Dear Colleagues,
Fall 2023 is here! Let me give you a bit of a preview of what you can expect for this forthcoming fall semester.
We have a great class of new undergraduates. While exact numbers will fluctuate until the 12th class day, we expect approximately 3,350 students. This cohort of students has more Texans than last year and is one of the most diverse classes of undergraduates in Baylor's history. We will also be welcoming approximately 125 new faculty members. Not only is this an unusually talented and mission-committed cohort of faculty, but they also are the most diverse cohort of new faculty at Baylor.
This will be our first class of undergraduate students to have the opportunity provided by the Baylor Benefit program. This program provides full tuition to students coming from families that make $50K or less annually. We are working to continue to improve the graduation and retention of all our students, especially those with the most financial challenges. Overall, we anticipate Baylor’s highest-ever first-year retention rates and four-year graduation rates. While this is great news, there is still a lot of room for improvement in comparison to our peer institutions.
In the past, outcome measures such as graduation and retention rates counted as 40% of the score for US News and World Report Rankings. We have been notified that the methodology for these rankings has changed. We will know more about these changes after they have been released in late September. We expect that these outcome measures will be more important in the rankings formula and that there will be new measures of social mobility. This simply means the work we are now doing is increasingly important, not solely for the rankings but foremost for our students.
This fall, we will also launch a new electronic research administration system, known as CARA (Compliance And Research Administration). CARA will be important for the efficient management of external grants as well as for providing more robust support for federally compliant research processes. Outside activities are expected at a research institution, and transparency in reporting is paramount to protecting both individual faculty/staff and the university in a rapidly changing compliance landscape. Along with the new system, we will also be implementing new policies that will provide clearer guidance on the reporting of outside activities. This policy will apply to everyone, regardless of whether they receive external funding.
Make sure you are available when your unit is scheduled for a listening session with members of the Strategic Planning Committee (SPG). Updates on this process, including opportunities to submit white papers, are available on the SPG website.
See you soon!
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