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Purdue hailed as making headway in student success
Not that they didn't already bleed black and gold but the Purdue Club of Putnam County heard statistical proof recently they aren't the only Boilermakers true to their school.
Spewing out statistics like Drew Brees filling the air with footballs or Rick Mount bombing in baskets from long range, Purdue Board of Trustees President Thomas E. Spurgeon addressed the value of a Purdue education and how President Mitch Daniels has positioned the West Lafayette campus for an even greater future when he spoke to the Putnam Purdue Club Thursday night at Autumn Glen in Greencastle.
In a national survey on how universities help prepare students for life outside college, Spurgeon said 18 percent of all graduates report being emotionally invested in their alma mater.
However, a survey of Purdue grads produced a figure nearly twice that, its board chairman said.
Nearly a third of Purdue alums consider themselves emotionally attached to the university.
"I think that's significant," Spurgeon said. "It's a hot button with me."
A 1961 Purdue grad who resides in Illinois yet spends an estimated 40 weeks a year in West Lafayette, Spurgeon told 30 members of the local club that according to a recent study, Purdue ranks 20th academically among all public
universities and 62nd among all public and private colleges. That is up four spots in the public listing and six in the other.
"In other words," he said, "we're making a little headway."
Under President Daniels, the former governor of Indiana, Purdue's motto has become "student success," Spurgeon said.
"Everything we do is aimed at student success," he said, adding "it really charges me up when I walk into his office and he (Daniels) says, 'How are we doing, boss?'
Likewise, the numbers and statistics Spurgeon offered should charge up the Boilermaker faithful.
For example, the grade-point average for entering freshmen this year at Purdue was 3.72 on a 4.0 scale.
"I'm not sure I could compete with those students today," suggested Spurgeon, who earned his degree in industrial management and forged an entrepreneurial career building companies across the United States, most recently serving as president and CEO of Lincoln Office in Peoria, Ill., one of the country's largest distributors of Steelcase furniture.
Purdue, he said, welcomed the second largest incoming class in the country this past August with 6,373 freshmen descending on West Lafayette. Of those, 3,300 were Indiana residents.
"Good things are going on right now getting students to come to Purdue," he said, noting that last year the university worked from a pool of 200,000 prospective students, resulting in 39,700 actual applications. Of those, 23,450 were admitted with 6,800 accepting and 6,373 actually showing up on campus.
Overall, the student population at Purdue is down from 31,200 in 2009 to 29,195 this year, Spurgeon said.
"The reason it's down," he explained, "is because we've made it a little tougher to get in."
For one thing, prospectives now need to have four years of mathematics instead of three.
One of Purdue's goals, the Columbus native said, is to lure more of those Indiana students.
"Hey," Spurgeon said, "we're an Indiana land grant school."
One step in that direction, the board of trustees president noted, is the number of Hoosier high schoolers considered "elite students" who chose Purdue last year.
Overall there were 631 such students identified, Spurgeon said.
"Everyone wanted to get those 631. Purdue got 356 ... 356 out of the 631. That's a big, big number."
Last year Purdue also had more international students apply than it did out-of-state students.
"That's amazing," Spurgeon said, while nothing that international students pay the highest tuition ($18,000-$19,000, as opposed to $9,000-$10,000 for Indiana residents) and are not eligible for scholarships.
President Daniels, Spurgeon praised, "started off freezing tuition for two years and has even gotten the board to agree to a third year."
That means the senior class will go through Purdue without enduring a tuition increase.
"That's received so much attention," Spurgeon said, that President Daniels "has been besieged" to come and talk to other university administrations about it.
But the most unique thing Purdue has done, Spurgeon said, is forge an agreement with Amazon to provide textbooks for students at 30 percent less than bookstores had previously offered.
That has generated $2.5 million in textbook sales, he said, as 73,000 items were ordered from Amazon by Purdue
students.
"Purdue gets a little piece of the action," he divulged, saying that amounted to $63,000.
"What did we do with the money?" Spurgeon asked. "It went right into the scholarship fund and that's where it will continue to go."
Spurgeon, who said until Thursday night he hadn't been back in Greencastle since 1957 when his high school sweetheart was attending DePauw University and he would visit from West Lafayette, characterized his facts and figures as "a feel for the kind of things the board is working on and why we're trying to do it."