Dear Colleagues,

This briefing document is for your review in advance of the State of the Campus Town
Hall, Tues. Oct. 13 at 7:30 a.m., focusing on my three campus priorities: student
success, revenue diversification and reputation enhancement.
It provides you with information on the great progress we have made on these priorities
over the last year with strong efforts all across the campus and with ideas for the next
steps.
STUDENT SUCCESS
Six-Year Graduation Rate
Our most recent six-year graduation rate for the entering class in 2009, at 71%, is not
where we want to be. My charge is to increase that to an 80% graduation rate by 2020.
We are a selective top public university and we should have every expectation that our
graduation rate will equal that of our public peers such as the University of Washington
(80+%) or the University of California-San Diego (85+%).

What We Know
On average we consistently lose 16% of any entering freshman class by the start of
their second year.

Thats where we take the biggest loss. Particularly troubling is that nearly one-quarter
of the first-year attrition have a 3.0 GPA. Theyre not flunking out, theyre walking away.
Why are academically competent students not willing to stay?
The answer may surprise you. Many of the students who leave believe the campus
community does not care about them as a person. We need to focus on both
academics and on helping our students find a sense of community at CU-Boulder.
With students, faculty and staff working together we can create that sense of
community. We saw this with the successful New Student Welcome that many of you
worked so hard on last spring and summer.


The Brutal Facts
Our six-year graduation rates are steadily improving we saw a small jump in each of
the last three years. But if we continue doing what we have been doing, we can only
expect to improve at our current pace and we will not hit our goal of 80% until 2038.
Clearly this cannot be the plan.

This university travels in the company of the nations top universities in research and
we should match that success in our graduation rates. We also have an ethical
responsibility to students and their families to insure they graduate in a timely manner
with as little debt as possible.


What We Are Doing
I believe we can improve persistence to graduation through cultural change.

This includes continuing to refine the successful New Student Welcome program, an
exciting new culture of mentorship in Advising, new centralized advising software that
will allow advisors across campus and eventually faculty and staff to monitor
student performance, and establishing an Associate Provost for Student Success.
I invite you to contribute your ideas to how we can help more of our students persist
and successfully complete their degrees in a timely manner.
REVENUE DIVERSIFICATION
The future of the university and our ability to remain in the top tier of research
universities while delivering excellent education at a reasonable price depends upon
our ability to develop a variety of sources of revenue for the campus. This does not
happen overnight, so we are taking a multi-prong approach in diversifying our revenue
sources through both short and long term strategies and coupling those with a hard
look at how we can better deploy the resources we already have.
What We Are Doing
We are defining short term as initiatives to be completed by 2020. Key initiatives under
short term include:

Growing federal research to $605 million annually from todays $425.6 million.
Increasing enrollments in professional masters by 3,000 students by 2020.
Increasing enrollments in online programs by 3,000 students by 2020.
Consistent with our student success goals retain and graduate more
students. This will result in a more stable revenue stream for the campus that
allows us to plan with more certainty and invest accordingly in faculty.

In the longer term we must work on strategies to increase fundraising and our
endowments overall. We perform well below our peers in this area and have set this as
a major target. Finally, we are focusing our efforts on increasing industry researchpartnership revenues to $100 million a year.

To better deploy the resources we already have, we are focused on cost-containment

and continuous improvement of our processes. Investments in this area have already
saved the campus as much as $7 million more than half of which is from crosscampus collaborations such as purchasing, information technology system
consolidations and creating a library purchasing consortium across the system.
We are in the process of deploying other strategies to save both dollars and our time
such as the Paperless Initiative which reduces costs and physical space for storage,
not to mention time sending physical forms from office to office. A cross-campus team
is working on a space utilization study to determine how we can more effectively use
the meeting, office, classroom and administrative space we have now and avoid new
construction costs as much as possible.
Our Capital Asset Management Plan (CAMP) reduces ongoing operating costs of
buildings through improved energy efficiency and better use of space. Our Green Labs
programs to minimize use of energy, water and hazardous waste has saved 720,000
kilowatts per year in electricity and 5 million gallons per year of water.
Suggestions and ideas on how to run the institution more effectively are coming from
many people throughout the campus and we welcome your ideas.
ADVANCING OUR REPUTATION
Our reputation is the direct result of the work of our faculty, students and staff
collectively. Positive news about the university is of course driven by our academic and
research stature, as well as the success of our students and alumni.
This year we generated more than $425 million in research revenues. We are NASAs
top-funded public university. We boast five Nobel Prize winners, eight MacArthur
fellows, top performing schools and colleges and many nationally recognized faculty


and departments. We are a university in high standing. We are the only member of the
Association of American Universities in the Rocky Mountain region.

But it is surprising that when you ask the general voting population about us, not
enough people know about our academic and research reputation. To better
understand how we are perceived, we began measuring our statewide reputation and
how that compares to mostly Colorado institutions in 2014 through a survey of
Colorado voters randomly selected for telephone interviews. That survey showed we
have some work to do.
What We Are Doing
To improve perceptions of CU-Boulder over the past year we have been delivering key
facts about CU-Boulder into the Colorado market via a digital media campaign
designed to support our admissions marketing efforts and to inform community
opinion leaders around the state about CU-Boulder. We have also been pitching more
news stories about the the research and projects our faculty and students have been
doing and their impact on the community. We have made some progress, especially
with people who have seen news about CU-Boulder or even more so if they saw our
ads.
In the surveys we listed a number of institutions and asked if the person felt very
positively, positively, neutral, negatively or very negatively toward each one. The


surveys show that voters with a very positive impression of CU-Boulder increased by
six points from 2014 to 2015.


While CU-Boulders reputation has improved, it still has a polarizing effect on people
across the state. Compared to other universities, CU-Boulder has a much higher share
of voters who say they have a negative impression of the university and we continue to
rank behind the Colorado School of Mines, Colorado State University and University of
Denver in positive impressions. So, clearly, we continue to have our work cut out for us
in shifting those attitudes.

We have just recently begun to do some national surveying in key markets. We

compare ourselves to some of our peers, along with CSU to understand how we may
be perceived. What we found is that we rank low among them reflecting that we have
done very little messaging in national markets. It also told us that if voters surveyed do
know something about us generally through an alumni or student they have a very
favorable view.


This is a topic we should all understand and be aware of and I am looking forward to
hearing your ideas on advancing our reputation.
I look forward to a robust discussion on these issues on Oct. 13 from 7:30 a.m.-9 a.m.
at the State of the Campus town hall. I hope to see you there.
Sincerely,
Philip P. DiStefano
Chancellor