An Outstanding Year for Purdue Northwest

Dear Colleagues,

2022 has been an outstanding year for Purdue Northwest. Your hard work and dedication to our university, and especially to our students, has moved us forward in so many ways. It is difficult to name all the significant outcomes of your work, but here are some highlights as I reflect on this past year.

The innovative work of Admissions, academic units’ retention efforts, and Athletics and many other units have made significant strides in attracting and retaining outstanding students. A 21% increase in First Time in College students and an 18% increase in transfer students made for an excellent start to our Fall semester. We now have the most diverse Honors College in the state (and perhaps the Midwest) and by this time next year PNW will be a federally designated Hispanic Serving Institution with more than 25% of our students identifying as Hispanic and/or Latinx. The positive vibe and energy of welcoming our increasingly diverse student body can be felt throughout the campuses.

Academic Affairs has again broken records for increasing external funding in sponsored programs and has continued to recruit outstanding new faculty members. Of particular note in Academic Affairs are the new doctoral degree in Technology which will welcome its first cohort of students in January, and the positive steps taken toward approval of the doctoral degree in Counseling Psychology.

Our marketing efforts have won multiple national awards and have reached new heights with intentional and strategic social media and digital marketing, anchored by a best-in-class website. In Development, we continue to reach new goals in fundraising.

The past years of declining enrollments have been hard for all of us to weather, but we have managed to take many small bites in adjusting our budget. This has allowed us to sidestep the type of truly major cuts which we are seeing at many other institutions in the state and in the country.

Again, thank you for your hard work and for making PNW the first-choice university for most of our freshmen, according to a survey conducted this summer of our incoming class. The challenges facing higher education today will likely be ongoing. This reality further emphasizes the need for us to remain staunchly committed supporters of PNW and to continue to provide quality experiences in and out of the classroom for our students.

I wish you and your family a very warm and joyous holiday season.

Sincerely,

Thomas L. Keon, Chancellor