The Campaign For Wake Forest University: Honoring the Promise

UNFINISHED CAUSE

Public Kickoff
April 26, 2001

Dr. Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

Many of you know of my affection for former Wake Forest President William Louis Poteat and his writing. A phrase he used in one of his speeches captured my attention recently and seemed appropriate for the effort we have just begun. In speaking of a Wake Forest education, he described the mission of achieving persons, “Not finished, but perfecting.”

Wake Forest has, of course, accomplished much in the decades since he was president in the early part of the twentieth century. But that quote is still relevant today. There is no status quo in education. You must consistently move forward. We are not finished, but perfecting.

Private higher education by its very nature is a competitive enterprise. Only a few institutions can succeed at the top where the best students and the best faculty and the best instructional resources are at stake. Going forward, many private universities will survive, but only the very strongest and the very best will thrive.

In the next few years, our goal is to secure our place among those premier private institutions, which by virtue of their quality and reputation are the hallmarks for excellence in higher education in the nation and in the world. We intend to be on the short list of the best of educational institutions. That Wake Forest is emerging into this cluster of institutions is one of higher education’s most remarkable modern stories, a story made possible only by the loyalty and generosity of our alumni and friends.

Like other private universities, Wake Forest cannot compete with public universities on the basis of cost. We must compete on value, not price, by offering quality educational programs that public universities do not offer and will not be able to provide. We must continually demonstrate that private education in a values-based setting is worth the additional investment that families must make to send their children to Wake Forest. Expensive schools must be clearly superior. They must offer uniformly excellent teaching with the best available learning resources. The value must equal the price.

To demonstrate our value, two elements must dominate our priorities: we must recruit and retain top faculty; and we must attract and enroll top students. For this reason, faculty support and student financial aid are the top priorities in the capital campaign.

For many years Wake Forest was considered a “bargain” in higher education. Our tuition was significantly lower than those institutions with which we competed for students, while our academic quality and reputation grew. We were able to keep tuition at a low level because our programs were not as extensive as those of other schools. Today, it is far more expensive to compete at the level in which we now operate. Because of the additional benefits we offer students—more faculty members so that classes are smaller; technology; first-year seminars, for example—our tuition, while still low relative to other top private schools, is quite expensive. This fact represents a significant change for Wake Forest.

In a related area, however, we have not changed. Wake Forest is one of fewer than thirty institutions nationwide that admits students regardless of their financial circumstances and then pledges to meet 100 percent of their demonstrated financial need. The policy—known as need-blind admission—not only enables us to attract students from all economic strata but also facilitates social and economic diversity in the student body, a crucial factor in a well-rounded educational experience. It also helps take cost out of a prospective student’s consideration of which school is the best personal fit.

Obviously, we could choose to abandon the need-blind admissions policy, and our financial aid need would disappear. Because of our position in higher education, we could easily fill the freshman class with only those students who can afford to pay full tuition. But to become a school disconnected from our constituency would be a drastic and unwise change in Wake Forest’s fundamental values. Our “old campus” heritage was that of serving lower-income, first-generation college students. This commitment has been an important distinctive for Wake Forest for many years, one that is valued by our governing board and the many alumni who were able to matriculate here because of this policy. Need-blind admission, however, is also expensive, and increasingly so.

Another factor affecting us is the computation used to evaluate families’ need. Recently, the College Board changed the formula for determining aid, a methodology that is now more generous to middle-income students who previously were unable to qualify for aid but also unable to afford private school tuition. While adopting these new guidelines is clearly the right thing to do, the cost will be considerable.

Compounding these circumstances is the consumer culture in which we live. Most, if not all, of our competitors already offer more scholarship aid than Wake Forest. Today, for better or worse, cost-consciousness and comparison “shopping” extend to college selection. Surveys show that only 15 percent of prospective students and their families today are willing to consider private college, a startling drop from even a decade ago. Other studies suggest that, on average, only families with annual incomes greater than $150,000 do not consider cost a critical factor in college selection. Thus, our pool of prospective students is shrinking, even before academic ability is considered.

Princeton University’s recent announcement that all of its aid henceforth will come in the form of grants instead of loans has already begun to affect financial aid decisions of many other schools. The bar has been raised, and not just incrementally. The decision is already placing pressure on all private universities to offer more generous financial aid packages. Dartmouth has announced that grants for next year’s freshmen will increase an average of $1,750 per student. Vanderbilt, one of the nine schools with which we compete most directly for students, has earmarked an additional $8 million a year for financial aid. Closer to home, Davidson College is devoting more resources to financial aid.

Wake Forest is limited in responding to these initiatives with current funding options. We already rely far too heavily on tuition income to fund financial aid: less than 30 percent of the financial aid budget comes from endowment revenue. A successful capital campaign will enable us to restrain future tuition increases and to gain the endowments necessary to preserve our need-blind admission policy.

Other forces, created within the academy itself, threaten our particular culture. Wake Forest is, without apology, a university shaped by faith and reason. The values that grew from our religious affiliation and from our founding in a small Southern town have given us a community that seeks more than just the creation of knowledge. Our motto, Pro Humanitate, embraces the values of service to others, compassion and attention to the individual, as well as excellence in intellectual pursuits.

Today, the great graduate centers of this country—our undisputed intellectual leaders—have adopted “knowledge creation” as their all-but-exclusive mission. The relegation of undergraduate education to graduate assistants and the model of huge classes with virtually no professor-student interaction are counter to the culture that has distinguished Wake Forest.

Because we recruit our faculty from these graduate centers, we must identify faculty who share the Wake Forest academic ideal that knowledge-production alone does not constitute education. We must find those who are committed to the teacher-scholar ideal and the belief that the best education grows from personal relationships between faculty and students. We must have greater resources to attract and recognize those professors. Wake Forest currently ranks near the bottom in faculty salaries at the nation’s top fifty universities. These facts carry a critical message for Wake Forest’s future: our universe of prospective faculty, as well as prospective students, has grown narrow and, thus, keenly competitive.

The Plan for the Class of 2000, successfully implemented with the expertise of dedicated faculty, added substantial academic value at a substantial cost. Our future success depends upon our continuing to make investments in people and programs to enhance our academic quality and, consequently, our academic reputation. Situating ourselves firmly in the upper tier of private universities is necessary to preserving Wake Forest’s fundamental values. It is only by succeeding within that category of excellence that we can retain our need-blind admissions policy and achieve the strength and reputation that enables us to preserve and extend the economic diversity that enhances our educational environment.

Wake Forest has a long and rich history of developing in young people the promise of a bright future through lives of service. Eighteen years ago, when I become president of your University, I saw the promise of a Wake Forest that could render an even greater service to higher education—and I believe we have accomplished much. In writing the concluding chapter of my presidency, I believe “The Campaign for Wake Forest: Honoring the Promise” will enable us to strengthen our place among America’s great universities.