In this instance, the predictive analytics have overlooked Drexel's great advantage: Our team is made up of a group of talented young men excelling in athletics and academics, feeding off one another's strengths, and buying into Coach Zach Spiker's ethos of "Sometimes you, sometimes me, always us."
And wouldn't you know: Drexel winds up flipping its 21% chance of defeating Villanova after tip off into a 100% certainty with a two-point upset victory, vaulting our program into the national spotlight and propelling us to our best start ever in Coastal Athletic Association play.
The Dragons' stunning victory put an exclamation point on a year in which Drexel students, faculty, alumni and professional staff rallied to meet every moment through the power of teamwork, collaboration and partnerships.
In March, our students dominated the research poster competition for the second straight year at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, for which Drexel served as the host institution. Competing against peers from MIT, Harvard, Penn, the University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon, Rice and Georgetown, Drexel undergraduate and graduate students won 17 of 39 honors, including 10 first-place awards and seven honorable mentions.
When a stretch of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia collapsed in June, Drexel engineering faculty and alumni jumped into action not only to educate the media and to help devise a rebuilding strategy, but also to serve as the principal construction contractors who enabled the highway to re-open in 12 days — months earlier than initially projected. Serving as the general contractor for the rebuild was Buckley & Co., the company led for decades by Drexel alumnus and emeritus trustee Bob Buckley, '58, HD '12 and now led by his son Rob. And right in the thick of the action was Aero Aggregates of North America, led by Drexel alumnus and eminent civil engineer Archibald S. Filshill ('95, PhD '10), which provided more than 8,000 cubic yards of foamed glass aggregate to rebuild the collapsed portion of the highway.
The swift, seemingly miraculous reopening of I-95 once more demonstrated the impact of powerful partnerships — and why external officials and stakeholders can count on Drexel to serve as a great partner.
Indeed, powerful partnerships with Drexel continue to take many shapes and forms.
Some build on longstanding partnerships to deepen engagement, as Drexel and Lockheed Martin did last spring to create the Lockheed Martin Launchpad as a hub to foster innovation.
Some strengthen the position of Drexel and its partners to pursue ambitious goals for the greater good, as the dramatic financial turnaround at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children has demonstrated.
Hundreds of partnerships with federal, commonwealth, and city agencies, with nonprofit foundations, and with private industry fuel our steadily growing research enterprise. Over the past 13 years, Drexel has more than doubled its annual research expenditures, propelling us into the ranks of only 39 private doctoral universities that have earned the Carnegie Classification R1 designation for "very high research activity."
Overall research expenditures for FY23 reached $169.6 million, up $18 million over the previous year. Externally sponsored research expenditures in FY23 totaled $153.3 million, up $8.5 million over the previous year, with the College of Medicine ($37.3 million), the Dana and David Dornsife School of Public Health, the College of Engineering ($23.9 million), and the College of Arts and Sciences ($14.3 million) surpassing the $10 million mark.
Drexel got off to a strong start for the 2024 fiscal year by winning $62 million in research grants for the first quarter. As we kicked off the new academic year in late September, we were especially thrilled by the news that the Dana and David Dornsife School of Public Health had received a $20 million award from the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Common Fund through the agency's Community Partnerships to Advance Science for Society (ComPASS) program to study health equity solutions nationwide.
Beneath and beyond all these impressive numbers, faculty at Drexel and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University continue to produce an incredible breadth of groundbreaking and often interdisciplinary innovations, inventions and discoveries in STEM, and across all the arts and sciences — many of which are featured in the current edition of EXEL, the University's outstanding biennial research magazine.
Our faculty ranks have grown even stronger with the arrival of 84 outstanding new scholar-educators and practitioners. They bring great energy, fresh thinking and exceptional expertise to areas of excellence and growth opportunities that include: Health Innovation; Health Equity and Wellness; Advanced Materials and Manufacturing; Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Cyber Security; Sustainability and Climate Resilience; and Urban Futures.
With innovative research partnerships continuing to expand across all our core endeavors, Drexel is on track toward reaching its goal of $250 million in research expenditures by 2030, which will further galvanize our efforts to recruit top faculty and students and to extend the frontiers of applied knowledge across all the sciences for the public good.
And in keeping with the spirit of Drexel, we are continuing to form new partnerships that create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
This past summer, Drexel formalized a merger agreement with Salus University, which has an impressive portfolio of outstanding graduate degree programs in high-demand fields in the health professions. Under our integration plan, Salus' Pennsylvania College of Optometry will become a standalone college at Drexel, while other Salus programs, including audiology, speech-language pathology, physician assistant studies, occupational therapy, and orthotics and prosthetics, will be become part of the College of Nursing and Health Professions. When this merger is completed, Drexel will offer our students an even wider array of pathways to careers in the health professions and bolster our global reputation as a comprehensive teaching and research university.
This is a challenging time for our world — and for higher education, which has seen public trust and confidence drop at an alarming rate. This places an even greater responsibility on Drexel to prepare our students and deploy our assets toward playing an essential role in the world.
