented the strategy starting with Muskingham in the 90s and University of the South in the 2000s and many others since. In our model, the lack of incremental revenue was somewhat countered by larger student numbers in those classes of 2015 and 2016. Nonetheless, it required hard work by everyone to match revenues to expenditures each year. We were able to reduce spending in many areas, significantly refinance debt, limit the growth in personnel and use market forces to reduce the cost of purchasing big ticket items like health care and energy. While this was difficult, it was needed to reduce the inefficient expenditure model under which we had been operating. Since then our balance sheet is far stronger. We've reduced our bond debt from a high point of over $150 million by nearly one-third. We've increased our net asset balance by over 60 percent and improved other indicators of fiscal health, the things that bond agencies and outside entities look at to see how we're doing. This is not easy and it required many people across the university to work together in the struggle to make the changes needed to cover the annual increases in salaries and other expenditures. Increasing affordability was necessary, but it was not sufficient in making the case for the value of an RWU education. The price students and their families are willing to pay is determined in large part by the value they perceive. The most important work of the last several years, therefore, was an enriching student's curricular and co-curricular experience and better marketing this along with RWU's many other strengths. The focus on excellence, the second part, the noun and affordable excellence, was guided by the core purpose and values laid down in our visioning project. Our common purpose, serving society through engaged teaching and learning, committed us to doubling down on the pedagogical approach that has always been at the heart of the university. We can now claim with a great deal of confidence that nearly all of our students graduate with a significant semester-long experience as an internship, undergraduate research, global study, and particularly our community partnership program, in that most students have more than one of these experiences. This has a tremendous impact on our admissions, on the perception of the institution, on the perception of value of the institution. Whereas once we were, in fact, seen by many students as a second-choice institution, now nearly 70% of the students who come here see us as their first choice. They're students who are fighting to get in here because they perceive the value of a Roger Williams education. The students are also now supported by CSAS, the Center for Student Academic Success, and the coordination of its work with student life. Together, we have overhauled orientation, the first-year experience, career services, and improved resources for advisors and students, and the delivery of the core program. Indeed, this year is the first time that all entering students will take a common seminar on Roger Williams as part of one of their core courses. We're already seeing that this is providing better support for our class that has just entered, and taking together all of the work that we've done has helped to increase our average retention rate and push our four-year graduation numbers significantly higher. They aren't where we want them yet, but they're higher than they were, and that reflects on our quality as well. Parents, students, outside evaluators are all looking at these benchmarks now. It's not just the reputation of an institution. It's not just how one has seen it in the past. It's not just how good someone's football team is doing. It's how well we are meeting those core indicators of success for our students, and we've improved in all of those areas. Rebounding from a challenging stretch is in the DNA of Roger Williams. You need to look further than the School of Law to see a great comeback story. Like many other law schools out of the nation, it experienced a dramatic drop in enrollment six years ago. Since then, it's recovered much of the lost ground and stabilizes enrollment by adopting the core tenets of affordable excellence and scaling back operations and staff to match its new size. In 2014, it reduced tuition by 18 percent and gave all incoming students a tuition guarantee. It also committed to providing all students with access to experiential education and public interest law. This fostered a recovery of enrollment, and the law school had a budget surplus in 2017 after several years of deficit and a balanced budget in 2018. Many similar schools went through the same experience, but they have not recovered. We're seeing that in our region. We're seeing that nationally. The actions that the law school was able to take were transformative. Likewise, University College, which is our new name back to return to an older name for the School of Continuing Studies, we needed a name that actually covered its much more expansive scope, has dramatically improved the quality of education that it offers and diversified its range of programs. It has expanded student space by building new pipelines and pathways and widened student demographics to ensure its growth and the ability to meet the needs of Rhode Islanders. Over the last several years, UC has seen growth through dual enrollment of high school students. That's our advanced course network. In fact, those high school students are allowed to take college courses while in high school. We have over 400 this year. We have the largest provider in Rhode Island. And also the Bill Gates Fundate Gateway to College, which helps the students who have gotten off track in high school to complete