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Office of the Provost: This Week at Lehman
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Spring 2020 is here!

Dear Colleagues:

I write to welcome you back to the Spring 2020 semester, and to the beginning of a new decade! I trust you had a restful holiday season and are super-recharged and well rested to begin a new semester. Tuesday, January 28 will mark my first full year at the college. A lot has happened during this year. As I noted in my last monthly report in December, working together, we accomplished quite a lot. We saw an enrollment headcount of 15,500 students in fall (a 3% increase from the previous year), representing the largest such enrollment for Lehman College since 1975, when CUNY's free tuition policy was discontinued. Enrollment Management informed me last week that we are on track this Spring to meeting our enrollment goal.

We graduated 3,676 students in May, the highest graduating class in Lehman's history, contributing to the largest increase in our six-year graduation rate over the last five years (11.9%), positively impacting our 90x30 goal of advancing educational attainment in the Bronx, and making us the only senior college in CUNY to have increased its graduation rate in each of the last five years. An analysis last year by The New York Times showed that Lehman's actual graduation rate was 9 percentage points higher than its expected graduation rate, giving us the highest positive gap among CUNY senior colleges.

We reached a major milestone with the approval of funding in the amount of $75 million by the CUNY Board of Trustees for the construction of the new Nursing Building at the institution. And this spring, we will have the formal opening of the newly renovated state-of-the-art facility on the first floor of our library.

We received a much-awaited wonderful news in June: the decision of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) to fully reaffirm our institutional accreditation through 2028. We are on track to submit the Supplemental Information Report (SIR) requested by MSCHE regarding two areas: Assessment of academic programs, including General Education, and Administrative and Educational Support (AES) units in support of student achievement, and assessment of institutional effectiveness. In the SIR, which is due March 1, we highlight several key steps we have taken to strengthen our approach to organized and systematic assessment at the college: We 1) restructured the Associate Provost for Academic Programs and Educational Effectiveness (APAPEE) position to include the assessment and institutional effectiveness functions and concluded the national search to fill the permanent APAPEE position with the selection of Dr. Victor M. Brown, who will begin work on February 10, 2020, 2) strengthened the Office of Assessment and Educational Effectiveness (OAEE) with additional staff support, providing a dedicated office space for the unit, and appointing a faculty director on reassigned time, reporting to the APAPEE, to lead assessment and institutional effectiveness activities 3) invested in assessment coordinators for each academic department, providing three-units of course release time for each faculty assessment coordinator, reflecting the college's strong commitment to continual improvement in expertise and capacity, 4) began full implementation of a uniform six-step assessment process adopted in spring 2019 for all programs including general education to support program improvement, 5) reconstituted the General Education Council (GEC) to enhance GE assessment and developed and began implementation of a multi-year GE assessment plan, 6) broadened the composition of the newly established Academic Assessment Council, and began the process of making it a standing committee of the College Senate to be named the Assessment Committee, with the charge to work closely with the OAEE and departments/programs to ensure coordinated assessment efforts on campus, including providing ongoing workshops to faculty and staff to deepen the culture of assessment and continuing quality improvements, 7) updated the process and timelines for Annual Program Reviews (APRs) and using results for improvements, 8) took steps to replace Lehman's online platform for tracking and documenting planning and assessment activities based on feedback from the college community, and 9) developed our Institutional Effectiveness Plan (IEP), which codifies our existing institutional effectiveness framework into one single document that further clarifies campus-wide expectations and timelines for all activities and processes that support our institutional effectiveness efforts. The IEP, which emphasizes planning, budgeting, assessment, decision-making, and action, takes an intentional, integrated, and comprehensive approach to continuous improvement which extends across academic and AES units and divisions, and focuses on the intersection of student achievement, social mobility, academic quality, and institutional sustainability. These are intentional and tangible steps and demonstrate the college's continued commitment to sustaining what we have put in place to support Lehman's organized and systematic assessment and continual improvement efforts. Over the course of the semester, you will be receiving additional information on our assessment and institutional effectiveness processes, and we plan to host an open house for the newly revitalized Office of Assessment and Educational Effectiveness (OAEE) in Shuster Hall Room 318, a dedicated office space, where faculty and staff can reach out to for technical support on assessment.

We continued our commitment to improving the student achievement goals for our PMP report to the CUNY Chancellor. According to the most recent CUNY PMP report, student outcomes have improved substantially in recent years. Forty-nine percent of full-time, first-time students who entered Lehman in Fall 2012 graduated in six years, representing a twelve-percentage point increase in comparison to the graduation rate for the 2008 student cohort (37.1%). Preliminary data from the College's Student Success Dashboard (SSD) indicates that the six-year graduation rate will rise above 53% for Fall 2013 first-time full-time freshmen. The college's four-year graduation rate for first-time, full-time students has also improved substantially. First-time, full-time students who arrived at Lehman in Fall 2014 graduated at a rate (28.2%), which was nearly ten percentage points higher than 2010 full-time, first-time students (18.7%). Data from the SSD indicate that four-year graduation rates for the Fall 2014 first-time full-time cohort will again improve, rising above 33%. Although the four-year graduation rate of transfer students declined 4.6% points between Fall 2013 (59.1%) and Fall 2014 (54.5%) entering cohorts, Lehman has consistently been a leader in transfer graduation rates, with a rate above the senior college average in each of the previous five years.