This is also a call to continue seizing challenges that our city, country and world face as opportunities to join forces with neighbors, organizations, companies, and other "eds and meds" in order to learn together, solve problems together and grow together.
Throughout this report you will read stories about extraordinary achievements in our classrooms, research labs and athletics; about Drexel's leadership in experiential learning and co-operative education; and about our progress in promoting innovation and inclusive growth in University City and communities throughout the world.
At the heart of all these endeavors is an unwavering commitment to collaboration and partnership — among students and faculty across multiple disciplines; between co-op students and employers; between student-athletes and coaches; and between Drexel and external stakeholders.
Before you dive into this report, I would like to call your attention to some key milestones and achievements from 2023.
Putting Students First — and Rising in National Rankings
Drexel made impressive gains in national rankings, which are now focusing more heavily on student outcomes.
For example, the 2024 U.S. News & World Report rankings changed its methodology in favor of new criteria, such as first-generation student graduation rates and college graduate earnings, which more align with our commitment to broad access and student success. As a result, Drexel placed in the top 100, ranking 98th out of 435 universities and 50th among private universities.
We should also be pleased by Drexel's strong showing in the Wall Street Journal/College Pulse rankings of best colleges and universities, which focuses more heavily on student outcomes and the learning environment of the 400 institutions that were ranked. Drexel placed 54th overall and 37th among comprehensive research universities with R1 and R2 designations.
Finally, U.S. News & World Report just published its 2024 rankings of online bachelor's programs. Among 339 universities that offer online bachelor's degrees, Drexel ranked #71, making this the fourth consecutive year of improvement from our #99 position in 2020.
Drexel will continue to climb in national rankings as we keep providing the things that matter most to our students — a welcoming and supportive learning environment, and a rewarding experience that prepares them for a lifetime of success and personal fulfillment.
But more important, by putting our students first, we will continue to attract and graduate large numbers of accomplished future scholars, professionals and leaders from all backgrounds.
On that score, we are off to a promising start.
In September, we welcomed new cohorts of undergraduate and graduate students, who come from all backgrounds and parts of the country and world. They are an exceptionally talented and diverse class — with boundless potential to parlay their Drexel experience into a life filled with purpose and high achievement.
Against a sharp 4% national decline in enrollment of first-year students at private, nonprofit four-year colleges, Drexel's first-year undergraduate class stands at 2,850 students, a 1.2% decrease over last year. Current enrollment of 2,483 new graduate, certificate and professional school students, although a 0.7% decrease over last year, nonetheless outperforms national trends that show a nearly 5% enrollment decline.
Meanwhile, I am very encouraged to report that we retained nearly 90% of the fall 2022 entering class, which represents a dramatic 2.5% increase over the previous year's retention figures. That is a testament both to our students and to the excellent work of our new Academic Resource Center, a one-stop campus hub for academic advising, tutoring and coaching.
We have developed robust plans for increasing tuition revenue across our undergraduate, graduate and professional programs, with a focus on accelerating recruitment efforts for next year's entering undergraduate class, generating more than $1 million in additional graduate net tuition revenue through a variety of strategies, and continuing our progress to improve the graduate completion rate, which rose to 82.6% — three full percentage points above our goal.
I am also pleased to report the New Year arrival of Dawn Medley as our new senior vice president of enrollment management. Dawn brings to Drexel an impressive track record of improving selectivity, diversity and yield at SUNY-Stony Brook University, where she served most recently as vice provost for enrollment management and retention.
Teaching and Building on Drexel's Phenomenal Collections
Drexel further cemented its national reputation for innovative stewardship and growth of its incomparable Collections while continuing to mount noteworthy exhibitions.
During the spring, the Writers Room, a unique University-community literary arts program at Drexel, mounted "A New Kind of House," an exhibition of captivating photographs and prose by Drexel students, alumni and community members that were displayed alongside paintings from the Drexel Founding Collection in the A.J. Drexel Picture Gallery. The exhibition provided a genuine illumination and reflection of many different ways that our University and neighborhood have changed over the past eight years.
Over the summer, we mounted "Seeing Philadelphia," our first exhibition of the Atwater Kent Collection that Drexel is now privileged to steward, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Drexel also received an $850,000 grant from Pew Charitable Trusts to continue broadening public access to the collection.
During the fall, we presented "Electrified: 50 Years of Electric Factory," a thrilling, multimedia exhibition at the Paul Peck Alumni Center Gallery and the Bossone Research Enterprise Center that celebrates the legacy of Philadelphia's legendary Electric Factory and Electric Factory Concerts.
And to ensure the long-term success in bringing ever greater innovation, creativity, interdisciplinary collaboration and inclusivity to our exhibitions, collections and programming, we established a permanent endowment for the position of Cara Keegan Fry University Curator, and awarded the position to Derek Gillman, distinguished teaching professor in the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design and the executive director of University Collections and Exhibitions.
The Cara Fry University Curator was one of four newly endowed chairs that will enable our faculty to further drive advancements in engineering, computing and informatics, biomedical engineering and collections.