their degree and to complete college credits as well. UC is also working to expand its adult student population and diversify the types of students it serves by partnering with community-based organizations, industry and municipalities. In addition, through its Center for Workforce and Professional Development, University College provides opportunities for men and women who have faced barriers to gain real workforce skills and step directly into promising career paths. Based on our improved reputation, we are now able to raise more money from individual donors and foundations. In 2011, our total fundraising was $1.7 million compared to last year when we raised $5.5 million in commitments from private philanthropy. RW law has been a great success story here as well. It's raised $460,000 last year, including $240,000 for the RW law annual fund. Both are records for the school. We're building a strong culture of philanthropy at RW, and donors generosity has recently made a real impact. For example, the Richard Brady Sailing Center was funded almost entirely from donations, the first time that it ever happened at our university. Donor dollars are also making it possible to build our Seacum Labs building, which began in earnest just this last Monday. We've raised almost $4 million for that project, and we expect to raise another $2 million in the coming year. We've never raised anything like that amount of money for a project on this campus. In addition, there are many smaller projects within the campus communities that you may not know are the result of fundraising. The Mary Tuff White Cultural Center and the Jeremy Warnick Center for Student Accessibility Services in the library represent nearly $700,000 of upgrades, which are primarily based on external funding. The Gabelli Schools has the new Stoico First Fed Financial Services Center and the EI Wegun Center for Advanced Financial Education. $342,000 helped to make those possible. The law school has raised $425,000 towards a half million dollars endowment for the pro bono collaborative. And over the past year, the Hassenfeld Foundation has provided a half a million dollars for programs for community engagement on campus. That includes stipends for students, stipends for faculty members, training. This has been incredibly transformative. That's our capacity now. And it's a capacity that we didn't have in the past. Fallon Hassenfeld, who runs the Hassenfeld Foundation, is a good example. He had refused to even meet with the university several years ago because he was not happy with the experiences he'd had in the past and was not impressed with his reputation. When he saw what we were doing with the Community Partnership Center, he came through with a half a million dollars. He came in yesterday with one of our reports on the way we were using his funds. He was so happy with what we've done. He said, thank you for the tome, meaning the large report. But he was sincerely impressed by the capacity of the institution to use funds in a way that simply wouldn't have been before. With improved reputation matched by stronger marketing and communication strategies, undergraduate recruitment operations are now taking hold. Don't need to look any further than this past weekend to see our admissions efforts are working. Last fall, we had 465 students visit our first open house. This year, it was 572. And we see much larger numbers in our upcoming open houses. There's more interest in this institution. And many of you were at this last open house. In fact, hundreds of you, faculty and staff, worked it. I was there. It was an incredible energy. Students were seeing the kind of institution that they want to come to. And our evaluation that we asked the students to fill it and then said it was overwhelmingly positive. Students want to come here. We're the first choice. None of the students on that chart said, this is the place that now after seeing the open house, I don't want to come. In fact, the great many were more inclined to come because of that. But the takeaway from all of this is that we're offering a better education with better outcomes and we're achieving higher levels of excellence throughout the university. We, all of us, did this relatively quickly. And if we had not risen above the challenges of the past and kept an eye on the future that we're building now, the university would be in a markedly worse position today. Still, you might ask, we've had so much success, why are we facing financial issues now? And we'll talk about that a little bit. Now, despite all of the improvements of the university, along with all of higher, we, along with all of higher education, still face sharp limits on our ability to increase or even maintain our undergraduate enrollment or to enlarge the net revenue that we get from each student. We must do more and be more to compete in a new undergraduate marketplace that has been developing over the last couple of years. We face a declining number of students for the traditional undergraduate program along with increasingly desperate competition among schools to enroll them. The long prophesied decline in student enrollments has fully arrived in the northeastern United States. It began to really see it in earnest in the Midwest. It's here now, particularly in New England, but also throughout the rest of the northeast. Three factors help to explain this. The first is the overall decrease in the number of high school students graduating in the region. This is particularly pronounced in the suburban New England zip codes from which we have drawn most of our students for the Bristol campus. This trend has been growing more pronounced for a few years, and it will continue at least through the 