Our students also continued to garner national recognitions receiving competitive scholarships and fellowships funded by foundations, non-profit organizations, and government agencies to help underwrite the cost of going to graduate school, studying abroad, conducting research, and engaging in other scholarly pursuits. In AY 2018-2019, our students won more than 70 awards, totaling more than $2.3 million, besting the previous two years' records since the Office of Prestigious Awards (OPA) was established (34 awards totaling nearly $608,000 for AY 2016-2017 and 58 awards totaling more than $1 million for AY 2017-2018). In three years, the OPA has helped our students receive 162 awards totaling more than $4 million. Students have earned some of the most prestigious scholarships and fellowships in the nation:
  • The Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans
  • The Jonas E. Salk Awards for medical or graduate education
  • The Boren Scholarship to study in Japan
  • Four students received Fulbright Fellowships to study in Bulgaria, Mexico and Poland.
  • The Jeanette K. Watson Fellowship for Summer Internship.
  • Fifteen students received funding to pursue graduate education at some of the finest colleges and universities in the nation.
  • Eleven students received the Teach for America Fellowships.
  • Two students received summer research development grants from the National Institutes of Health.
  • Twelve students received Pre-Health Internship Awards.
Two major college-wide reviews were completed in fall 2019 to assess college capacity and readiness to advance student achievement and support our increasing student population. First, the Provost's Committee on Re-entry submitted its final report on November 26, recommending strategies for a well-coordinated system of college care and support services to assist previously incarcerated men, women and youth to successfully participate in college at Lehman. The group's work is consistent with Lehman's mission of social justice and expanding access and opportunity in our region and builds on ongoing faculty-led efforts at the college to support students impacted by the justice system in their academic endeavors. The provost will announce initial steps in early spring 2020 to advance the recommendations submitted by the committee. Second, the President's Taskforce on Food Insecurity and Homelessness completed an inventory of services available to Lehman students, and submitted its report on December 17, with recommendations for a strengthened system of support for students at risk. The Lehman College report follows the Report of the CUNY Consortium on Food and Housing Insecurity released in March 2019, and authored by Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab, Professor of Higher Education Policy and Sociology at Temple University. In fall 2019, Lehman received additional philanthropic support to expand its food pantry and will be examining ways to advance the recommendations of the President's Taskforce.

Our fiscal health remains strong. We experienced a positive $9.6 million balance in our reserve account in fall 2019, which represents 50% of all reserve account balances combined for CUNY's 11 senior colleges. However, in light of the vagaries in the economy (e.g. growing state deficits), it is imperative that the College charts a new course that improves our capacity to leverage existing opportunities to advance a growth and investment climate in support of our financial sustainability and long-term health. In spring 2019, we initiated the development of the college SGIP as a blueprint for strengthening Lehman's long-term financial health and sustainability. The plan, whose implementation began in fall 2019, calls for efficiencies in curriculum planning and scheduling, decentralizes adjunct spending, for the first time in the college's history, and gives autonomy to school deans to manage their adjunct spending, expands the college's international footprint, expands on the college's ongoing work on innovative pedagogies and online learning, and re-imagines the School of Continuing and Professional Studies (SCPS) to collaborate more efficiently with our four academic schools in developing and delivering quality stackable credentials and certificates to serve the needs of the region. In addition, we continue to strengthen our faculty capacity by increasing new tenure-track and lecturer lines, with the President approving twenty-six full-time faculty lines for AY21. Of this number, 16 are replacement lines, and 10 are new faculty lines (5 tenure-track and 5 lecturer lines), doubling the president's previous commitment of 5 new lines. The searches for these lines are underway.

These accomplishments and many more would not have been possible without the collective efforts of so many, and months of hard work by our college community--students, faculty, staff, and administration. President Lemons and I are deeply grateful to each of you for your dedication and continued commitment to our mission of transforming lives and igniting new possibilities in our students, and we look forward to the great work ahead of us in the new year. We look forward to continuing our work together this semester, in particular as we advance the development of our next five-year Strategic Plan (2020-2025). This is an exciting time for Lehman College, and the process for developing our strategic plan provides an excellent opportunity for institutional self-reflection and renewal, as well as a re-commitment to our mission and values.

Again, I welcome you to the Spring 2020 semester, and look forward to working with each of you to advance our strategic priorities on behalf of Lehman, our students and our community. You have my high personal regards.

-P

Peter O. Nwosu, Ph.D.
Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Student Success
Lehman College
The City University of New York
 
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The Office of the Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs & Student Success oversees all educational programs; faculty matters; accreditation reviews; strategic planning; and the review of division and departmental budgets. Questions? Email provost.office@lehman.cuny.edu or call 718-960-8222. For submissions or issues relating to the eDigest, email edigest.provost@lehman.cuny.edu.