Creating a More Beautiful Campus and a Vivid Innovation Neighborhood Skyline
Noted architect and urbanist Alan Greenberger, who is Drexel's vice president of real estate and facilities, recently published a compelling review of the major campus and innovation district partnership projects that were begun or completed in 2023, or are well on the way toward completion in 2024.
From the major new recreational field and quad-like green spaces that will unify most of our residence halls … to the completion of the 3025 JFK Boulevard complex in Schuylkill Yards and One uCity Square at 25 N. 38th Street … to the construction well underway for the game-changing projects of Spark Therapeutics' Gene Therapy Innovation Center and Gattuso Development Partners' Life Science Research facility at 3201 Cuthbert Street … and so much more, the beautiful campus and vibrant innovation ecosystem that we envisioned in our 2012 Campus Master Plan is becoming a reality before our eyes.
Another Strong Year in Fundraising
Fundraising remained a critical part of our work to grow our endowment and fund operations. This past fiscal year, we raised nearly $77 million in gifts, much of which will support student scholarships and programmatic innovation.
Major gifts included:
- $10 million from the Wilbur C. and Betty Lea Henderson Foundation to establish the Wilbur C. Henderson Real Estate Institute in the Bennett S. LeBow College of Business;
- $2.5 million pledge from alumnus Barry Silk to establish endowed scholarship funds in the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Computing & Informatics;
- $1.875 million from The Howley Foundation to support scholarships for West Catholic Prep students enrolling in engineering at Drexel; and
- $1.5 million from Janet Burkholder to create the Barry C. & Janet E. Burkholder Family Head Women's Basketball Coach endowment.
Drexel's strong performance in fundraising for the current fiscal year featured several seven-figure gifts, including:
- A $1.5 million gift from Drexel University trustee and longtime supporter R. John Chapel Jr. '67, and his wife, Jinnie, has established the John and Jinnie Chapel Learning & Tutoring Center in the Bennett S. LeBow College of Business. The commitment supports Drexel's ongoing efforts to create and utilize campus spaces to support academic activities and improve the overall student experience;
- A $2.5 million gift from alumnus and former trustee Dominic Frederico '74, MBA '82, is transforming the finance trading lab in the Bennett S. LeBow College of Business into the Dominic J. Frederico '74, '82 Finance Trading Lab. The commitment will enable Drexel to enhance students' activities with hands-on, experiential education in portfolio management, equity modeling and other key areas in finance;
- A $2.5 million commitment from trustee Thomas "Rick" Berk '86 and his wife Christine has established the Thomas E. & Christine D. Berk Professorship in the College of Computing & Informatics;
- A $1.25 million pledge from John Martinson to enhance the Pennoni Honors College's "Honors with Distinction" curriculum; and
- $1 million from Trustee Pat McGonigal '86 to support the construction and fit out of the Academic Resource Center in the Korman Center.
Ending the Fiscal Year with a Positive Operating Margin
Notwithstanding strong financial headwinds across the higher education industry, Drexel ended Fiscal Year 2023 with a positive operating margin as we continued to implement strategic initiatives that will position the University to meet the challenges of an increasingly competitive environment. Our revenues exceeded budget by $40.5 million, grants and contracts activity were ahead by $3.9 million, and other income was ahead by $43.3 million, with $27.7 million of that portion coming from additional funding from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Factoring in all other revenue indicators, including an overall $13.6 million increase in operations and a $45.0 million increase in net assets, the University ended the fiscal year in a strong position.
Looking Ahead
Despite our many successes and accomplishments, 2023 represented a new inflection point for higher education. Even before the fateful day of Oct. 7, when the terrorist group Hamas instigated a deadly war with Israel by launching a horrific brutal attack on innocent Israelis, higher education was already under heavy financial stresses. College and university enrollment has fallen by 11% nationwide since 2010, and with the number of high school graduates expected to drop between 10% and 15% from 2026 to 2037, the competitive pressures on tuition-dependent institutions like Drexel are expected to increase exponentially. Those pressures have been further exacerbated by increased costs, constraints on universities' ability to raise tuition to keep pace with those costs, the need to increase tuition discounts to meet enrollment targets, and the competition to generate more revenues in new markets.
Now, with public confidence and trust in higher education eroding further, the colleges and universities that will prevail and flourish must develop and execute bold strategic plans and measures across their entire academic and administrative operations. They must be unafraid to take a critical look at themselves in upholding core values and principles. And they must seek to engage all stakeholders as partners in reimagining their institutions into more innovative and inclusive versions of themselves.
Fortunately for Drexel, we embarked on that path several years ago by developing our bold, foundational 2030 Strategic Plan, which we have been implementing for three years. We are now in the thick of implementing a series of proposals that will better position Drexel for academic success and institutional effectiveness. And we are charting a roadmap toward long-term financial sustainability and margin improvement.
By this time next year, I look forward to reporting on our tangible, measurable progress toward achieving these goals. I am quite confident that our 2024 President's Report will contain many more captivating stories of incredible, indeed dazzling accomplishments by our faculty, students, alumni, professional staff — and all our partners near and far. To borrow from Coach Spiker, "It's always going to be us."
Sincerely,
John Fry
President