2020s. We see a little bit of a turning point in the mid-2020s, but this is a phrase I don't particularly care for, but it is the new normal for us. Second, as the high school population has decreased, it has also changed in composition, and it's now more diverse than in the past. Significantly so. It thus contains more students from groups that we have been less successful in recruiting and retaining. And third, the relative drop in incomes for the great majority of families further depresses the number of students likely to come to a private university such as ours. Our competitors for the shrinking number of students include many smaller institutions that have been living on a very thin diet for some time. These colleges and universities have struggled to maintain their campuses and attract students, forcing them to cut the quality of their academic programs and underfund operations while also discounting tuition with aggressive scholarship strategies just to enroll enough students to stay solvent, or to stay barely solvent. If you've been on these campuses, you can see it the way as professionals probably see it more than prospective students and their parents. You can see that the buildings are not maintained. They have a tremendous amount of deferred maintenance. That's the external. But you can also see it in programs that are understaffed in the entire feel of the institution. Still, they're able to attract students. Many of them are to the, however, near the point reached by Mount Ida last spring where they can no longer continue. But most will continue to hang on as long as possible, siphoning off enrollments for more robust institutions. I've taken to calling these institutions zombie institutions because they're a hollow shell of what they were. Institutions of a thousand, sometimes 1,500 students, are just in many cases no longer viable, particularly in the current market. On the other hand, they're stronger and more selective in private universities to finding it difficult to attract sufficient numbers of students that fit the academic profile to which they have become accustomed. They are thus competing for freshmen who had been going to less selective institutions, including our own. They're also now actively recruiting transfer students. This is not the old days of genteel enrollment management. People are recruiting everywhere they can because they all face the same competitive pressures. Sure, there are some institutions with very large endowments, but there are very few of them. Most of our competitors have a profile just like us where we're mainly tuition dependent institutions, and we're all competing for the same group of students. But it's not just the privates that are a problem. Most states have sharply decreased the funding for higher education over the last decade. I could say over the last couple of decades and still be accurate, but since the crisis of 2008 states all over the nation here as well have decreased the funding available to universities. The universities are then forced to live on tuition. They need more tuition dollars. Where are they getting those tuition dollars? They are going after students both in state and out of state, often with tuition discounting strategies that are very similar to the kind that we use. They have a different cost structure than what we have. I think classes much larger than this group here, classes of 400, the cost of delivering that education, even if it's not a quality education, is less than what we have. And it is hard for us to compete on price with them. But they need to have the tuition dollars to operate. Some states, including Rhode Island in a modest way in New York in a much more dramatic way, are now offering free tuition. That's kind of counter the idea of getting more tuition dollars, but it's free tuition for certain students. It's not money that they might have spent on increasing the quality of education in their state systems, but it's a political attack to increase support for higher education and support for the politicians who advocate it. It's also taking students away from us. Many now, not really in Rhode Island, but certainly in New York we felt a little bit of a bite last year. If you look at other institutions in New York, particularly the smaller private colleges, they are suffering tremendously from this, particularly those in upstate and less attractive locales. This is something we have to face. The result of these market forces is an intensification of competition for traditional age students that affects both the numbers who choose to attend and the price they're willing to pay. Students and their parents are now fully aware most of them that it is a buyer's market for higher education. This causes a downward pressure on our main source of revenue, which is the traditional program on the Bristol campus. We have revenue of course from the law school, we have revenue of course from UC and from some other auxiliaries, but our main source of revenue is still part of the university that is most hit by these competitive pressures. Until the 2017-2018 year, RWU have been able to end each year with an operating surplus and thus meet the board of trustees mandate for a balanced budget and the terms of the covenants for our bonded debt. You know, we took on a lot of bonded debt about 15 or so years ago. More than 150 million as I said, that's been in many ways built buildings which are important for us, but it's been a drag on us. Those debt, that debt comes with certain covenants and we have to meet certain physical measures in order to maintain those covenants. We ended the past year however by needing to take a small supplemental drawdown from our endowment. This year