Penn State President Neeli Bendapudi announced a set of five-year goals for her administration Monday that, if attained, are designed to leave a stronger Penn State - and Pennsylvania - in their wake.
The new objectives come a little more than one year since Bendapudi received her appointment from the university’s trustees in December 2021, and about nine months after she officially took over from her predecessor, Eric Barron, in May.
In the interim, besides making key day-to-day decisions like renovating Beaver Stadium rather than build new, or calling for an end to Penn State’s experiment of running two separately-accredited law schools - Bendapudi has spent a great deal of time listening to her new constituencies, and taking the measure of the university’s resources and results.
The agenda announced Monday is really a first statement of how she hopes to put her stamp on Penn State.
To read the list: Enhance student success; grow interdisciplinary research; increase land-grant impact; foster diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging; transform Penn State’s internal operations - it does not come off as a particularly transformative package.
But Bendapudi, in a telephone interview Monday afternoon, called them achievable targets that can produce real results that will be good for Penn State students and the communities they take ultimately decide to take their degrees too.
“We really want to make sure that, in the time they were here, our education did transform that individual,” Bendapudi said.
One top priority the president has already rolled out is getting substantially more state aid for Pennsylvania’s biggest state-related university.
In fact, Penn State already gets more money from Pennsylvania’s state budget than any other college or university. But, Bendapudi has argued that on a Pennsylvania resident student basis, it is actually drawing significantly less than Pitt, Temple, or the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education Schools.
She has already launched a dedicated campaign to ensure that Penn State gets more of an increase in state aid than its public peers this year to try to help close that gap.
It’s not a one-sided conversation.
In exchange for enhanced state funding, Bendapudi has promised to put Penn State’s own operations on course to yield a balanced Education and General budget - the one that covers the bulk of the university’s day-to-day operations - by the 2025-26 academic year.
While Penn State as a whole typically finishes any fiscal year with operating surpluses, Bendapudi has identified a $140 million structural deficit in the so-called E&G budget. It’s that deficit she hopes to erase.
Her staff is already working on a new budget model that will see more funds appropriated based on student enrollment and credit hours taught in various departments and colleges. Officials have made clear that no unit will take a budget cut of more than 4 percent in any given year as this is implemented, and year-over-year increases will be capped at 4.6 percent.
Another clear point of emphasis for Bendapudi are her own markers for progress on diversity, equity and inclusion.
This has become something of a flash point for Penn State’s first president who is not a white male, because one of Bendapudi’s first actions as president was to cancel work on the planned establishment of a Center for Racial Justice at Penn State.
in this area, Bendapudi has argued, the university already knows what it needs to work on. She said it is far more efficient for the university to get to work on a set of actual targets that can show real progress as it is being made.
For Bendapudi, one measurable she would like to show improvement on is an evening out of graduation rates among all demographic segments at Penn State.
A new diversity, equity and inclusion dashboard rolled out at Penn State this week showed that for all undergraduate students enrolling in 2018, the four-year graduation rate for whites was 61.2 percent. For Hispanic and Black students, meanwhile, the rates were 46.0 and 34.2 percent, respectively.
That’s another gap that Bendapudi is committed to closing.
She is also pledging to increase recuitment of minority students, faculty and staff at Penn State, with a particular eye toward making Penn State a place that lifts groups who traditionally who have been in the minority, whether that’s getting more domestic minorities into staff and faculty jobs, more first-generation students into college, or getting more women enrolled in STEM classes.
“We’re a land-grant unniversity. It’s supposed to be about transforming lives through higher education, not just for the elite; but for everybody,” Bendapudi said.
Bendapudi’s list also calls for making sure Penn State’s $1 billion annual research arm hits its full potential, including maximizing chances for its end products to make it into the marketplace - and to do that in Pennsylvania as much as possible.
A National Science Foundation ranking of university research and development expenditures has Penn State ranked 26th nationally for 2020-2021, the most recent year for which data has been compiled. That’s also third in Pennsylvania, behind the University of Pennsylvania and Pitt.
Barron, during the major capital campaign accomplished during his tenure, identified food and water, energy and health as three broad areas where Penn State was built to play a leading role.
Bendapudi didn’t propose specific changes in research prioriities Monday, but she did add this caveat: “We are always going to align our (research) areas with the biggest needs of the Commonwealth... Our purpose (as Pennsylvania’s only land grant university) requires us to align what we do with the needs of the Commonwealth, the country, and beyond, in that order.”
For the 73,000-member Penn State student body, the president said her vision calls for getting more students to actively supplement their course-work with lived experiences like internships, research opportunities and participation in extra-curricular activities.
There will also be efforts to enhance the university’s commitment and offerings related to student mental health and financial literacy.
“A foundational aspect of Penn State... is its commitment to serving Pennsylvania and its people,” Bendapudi summed up, in her roll-out announcement.
“We will continue this commitment through economic and workforce development, helping businesses grow, our extension network, our multidisciplinary research tackling practical problems, and new opportunities to keep our alumni in Pennsylvania.”
Members of Bendapudi’s President’s Council have been tasked with leading the charge toward progress in each of the goal areas. She promised periodic updates to the university community on planned actions, and metrics for determining success.