Welcome to the Fall 2024 semester!
Dear VCU Faculty and Staff:
This month marked the third anniversary of my appointment as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at VCU. Thanks to you, these past three years have been the most exciting and rewarding of my career. Yet, I promise you that our best days are yet to come.
Together, we are making tremendous progress on the goals of VCU’s strategic plan, Quest 2028. Along the way, we are elevating VCU’s reputation, climbing the ranks of the top 50 public research institutions, and setting new records for sponsored research funding.
Transforming VCU’s Curriculum
We are implementing the faculty- and staff-led recommendations created last year by the One VCU Academic Repositioning Task Force and vetted throughout our institution. By coming together and leveraging our collective intellectual capacity, we are taking steps to “future-proof” VCU and the Rams we prepare for a dynamic and fast-changing world.
This semester, VCU is becoming the first university in Virginia to offer minors in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Mixed and Immersive Reality Studies that are available to every student. These cutting-edge opportunities, along with our 17 new degree and certificate programs illustrate how we prepare students to be difference-makers and problem-solvers regardless of their chosen career field and life aspirations.
We are integrating more and deeper transformative experiences into our students’ journeys. While VCU’s new Convergence Lab model encourages exciting new opportunities in transdisciplinary research and pedagogy, efforts like our QEP plan, Every Ram’s a Researcher, ensure that every VCU student can participate in creating knowledge in emerging fields. These uncommon possibilities distinguish VCU to prospective students and they distinguish our graduates to prospective employers.
Purposeful Student Engagement
We are excited to say that this year’s class of first-time students is nearly as big as last year’s class, which was the largest in university history.
That momentum is vital as VCU braces for the forthcoming student enrollment cliff, the demographic challenge soon facing all of higher education. The university’s strategic enrollment plan focuses on attracting more students from other states and countries. Today, some nine out of every ten VCU students are Virginia residents. We’re proud of that, and we see incredible value for them, and our institution, in enriching our student body with individuals from beyond the commonwealth.
Adding more new students, however, is only one way to strengthen enrollment numbers. We further seek to retain more existing students, through completion, to reach our strategic enrollment goal of 32,000 students, with a 90% first-year to second-year retention rate and a 78% six-year graduation rate.
Accomplishing that requires us to become experts on the individuals that we serve. Partnering with the University Innovation Alliance (UIA), we are beginning an effort this fall, called VCU Cares, to conduct 5,000 empathy interviews with students to better understand their VCU experience – the good and the bad – and how we can improve it. We will conduct similar efforts with graduate students and faculty members. We believe this initiative could become a national model.
We are also working to strengthen the university’s student success resources and increase their effectiveness. We will soon announce a workgroup through which we’ll implement suggestions from an examination of VCU’s student success resources and practices conducted last spring by the National Institute of Student Success (NISS).
Innovative Employee Recruitment, Advancement, and Retention
Student success also depends on VCU’s ability to retain and attract a diverse community of highly-qualified faculty and staff members and support their professional growth. We’re pursuing a number of innovative strategies to do just that, and earn more accolades like VCU being named among the “Most Promising Places to Work in Student Affairs.”
Perhaps the biggest of those strategies is the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) survey process beginning this year. We are assembling a steering committee that will prepare us to launch a Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey in February, followed by a Faculty Retention and Exit Survey during the 2025-2026 academic year. Faculty responses to those surveys will deliver valuable insights on steps we can take to support them now and to attract highly-talented colleagues in the future.
In closing, please allow me to say thank you. This is an exciting time to be at VCU. Under the visionary leadership of President Michael Rao, we collectively contribute to the institution’s rapid rise as a leading research university where access and inclusive excellence converge to impact the lives of our students and our communities. VCU’s remarkable students are a constant source of inspiration and motivation, and I’m grateful for all that you do as we work together to serve them!
Best Regards,
Fotis Sotiropoulos, Ph.D.
Provost and senior vice president for academic affairs