we confronted decreased revenues stemming from a decline in overall student numbers, a little bit of a not a huge dip, but a little bit of a dip over the last couple of years and a slight increase in our discount rate. We have to compete harder with other institutions. That's what that discount rate increases about. And for more this budget was built on more conservative projections for the revenue from University College and other sources. The same time, we facing the same increased expenditures from wages and other lesser but significant drivers of cost increases. We're caught in this bind. We limited the amount of revenue we can get from our expenditures go up every year. Nonetheless, the University has developed a balanced budget plan for the coming year in part through rigorous efforts to curtail spending and careful steps to increase revenue. We will also need to depend on an additional draw from the endowment that we will not have the luxury of repeating in the near future. I've heard a great deal of concern on campus that the Secum Labs project is the cause of our current budget problems. Let me be clear, that's not the case. Stated earlier, fundraising from industry and university sources provided nearly $4 million for the building. We're going to get another $2 million. About $8 million we have borrowed in bonded debt. That will be repaid through a modest tuition differential for incoming Secum students. This is similar, it will be less then, but similar to the tuition differential for architecture. I have a great deal of confidence that students will in fact pay that. The Secum Labs building will provide the facilities needed for programs that are experiencing significant growth. When completed in late 2019, the facility will provide our engineering, computer science and construction management students with a world-class hands-on learning environment commensurate with outstanding programs reputation. It will also free up space in the existing engineering building available for use by other programs on campus. Investments such as the Secum Labs project are designed to increase enrollment and to a degree offset declines in traditional age student population from other programs. There's also some concern that the purchase of the Livingston property what we've been calling Wind Hill across the street is the cost of the deficit. This is also not the case. RWU did not use any money from the operating budget to purchase the Livingston property. Rather, it used money from its endowment fund based on a review by the Board of Trustees. The land is now considered an asset within our investment portfolio swapping out one set of investments for another. Now opportunities to purchase the significant piece of real estate next to a college campus are rare and they often are not repeated. RWU purchased a 17-acre property to protect and ensure the opportunities for future use. The upcoming master planning process which will begin in earnest next spring will help us with what those uses are, but we had to secure it now or we would never have gotten it again. Now the physical challenges are rather the result of the larger market forces that I just described. They are real and serious but it's important to note that this is not a crisis for Roger Williams on the order of magnitude affecting many of the smaller institutions that I discussed. We can handle this. This is a warning. This is not Mount Ida. Nonetheless and I can't emphasize this strongly enough a new level of strategic planning and action is now required to avoid annual budgetary concerns and to ensure that the university remains on a strong footing in the long run. So what are we going to do? There's no silver bullet available to us. There's no one tweak that's going to make everything okay. We have to work along multiple lines and change aspects across our operations that will yield extra revenue while controlling cost. And I want to be clear. We can't cut our way towards prosperity or win the race by abandoning the steps taken to make the university stronger and more attractive to students. That leads to a spiral down and that's not our intention. We have to make certain cuts now. What we don't intend to cut our way out of this in fact could not. We must continue also to press to make the campus more diverse and inclusive so that it better matches the demographics of the college going population in the coming years. All of the work centers on making the university physically stable while maintaining the personal attention and opportunities for experientially engaged education that RWU students all over the university now enjoy. Four major elements to the tactical and strategic moves that we'll make in the coming year. First is restructuring to reduce salary cost. Second is developing a new pricing and aid strategy to match revenue needs to market demands. Third is increasing enrollment through a more effective recruitment and retention programs. And the fourth is increasing revenue from the university college and from our fundraising programs. Now first, a key component to balancing the current year and future operating budget is carefully, compassionately review all operating divisions to determine where consolidation of functions can be made or where the organizational structure can be modified to eliminate redundancies and achieve greater efficiencies and reduce expenditures. Along with other aggressive efforts to decrease cost and thus avoid having to reduce personnel, these strategic efforts have been underway in various parts of the university for the last few months. Our strategy has been to favor positions for elimination that have the least direct impact on the quality of the student experience. We