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Friday Focus: Students!

Sept. 16, 2022

— By Owen Guthrie, vice chancellor for student affairs and enrollment management

It is awesome to have our Troth Yeddha’ campus vibrant with students once again. It is energizing to walk around and see students dining in the Wood Center, walking across Constitution Park between classes, and taking the hike up to or down from the Moore-Bartlett-Skarland complex. I hear faculty and staff still remarking on this daily and we are three weeks into the semester. The positive energy doesn’t seem to be wearing off; it continues to be contagious and rejuvenating! 

What does this momentum look like from a numbers perspective? 

One of the metrics we use to track enrollments is our number of incoming first-time, full-time, four-year (ftftfy) students. This is the traditional baseline for undergraduate enrollments. This fall we welcomed about 354 ftftfy students. (Note that this doesn’t include part-time students, transfer students, dual-enrollment students, Community and Technical College students, or graduate students.) This is the largest incoming class of ftftfy students since 2018. In fact, our incoming 2018 class was exactly the same size and this is up 4 percent over fall 2021. We have steadily gained enrollments for the last two years and we are now 18 percent higher than we experienced during the first COVID fall of 2020. Our Fall ‘22 cohort also includes about 110 students with a 3.8 or higher high school GPA. This is the largest proportion of high-performing ftftfy students in more than a decade. 

Our residence halls on the Troth Yeddha’ campus are nearly full with over 1,000 undergraduate students. This is up about 15 percent over last year. I drove the MBS and Cutler parking lots Tuesday night, just to admire the full parking lots. Even just the tidy rows of students’ cars put a smile on my face. 

Across UAF, we admitted 440 new transfer students. This is up 120 over last fall. Our students are coming to UAF from all 50 states, Washington D.C, Puerto Rico, Guam, and over 32 countries. We have students enrolled from over 250 communities across Alaska. We continue to gain in numbers of underrepresented students but we still have a lot of work to do to close our persistent equity gaps. 

We have over 300 students majoring in College of Rural and Community Development programs, over 150 new applicants and almost 1,200 students taking at least one course from our community campuses (not including CTC). From CTC, we currently have over 1,200 registered for at least one course and over 700 students majoring in a CTC program! 

Through our partnership with edX, UAF courses and programs have attracted over 35,000 learners from over 190 countries! That is a number that is hard to grasp. Kudos to the faculty, researchers, and eCampus staff who are building these experiences and helping UAF share our voice on the world stage!  

All this life, all this energy washing through our doors and into our classrooms (in-person and virtual), it doesn’t just happen by chance. There are teams of people here and across UAF who have put in hundreds and thousands of hours of care and hard work. Years of Strategic Enrollment Planning, hours of calling admitted-not-enrolled students, and days of outreach and recruitment. Here’s to all the faculty and staff across UAF Troth Yeddha' and our rural campuses, and at CTC for bringing this to pass. You have gone above and beyond to connect with and energize potential students. Your work has paid off. It is wonderful to feel this validation and to take heart in the presence of students at UAF. Thank you! 

We do have some challenging numbers too. COVID-19 was especially difficult for our students and our retention of ftftfy students from fall of 2020 to fall of 2021 fell about 4 percent to an all-time low of 65 percent. We need to do better. Our new Student Success Center and the improvements of our services, systems, and pedagogies around this effort will help. Many of you are already deep in this work. Thank you! If you aren’t, here are three easy things you can do that will make a difference:

• If you advise students, help us make Nanook Navigator the standard advising tool for all UAF students. Adopt Nanook Navigator and use it for scheduling advising appointments.
• If you see a student struggling academically, submit a Nanook Navigator Alert.  
• If you think a student may be struggling socially or emotionally, reach out to the Center for Student Rights and Responsibilities. 

Many students are coming out of two years of COVID-hampered educational experiences and are struggling to regain educational momentum, especially in the social and community aspects of learning. On a local and global scale, this is a hard transition. Taking a moment to consider this context for our students, acknowledging the unique impacts of our times on the incoming class, and addressing this intentionally in the design of our curricular and co-curricular activities can make all the difference. Caring and compassion have never been more important at UAF. 

Yes, it feels wonderful to have our students back. It feels great to have them filling the halls and classrooms with life once again. It is also nice to have improving enrollment numbers. This is an important metric for how well we are connecting with the needs of our students. However, it is the unique story of each student that truly inspires. Each story is a quest for personal success and I know you, our staff, and faculty, are continuing to give deeply of yourselves to our students and helping them along their path. Thank you. This is such important work. You don’t need me to tell you this. You know it. Our work is one of the most important things we can collectively do for the challenges of our times – an elixir for the challenges of our moment. 

Fall 2022 is so full of promise. 

Thank you.