2009 Fall Convocation Speech - Growth
Speech Segments
‘Growth’ Video Transcript
Let me move to growth, particularly enrollment growth. I asked the cabinet, what do you think I ought to talk about today? And a couple people said the Growth Agenda. You know, talk about the Growth Agenda.
Do I support it? I do support it. I think it’s a great idea. The question is, is it dead or alive? Well it’s alive… but in a coma I think. How do you move forward with a Growth Agenda in this environment? But we will not forget it. We do need to grow and the Growth Agenda was a great idea. It still is a great idea. The economy will come back.
We need to make sure our strategic enrollment plan is just right. And if it is, it will help us grow. There is a demand for what we offer. So it’s not that we lack students. We have more people who want to come here. We need to determine how we can do that.
To me, the most likely scenario today, as I talk about it, is that we hold FTEs relatively stable because that relates directly to the number of students and classes. But we increase the headcount. There’s nothing magic about keeping FTEs small, increasing it, decreasing headcount, increasing it. But it does help when we can say that we’ve gone from 6,200 headcount to 6,300 headcount. That’s growth. Going from 6,200 to 6,199 is terrible in the eyes of a lot of people.
A story: I was testifying in front of a senate committee in Georgia, trying to garner support for a new building on my campus. And we had had eight years of growth, six of those years, five or six of those years, we averaged 9 percent growth per year in enrollment. The year I had to stand up in front of the sub-committee, we went down about a half a percent. And the senator who was running this interrupted me before I got my first sentence out, and said, isn’t it true President Harden that you had a decreasing enrollment this year?
After eight years of tremendous growth, the one semester we went down a half a percent, that’s when I got hit on it. So believe me, when you decline in enrollment, it’s a disaster. We don’t want that to happen. And I don’t think we have to. But are we going to hit 6,200 right on the nose every semester? We can’t. That takes more than all of us combined to figure out how to manipulate and maneuver students in and out of programs and enrollments to end up at 6,200 all the time. So we’re going to have to inch up a little bit. The alternative is we’ll have years and semesters when we will inch down. That’s not acceptable.
We do need to develop new ways to grow, to accommodate additional students. There are needs. Our job is to meet the higher education needs of this region.
There are needs we are not meeting, but let me assure you, I am listening. I have heard what many of you have said. And I have heard the concerns specifically regarding growth and the absence of additional state funding. Sort of, “we’ve tried that before and we got burned.” I respect that. Nonetheless, we’re going to need to find ways to grow to a certain point anyway.