believe that this is the best way to reduce cost while preserving the most important benefits of the high touch model of education we have at RWU. Staff reductions that have been made although essential and relatively modest are the most painful part of this work as it means saying goodbye to colleagues and friends. Steps have however been taken to support the impacted employees. Most of the reductions made through this process have already occurred. Many of them occurred actually for positions where there were in fact no current occupants. The university will continue as it has over the last several years to adjust staffing to needs of the institution as an ongoing part of our work. This is what institutions always do, what they have to do in a dynamically changing market. We're going to have to be very, very careful to do it going forward. Now over the summer task force of the cabinet and other staff analyzed the current pricing model of the university for its undergraduate tuition. We looked at tuition, we looked at room and board, we looked at fees to determine how to create a model that continues to offer the price point demanded by the market while collecting the revenue necessary for its operations. That key of matching revenue in the future. The analysis included a review of competitor school pricing. We now know, particularly because of our much more advanced ability to analyze data, who our competitors are down to the program level, we understand what our competitors are doing in terms of discounting and their pricing. We're looking at the total price, not just the price of tuition in a very, very sophisticated way. Although we do not yet have a policy to increase the price of tuition as we have for the past couple of years and will likely move away from the four year flat tuition guarantee for future classes. We are now priced well below most of our private competitors and will not move our price up to return to parity with them. We will instead carefully balance price with our competitive advantages to match revenues with expenditures. This analysis and recommendations will be presented at the board meeting of the trustees at the end of October for setting the tuition and the discounting strategy for the incoming class of fall of 19. Affordable excellence and how we are priced in relation to other universities matters greatly in a competitive marketplace. But beyond locking tuition, affordability and support for our students also must come from the overall financial aid strategies. The enrollment management team has been doing a lot of work over the past year and is beginning to implement a financial services model where financial aid appeals, high levels of personalization and helping families through the process are an essential part of the work. Helping parents and students to understand what they owe and understand how to pay it. Being much more dynamic in the way that we deal with people. Being more clear in how tuition frame our bills help people to understand how they can stay here and being more careful in the way that we give aid particularly to students who are already here. We have over the years engaged in what I call a policy of original sin and what that means is student aid, merit aid is based almost entirely on their high school record. The student who might not have had a great high school record would come to extraordinarily well and at the end of their freshman year they would start looking. We actually see this in our attention to other places because they say, you know I've got great grades now, I'm doing well academically, why aren't I getting the kinds of support that other students are getting? And they leave. We can do something to help those students, to help them stay, to make them feel valued here. That makes sense and that's the kind of practices that we're doing. Now pricing and aid policy can only go so far in attracting a sufficient number of students, the number that we need to maintain our undergraduate programs in the Bristol campus. We must match our program offerings to student demand and tailor our recruitment strategy to attracting students to those programs where we have excess capacity. We must also keep students, the students we have through to graduation, that retention and retention. Throughout 2017-2018 academic affairs and enrollment management partnered to launch the academic strategic enrollment management process to improve our offerings and our recruitment strategies. Asim is not just about looking at programs, it's looking about how we recruit for those programs. Asim phase one provided robust data sets at the program level to each academic department and program. In order to assess student demand, looking at those programs out there, but looking at them against the universe of our top competitors for those students. From this collaborative process, enrollment management is now aligning enrollment tactics to optimize recruitment and promotion of our existing programs and open new markets for RWU. We've had programs that have been under enrolled for a while. Now we can target those programs. Our strategy for enrollment is no longer just opening the gates and it's targeting so that we build in enrollments where we have capacity to educate students. From the first phase of this process, I'm excited to share that nearly 30 new programs, majors and minors, have been identified as possibilities and most of them require essentially little or no additional resources. Development of these kinds of offerings is essential to maintaining our ability to attract students. In Asim phase two, the Vice Management and the Acting Provost are working with Deans to prioritize and phase in these new ideas. Now beyond