A
&
WITH THE PRESIDENT
President Parker explains the strategy behind recent program reductions in relation to sustainable excellence. Sweet Briar has historically been proud of its very low student-faculty ratio. Why is it so important to reach 10-to-1 now? The current student-faculty ratio is about 6-to-1. Most of the colleges that we compare ourselves to, both for quality and for the kind of liberal arts program that we want to maintain, have student-faculty ratios of between 10-to-1 and 14-to-1. At 10-to-1, Sweet Briar will still be among the very smallest and most personal campuses in America, offering a strong liberal arts program, but it will be able to operate in a more financially sustainable way. When we created the strategic plan, the Plan for Sustainable Excellence, one of the study groups was called “Sustainable Size and Ratios.” That study group worked with the director of institutional research to understand institutional characteristics that would promote financial sustainability for the College. Those characteristics included things like the relationship between the annual budget and the size of the endowment, student-faculty ratio, the proportion and structure of debt, staff-faculty ratios, and so on. With the leadership of that study group, the administration worked to describe some of the financial characteristics of a healthy and sustainable institution. So, for example, we saw that we need to reach the enrollment goal of 750 to 800 students. Along with that, we saw we need to be at about a 10-to-1 student-faculty ratio. We saw that we need to have an endowment that is approximately three times
33
SWEET BRIAR MAGAZINE | SBC.EDU
the size of our annual operating budget. So, the 10-to-1 ratio grew out of analysis of the financial characteristics of a healthy, sustainable institution and is one of several targets that the plan identifies. It’s important to remember that a student-faculty ratio has two components: one is the size of the faculty and one is the size of the student body. Even as we make modest reductions to the size of the faculty, we need to make aggressive increases to the size of the student body, because we certainly can’t achieve our target student-faculty ratio only through reductions. We need to combine modest reductions with enrollment growth. Do you think having a larger ratio will enhance the quality of education at Sweet Briar? I’m sure it will. A slightly larger student body will enrich the academic experience of the College because it will bring more perspectives, backgrounds and intellectual energy into Sweet Briar’s classrooms. At 10-to-1 we can still be very small and will work very closely together while benefitting from more wonderful students and their perspectives, experiences, backgrounds, questions and talents. How many faculty positions will be eliminated to reach the 10-to-1 goal? Two years from now Sweet Briar will have the equivalent of 11 fewer full-time faculty positions than at the start of the 201112 academic year.