{"id":3015,"date":"2020-10-19T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-19T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/developmenttwo.marymount.edu\/blog\/inside-higher-ed-how-this-university-president-has-kept-enrollment-strong-during-the-covid-19-pandemic%c2%97while-pivoting-towards-the-future\/"},"modified":"2020-10-19T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-10-19T00:00:00","slug":"inside-higher-ed-how-this-university-president-has-kept-enrollment-strong-during-the-covid-19-pandemic%c2%97while-pivoting-towards-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marymount.edu\/blog\/inside-higher-ed-how-this-university-president-has-kept-enrollment-strong-during-the-covid-19-pandemic%c2%97while-pivoting-towards-the-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside Higher Ed: How This University President Has Kept Enrollment Strong During the COVID-19 Pandemic\u0097While Pivoting Towards the Future<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Irma Becerra still remembers\u0097with some disbelief\u0097her first day as an undergraduate in the late \u009170s, when her university’s president addressed the incoming freshmen by saying, \u0093Look to your left, look to your right\u0097only one of you will graduate.\u0094\u00a0
\n\u00a0
\n\u0093That has been the expectation,\u0094 says Becerra, now the president of\u00a0Marymount University<\/a>, a comprehensive Catholic institution in Arlington, VA. \u0093Nationally, only 50% of students who start college finish. That is a travesty. What\u0092s happening to the half that\u0092s not graduating?\u0094 Becerra, who joined Marymount in 2018, is committed to ensuring that every student who starts at her school graduates. Given Marymount\u0092s distinctive history of out-of-the-box thinking, its embrace of diversity and student support systems, its practical education underpinned by the liberal arts, and its\u00a0rising national profile<\/a>, Becerra is well-positioned to make good on her pledge.\u00a0
\n\u00a0
\nFounded as a two-year career-prep college for women in 1950\u0097right as women were being pushed out of the workforce by the return of WWII soldiers\u0097Marymount has evolved into a co-educational institution offering undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs ranging from nursing to cybersecurity to criminal justice. \u0093Our degrees tend to be very important for the D.C. region, but also for the nation,\u0094 says Becerra. \u0093That\u0092s why our students are highly sought after, and why half of our graduates stay in the area; it\u0092s a very vibrant job environment.\u0094
\n\u00a0
\nUnder Becerra\u0092s leadership, Marymount is poised to thrive in the coming decade. I recently talked with her about the innovative ways the university prepares students for the 21st century\u0092s in-demand jobs. We also discussed how her training in crisis management and engineering\u0097in 1994 she became the first woman to be awarded a PhD in electrical engineering at Florida International University\u0097has helped Marymount meet the challenges of COVID-19 and keep its enrollment stable even as other colleges suffer drastic dips. And with a nod to Marymount students\u0092 creativity, Becerra explained how her school\u0092s commitment to hands-on learning extends to the students who live\u0097quite intentionally\u0097at the scene of a crime.
\n\u00a0
\nMarymount recently restructured into three new interdisciplinary colleges. How will that benefit students, faculty and the school\u0092s overall mission?\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>
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\nSome of the most important and difficult problems that society faces today, like global warming and pandemics, require interdisciplinary thinking to solve them. Our students have always managed to major in X while doing minors in Y and Z, thereby creating their own interdisciplinary course of study. Now we are purposefully doing that by reorganizing the academic structure in each particular college.
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\nAnother way we have pursued interdisciplinary education is through the creation of stackable certificates that allow you to design your own master’s degree, at your own pace. For example, we have stackable certificates in cybersecurity, data science, project management, intrapreneurship, and leadership. You can pick three of these and they stack up to a master’s degree. Or you could earn a certificate in palliative care that could stack up with other certificates towards a master\u0092s in health care innovation. Even across colleges, you can stack up certificates, so it creates an opportunity for our students to design their own master’s degree in ways that give them the most flexibility, depending on what their interests are, or how those interests change. I think flexibility is going to be key for students going forward.
\n\u00a0
\nMarymount was one of the first universities to include internships as a graduation requirement. What are other ways you use hands-on training to educate students for key growth industries?\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>
\n\u00a0
\nThe hallmark of the Marymount experience is that we offer a practical education grounded in the liberal arts. In 1950, the University was founded to educate women for work. While we became coeducational in the 1980\u0092s, we still build on the tradition of preparing students for careers, and help them find their purpose in life. We\u0092ve built experiences into our curriculum that allow them to learn in a hands-on way.
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\nA few examples: Our physical therapy program shares a facility with MedStar, a local health care organization. So patients who come to MedStar for physical therapy are often seen by our students who are doing their clinical training. The nursing students have a lab full of very expensive computer dummies that are used to teach nursing. These dummies also serve as victims of crime in our crime lab. Our criminal justice students all live around a crime lab that\u0092s an ever-changing crime scene, which gets very interesting around Halloween!