imagining new places to go academically, our Asim process and the really dynamic enrollment management and marketing team that we have has helped us to see new marketing opportunities and recruitment strategies to improve enrollment in our existing programs. Some of the key initiatives that are underway for the fall of 2019 are the following. One important and you've probably seen some evidence of it is a strong focus on digital storytelling. It's increasing the number of profiles we have of faculty, of students, of success, of matching those to the interest of students, of being able to send those out and as we can now in a very, very targeted way to students whom we know will be interested in those programs. It's a much more sophisticated program. It's something we simply weren't able to do even a few years ago and we're now ramping up in what I think is a tremendously effective way. We're also improving the visit experience and we saw a little bit of that on Sunday. We know that the campus visit significantly improves our chances of students enrolling at RWU. 23% of applicants that visit campus overall, 23% end up enrolling here. That's extraordinary. 53% of the students who attend an accepted student day end up enrolling here. 4% of the students who have never been on campus enroll here. It's that group of students, the secret shoppers we call them, the people who just aren't necessarily on our radar. We need to reach out to them. We need to get them to this campus and we need to show them who we are because when we do we tend to win. We're also building transfer pathways and we've been looking at the transfer population for some time. We've not been as successful there as I think we might have been. We had a very interesting experience last year with the late closure of Mount Ida. We were able to reach out and bring about 15 students here from them, but that experience told us something. We were looking at the ways in which we recruit students to our transfer here and that we actually had created a lot of unintentional barriers to those students. And that's unintentional barriers to students from four-year colleges like Mount Ida, but also from two-year institutions. We've rethought that in an initial way and we're going to rethink it even more this year. Our goal for transfer students this year was 60. Not a huge goal, but that's about what we've been getting. We got 95 and only part of those were Mount Ida. We got those by reaching out to the community colleges building transfer pipelines with them and that's community colleges in Rhode Island and Connecticut and Massachusetts, but also some innovative programs like the School of Architecture has partnered with Miami Dade Community College. They have a tremendous two-year architecture and design program there. We've had students come from there before. We've made it much easier for students to transfer from there. There are other things like that we can do to build a strong transfer of population which we need to get those freshmen students. It also makes RWU much more affordable for many students. If they can do two years at a community college and then finish their four years here or say do two years here to finish their degree and then another two years to do their masters in architecture or another year to their masters in the MBA program. We're also I won't go into detail, but launching similar efforts for international students which we really had to do partly because of changes in the policies of Saudi Arabia which is no longer sending students abroad. That was our biggest international population. Other than just the disorder and chaos in the world has prevented us from getting as many international students as we might want. They're still out there and we can still get them, particularly if we can get and support them on campus. Something else that has helped us and I'm just going to use this example of management is our analytics, our ability to gather and understand data. Years ago we weren't able to do that. We did not have accurate data on our students. In many areas we've been able to gather data and analyze it in a whole new way and this is something that we really see in particular in the enrollment division. It's implemented relationship management systems that support graduate, undergraduate, and university college efforts. This is the same kinds of procedures and ways of analyzing data that are used in the larger world of marketing. They're very, very effective. We are in, as I alluded to earlier, kind of an arms race with other institutions and we are now able to win that in part by using data in new ways and that's something that's been contributed to by the enrollment management, by institutional research. The registrar has helped in some really profound ways in many other parts of the university. We're also seeing benefits from that elsewhere. It's powerful. It's the tools that we need to get to this next era and we're seeing enrollment management as a leader there and as a leader which is already showing results from that, already showing success as we saw it in this last year and I think we're really going to see it in this coming year. Now retaining students is as important as they said as recruiting them and it's an essential measure of our success as an institution. We've done a lot of work here over the last several years. Many of you have worked very, very hard to help increase our retention efforts and we've had some great successes over the last year or so. We've had a retention task force and very much like enrollment management has been using data to better understand why students please but more importantly how we can help students to succeed. We've implemented our Civitas