“Ensuring access to the Elmhurst Experience is a key part of our mission, and it resonates deeply with our donors.”
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With money an issue for so many students, what are you doing to make getting an Elmhurst degree more aΩordable? The College works hard to oΩer financial aid packages that bring down the cost of an Elmhurst education to a much more aΩordable level for most people. Among our current students, 97 percent receive some kind of financial aid. Our goal is to oΩer an excellent education to people who come from a wide range of backgrounds that aren’t necessarily underprivileged—though they sometimes are—but certainly do not qualify for the “one percent.” Ensuring access to the Elmhurst Experience is a key part of our mission, and it resonates deeply with our donors, who understand the value of an Elmhurst education, often from personal experience. You mentioned a trend toward more students starting at community colleges. Is Elmhurst taking any particular steps to respond to that trend? Absolutely. Transfer students have been a strong part of our undergraduate classes for a very long time, and we work to understand their needs. Each year, we enroll about 300 transfer students. This year, we formed a task force of faculty, students and administrators to explore ways for us to increase our already robust service to transfer students, as part of our commitment to educational access. The task force submitted a report to the Board of Trustees in March that’s full of creative ideas that will allow us to sweep away internal, bureaucratic barriers to admission and timely degree completion for transfer students, to build more degree partnerships with community colleges, and to recruit more aggressively among this key student constituency. We’re already implementing their ideas. How are you responding to the growth in the number of older students? In 2011, we started a whole new academic division, the School for Professional Studies. It’s designed to serve the big, growing population of busy people who otherwise would be shut out of bachelor’s and master’s programs. This includes working moms and dads, career changers, people in their 20s, 30s and 40s who need a second or third professional act, and many others for whom the traditional, full-time model of higher education is an impossible dream. Hasn’t Elmhurst always had adult and graduate programs? We’ve had adult programs since 1949 and graduate programs since 1998. They’ve followed a very traditional model that was very good in its day but that no longer really serves all that many students. These days, our society needs to enable bright, capable people to fully prepare for the contemporary workforce. This includes a lot of people who did not have the privilege of a full-time, or even a part-time, on-campus college education when they were 18 or 22 years old. This is also a form of stewardship. We’re providing programs to help our society better use its most valuable resource, the talents of its great diversity of people. Isn’t a more traditional education Elmhurst’s specialty, though? It is—and will continue to be. We really excel at providing traditional-age students with a high-quality, high-touch college education based in our well-considered core values. We believe that our society will continue to need that service from us for a long time to come. But our society also needs alternative ways to provide a diΩerent but highly comparable education to people who, for a lot of reasons, did not have the privilege of going to a college like Elmhurst full time when they were young adults. In DuPage County alone, we have more than 120,000 adults with some college education but no bachelor’s degree. This is a bright, talented population that often finds itself unemployed or