A LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT
Moving MCAD Forward Dear Friends of MCAD, Welcome to NEXT, a publication for the MCAD community. With this publication we intend to keep you informed of what is new and what is next for MCAD as well as what is currently going on at the college. We want to connect you to the stories of MCAD alumni, faculty, staff, students, and donors. As I start my sixth year as MCAD’s president, my two key goals for MCAD and its students are to create access and opportunity. How can we make sure an MCAD education is available to talented students who have a passion for art and design? And, how can we continue to provide a fresh, vibrant, and relevant educational opportunity for students who choose to come to MCAD?
“My two key goals are to create access and opportunity.” To create access to an MCAD education, I have focused on increasing financial support for students. Funded scholarships awarded to students have grown 77 percent since I came to the college. We have attracted more top-ranked students every year for the last three years. One-third of our incoming class received the highest admissions ranking. This year, we had our largest incoming MFA class ever with 33 students choosing MCAD for their graduate program. MCAD’s commitment to financial aid has grown immensely over the five years of my tenure. Our student loan debt has dropped by 20 percent over the last three years and we have a loan default rate that is half the national average. I am very proud of this progress in making MCAD more accessible. Students are leaving school with less debt and are working and able to pay back their student loans. And then there is opportunity. We are very proud to showcase, here, our first fully donor-funded enhancement to the facilities of the college, M/LAB. This media laboratory opened its doors at the start of this school year as one of the most comprehensive educational media arts facilities in the region. The excitement about the facility on campus is palpable. This project began as a conversation three years ago with former Vice President of Academic Affairs Vince Leo. During the last two years the project has progressed under the leadership of Karen Wirth, the current vice president of academic affairs. Media Arts Chair Stevie Rexroth and her faculty, as well as our facilities and IT teams, have made this project a reality. This reality has exceeded everyone’s expectations.
The space was designed by James Dayton Design and provides students with a cutting-edge facility, equipped with the latest media arts tools and offering spaces that invite students from all disciplines to get involved in creative collaborations using digital technologies. MCAD has always been a pioneer in technology, being one of the first art and design colleges to be wired for the Internet and one of the first to require and provide laptops for all students as an essential tool for learning. M/LAB builds out from our core of smart classrooms with expanded space for teaching. It builds out the third floor as a home for web and multimedia, photography, and animation, film, and video students. It also includes the Black Box experimental viewing space to accommodate a range of moving image and installation work by our students and gallery artists. This magazine also features big changes in liberal arts with retirements of some of our most beloved faculty and welcomes new faculty members who replace them—including a new chair and four new faculty members. We are also creating new opportunities for student minors, most recently art history and teaching artist minors to be followed by three new minors planned in writing, product design, and public practice. These add immeasurably to the richness of the MCAD educational experience. And lastly there are stories of our alumni. They populate the world of media arts and beyond and are doing great things to transform the worlds of art and design. We have award-winning alumni working across the country in various media arts areas that are profiled in NEXT. As always, MCAD works together as a community to help our students. I am proud of how we have done that by helping our students with greater financial support and by giving them the spaces and equipment to support their creative aspirations. Thank you to all of you who have made this possible and for helping MCAD to move forward. Sincerely,
Jay Coogan President
1