program which keeps a close track on students but also lets us to dig down and understand where students are facing problems, where they're facing roadblocks. It also lets us understand how the interventions that we've made succeed or don't succeed. It's a very, very powerful tool and we're already seeing some important results from that but let's think more broadly about our retention program. We've reimagined many parts of the way we bring students into the campus. From that handoff from enrollment management to the academic and student life programs is now much smoother. Orientation has a completely different feel to it. It's much more academically focused as much more student success focused. It is helping students to be retained here. One of our greatest successes for our orientation program is when we hear that the siblings of students who are coming to Roger Williams call up and say I'm having a lousy time at my orientation, how are you? And they end up coming here. In fact had three brothers come here like that. One brother was supposed to come here, the other two hated, the other two institutions what they were seeing came here, saw another orientation and they were hooked. We've also reimagined the whole first year experience in some profound ways and it's much more integrated, much more supportive for our students. I mentioned CSAS, that helps students to stay here and the people who work in CSAS do incredible work to move the dial in that to help students to succeed and they now are doing so in a way that is integrated with student life, with other parts of the institution. This is powerful here and we've already seen some of the impacts and we will see more. Now creating a more diverse and inclusive institution is crucial to both enrollment success and achieving our core mission as a university. To support the same, this year the new division of diversity, equity and inclusion will challenge and expire all campus stakeholders to infuse equity into our university operations while we focus also on fostering retention development and the thriving of minoritized students and employees. We're doing this through the efforts of student affinity centers and employee affinity initiatives and a number of other programs throughout the institution. Now joining the long-term efforts of the school of law and university college traditional undergraduate operations have a renewed sense of urgency to meet the needs of our current students and employees and to be on the par with our peer and I would say competitor institutions, many of whom have a longer history of working with these students. The positive impact will not just be seen in the critically important outcomes for the students and employees but also in having created a culture that enables all students and employees to thrive. Diversity and inclusion is not an afterthought. It actually has to be at the core of what we do as an institution and that's partially because the demographics are changing, the student population out there is changing. It's also and more importantly because it is a stronger and better form of education. Now all the above efforts, the ASEM process improved transfer admissions, better use of analytics, providing great visit experiences, the comprehensive integrated retention program and the diversity and inclusion initiatives will we believe help to achieve the key goal of increasing our undergraduate numbers which will help us to balance our budget. As I said that's the key driver but there's something more important here and I want to say all of those initiatives share something in common. All of them cross offices institutions, schools what we have been successful in in the past several years is working together, working across those lines which you haven't always done, working across the lines of academic affairs and student life, working across the lines of faculty and staff, working across the many offices of institutions. Roger Williams which I think you can get a sense of how complex our operation is by looking at the State of the Union report which we sent out yesterday is a very complex organization, it's easy to be in silos but where we succeed and where we have been successful is when we break down those values, where we work together that's very powerful and that's the tool that's going, that's the tool I think that's the practice that's going to help us as we move forward. We also need to increase revenue in other areas and one of those is university college. We have task forces that are working on this now university studies or university college rather has been transformed over the last six years in which I described earlier and now it has both a high quality program and the ability to offer more programs to different kinds of populations is innovative in its structure and educational approach and it's actually becoming a national model in many ways but has not yet received its full or achieved its full revenue potential. We see a lot of potential there, it's grown certainly in its revenue over the years but it's not there yet. We've invested in it though we had to invest in what had been more or less of a moribund program and to make it into what it is today and to create the foundation much like we're investing in the Seekum Labs building will help us in the future and we're expecting it to pay off this year in a more substantial way and in years in the future. Part of the reason for this is a creation of a stronger administrative structure. We need to build the structure in the University College that we have here but we didn't build there in the early stages of growth and that's going to help that college to succeed. The change in name and the launch of a new