\n\u00a0
\nHow is Marymount strengthening its commitment to diversity?<\/em><\/strong>
\n\u00a0
\nOur student body is incredibly diverse\u009720% Hispanic, 15% Black, 7% Asian, and 13% international, representing 78 different countries. We\u0092re considered an emerging Hispanic-serving institution, the only one in Virginia. We also have a large population of students who are undocumented. We have a partnership with\u00a0TheDream.US<\/a>, the foundation that is seeking to give students who are DACA recipients the equivalent of a Pell grant. It\u0092s part of our commitment to supporting pathways for students\u0097no matter their race, faith, or status\u0097to gain an education. It\u0092s our mission at Marymount.
\n\u00a0
\nWe have also invested in wraparound student support services. It can be very complicated to navigate all the nuances of the university, especially for first-generation students. So our students sign up for a personal advisor who leads them through the maze of college. I personally make a commitment to every student who comes to Marymount that if they do everything on their part, we will get them to graduate in four years.
\n\u00a0
\nHow has Marymount embraced online learning, especially as it relates to delivering fully online degrees?<\/em><\/strong>
\n\u00a0
\nWe started offering fully online programs this fall: a doctorate in education, which has a focus on leadership and innovation, and two offerings in nursing: a master\u0092s and a doctorate. For the latter, students can enter through multiple tracks. We offer options for students who need to start by fulfilling graduate requirements from a bachelor\u0092s level as well as those currently holding a master\u0092s in nursing degree.
\n\u00a0
\nIn Fall 2021, we\u0092re set to offer an online option for our accelerated second degree bachelor\u0092s in nursing program as well. So if you have a bachelor’s degree in, say, history, and now you want to make a career change and become a nurse, you can achieve this through an intensive nursing curriculum over 15 months.
\n\u00a0
\nWe\u0092re also planning to offer more programs fully online, such as our transitional Doctor of Physical Therapy and transitional Doctor of Occupational Therapy programs. These are designed more for the working professionals who want a Marymount education but, because of work or family responsibilities, find it impossible to get to campus.
\n\u00a0
\nWhat about remote learning?<\/em><\/strong>
\n\u00a0
\nI like to make the distinction between online and remote education.\u00a0Online\u00a0<\/em>assumes that you have a professor and thousands of students taking the class in asynchronous mode. When COVID-19 emerged, we maintained our twelve-to-one student-to-faculty ratio in our classes that were taught synchronously at a distance. We successfully pivoted to remote education in about 700 courses, and we graduated over a thousand students at our virtual commencement. The difference is that with\u00a0remote\u00a0<\/em>learning, students can still reap the benefits of our small classes\u0097they\u0092re learning together in real-time with their professors and it\u0092s still an interactive experience, despite the virtual format.
\n\u00a0
\nBut when we surveyed students, they said they did not learn as well remotely as they did face-to-face. That was really an \u0091aha\u0092 moment for me. For years, industry analysts have been telling us that the great American university as we know it is going to disappear and all higher ed students are going to be learning online. As a former knowledge management researcher, I know there\u0092s a lot of learning that happens in what we call a tacit-to-tacit knowledge exchange. When you are embedded in an educational environment, especially one as diverse as ours, you learn different perspectives from your professors and your colleagues, even things that aren\u0092t being said explicitly. Our traditional learning environment is so rich that it would be hard to replicate it in a\u00a0remote\u00a0<\/em>format, despite our small class sizes.
\n\u00a0
\nHow have you brought students back to campus\u0097and kept everyone safe?<\/em><\/strong>
\n\u00a0
\nWhen the students made it clear that remote learning was not going to cut it for them, we decided we needed to come back in a face-to-face and hy-flex (hybrid-flexible) format, even if it looked different than what we had before. I\u0092m trained in crisis management, as are several of my colleagues. We know that in managing through crises like earthquakes and hurricanes, frequent collaborations and the ability to pivot are important. We created a COVID-19 task force that has met more than 80 times to help our cabinet make decisions\u0097and quickly revise decisions when the first plan isn\u0092t working. In engineering, we call that rapid prototyping.\u00a0
\n\u00a0
\nWe completely restructured the places where we work, where students live, eat, and learn. Students are required to wear masks at all times unless they are alone in their dorm rooms, which are all singles. We have a health monitoring app and a contact tracing app. We bought a rapid-result testing machine. In some classes, we’ve had to split the class so half takes it one day and the other half takes it the next. Only 20% of our student body chose to take classes remotely; 80% wanted to be back here on campus. When I was greeting parents and students as they arrived on campus in August, the students were so happy to be back. The parents were even happier!
\n\u00a0
\nI think our ability to return face-to-face\u0097and be nimble about how we go about it\u0097is a big reason our enrollment has remained stable while other institutions are experiencing big drops. One thing we\u0092ve learned is that the organizations that can pivot quickly are the ones that will thrive during and after COVID-19.<\/p>\n

Read the original article on Inside Higher Ed’s website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Irma Becerra still remembers\u0097with some disbelief\u0097her first day as an undergraduate in the late \u009170s, when her university’s president addressed the incoming freshmen by saying, \u0093Look to your left, look to your right\u0097only one of you will graduate.\u0094\u00a0 \u00a0 \u0093That has been the expectation,\u0094 says Becerra, now the president of\u00a0Marymount University, a comprehensive Catholic […]<\/p>\n

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