website are part of this and more is to come. Early indications are that the UC will meet and likely exceed its revenue targets this year. Another area where we can increase our revenues is in fundraising and as I said we've had successes over the last seven years. We've built a much larger base of donors we've collected more money we've done it all with a smaller staff than we had in 2011 and all of that has been very powerful and impressive. We still have work to do building our alumni donors, building the friends we have in the community and in industry particularly for our professional programs and helping them to find their way to help fund the education that they benefit from or that they are emotionally connected to. Two big projects this year, one is Civic Scholars that raises funds, mostly funds that go straight into the operating budget to have support engaged in experiential learning. We've raised about $2 million for that. It is a $3.5 million project so far of the last couple of years and we expect to really push hard on that this year. The other fundraising program which I've alluded to is the Seacum Labs we need to get that final $2 million but we also need to increase the annual fund. We need to find ways and we've got interesting new technology that's helping us to do this new organizational structures to help us to reach out and connect to our alumni. Most of whom are relatively young. They don't really match the profile of donors in the past and they aren't as connected to the university as they might be and we expect that we will be successful in that this year and going forward. Now, let me conclude. Despite our recent challenges RWU is still strong and is actively moving forward to become a more robust institution capable of thriving in the emerging higher education environment. Very much as our law school did several years ago, that's the position we are now and we have the capability of doing this. We will continue our history of reimagining the university to reflect the changing societies and its educational needs. Recall we began in 1919 in our first iteration. We were the northeastern university Providence Men's Evening College in the YMCA. Very, very small post World War I program helping to train generally men, well men working in the factories to get the kind of education, the completion of high school and college education that they hadn't had an opportunity to complete beforehand. In 1956 we broke away and became Roger Williams University. That was a junior college, the only community college in the state of Rhode Island. Since then we've added the bachelor's program, we've added the Bristol campus, we've added graduate programs, we've added professional programs. We have 60 years of history of innovation. We have built a powerful attractive educationally excellent comprehensive master's university. About 6,500 students if you include all the various permutations of our students. This is something to be proud of but we can also reflect on that. That's something we did and we can do. That's in our DNA. That's who we are. Again, by thanking all of you for the important work that you've done and will do in making our university a place of which we can be proud. It's going to be hard work continuing this dynamic tradition of change in the future. That dynamic change brought us from very, very humble origins to where we are today. I'm proud to serve as interim president this year and I look forward to working with you all and the Board of Trustees to place the university in a great position to move forward when a new president is appointed in the spring. Thank you. We have some time for questions. There are some microphones I believe floating around out there if anyone has a question. Yes. Right, and you should be concerned. This is a national trend and we are higher than others. I'm going to turn it over to John King who there's a microphone somewhere down here because he can speak directly to that issue. I'm going to turn it over to John King who is the chairman of the counseling center staffing. We've actually invested in the counseling center so we have more counselors than we ever have had in the counseling center. And it's important to separate numbers and utilization from the total problems. So in instance, when you make a decision based on how an office or a service is being utilized, there could be a campus that has much to do with the counseling center being active. Most of the referrals for the counseling center come from students to students. They're peer referrals. So when you have a highly functioning counseling center, a highly functioning tutoring center for instance, or health center, you're going to get high numbers because the student satisfaction is there. There are many counseling centers and health centers that are under subscribe. We're doing the feedback and the success from entering that. So we have intentionally invested in both the counseling center and the health services center. We're doing more outreach than we ever have. We have a relationship with an accredited doctoral program where we get interns and postdocs. They provide a very rich added layer of counseling. So we're actually very proud of what the counseling center is doing. And more utilization of the counseling center. Okay, if you have any questions that you like me or any members of the cabinet to answer privately, just so you know our emails, send them to us. Our goal this year is to be open and communicative. That's why we develop such a detailed state of the university document. And as I said, we work best when we collaborate. We achieve most when we work and that's what's going to get us through this next year and beyond. Thank you very much.