Updates and Accomplishments

Marketing and Enrollment Strategies

We welcomed two new vice presidents:

• Mark Eyerly, vice president for marketing and communications, joined Ithaca College on July 1, 2023. Mark restructured his team around a storytelling strategy and recruited new leaders for communications, and for design and multi-media. The storytelling strategy began feeding compelling content to prospective students through our website, social media, and recruitment materials.
• Rakin “Rock” Hall, vice president for enrollment strategy and student success, joined Ithaca College on February 1, 2024. Rock implemented improvements throughout the recruitment funnel, including adopting an earlier, expanded name-buy strategy, targeting specific geographies where applications slipped in recent years, and increasing outreach to high school juniors and sophomores.

We developed stronger relationships among the academic, enrollment, and marketing divisions, leading to stronger presentations in our open houses and admitted-student events, and to improved recruitment materials.

Data Management
Information Technology and Analytics launched a beta version of an enrollment dashboard to track first-year, transfer, and returning student enrollment for the fall semester. The dashboard allows users to select melt rates from previous years to view various projections for final census numbers.

Institutional Relationships
We built stronger connections and more regular communications with area partners like the Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES), Tompkins Cortland Community College (TC3), local high schools, and college in the region that closed, to forge pipelines for perspective students.

Academic Realignments
We launched a Doctor of Physical Therapy program, with its first cohort of students arriving for the 2024 summer semester, and we announced an online modality for our master of science degree program in Speech-Language Pathology.  

We consolidated a business administration major with 10 concentrations into five new majors that are attractive to prospective students: business analytics, finance, marketing, strategic leadership, and sports management. 

 We reorganized and renamed majors in the Park School of Communications to better align the offerings with prospective students’ interests. The new majors are communication strategy and design; film; and television, photography, and digital media.

We added a master’s teaching degree in computer science.  

 We launched teacher education graduate programs that allow students to be hired by a district to teach in a local school while they are attending graduate school to earn their master’s degree and initial teacher certification.

The first of its kind in the country, a Speech Language Pathology (SLP) Graduate online modality was set to begin enrolling its first cohort in fall 2024. This is a completely online program, except for the clinical experiences, that allows both full time and part time participation for students seeking a graduate degree in SLP.

Campus Partners
Philanthropy and Engagement collaborated with admissions to reinvigorate the alumni student referral program, which resulted in 37 admitted students for fall 2024. It also partnered with admissions to contact 2,500-plus admitted students to offer congratulations and answer questions about the IC experience.

We welcomed Stanley Bazile (June 10, 2024) as our new vice president for student affairs and campus life.

Omar Stoute ’18 was named director for staff equity, inclusion, and belonging, completing the three-person leadership team in the Center for Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging.

Our newly rebranded Center for Career Exploration and Development launched student-driven Career Corner podcasts and held monthly Career Caravans across campus to encourage earlier and ongoing engagement.   

• Ninety percent of 2023 IC graduates were employed or in graduate school within six months of graduation, a seven-point increase from the previous year.
• The office conducted more than 1,200 student appointments and drop-in sessions; held 108 events (double the previous year), recorded a 12-point increase in student engagement. 
• Academic Affairs and the Career Development and Exploration office expanded their collaboration around experiential learning and career exploration, with an initial focus on student employment and internship coordination

The Center for Student Success and Retention became fully staffed with three new success coaches, an associate director, and a program coordinator. The team developed a model to assign caseloads to success coaches by using data to identify students with the highest likelihood of not retaining to third semester.   

The Center for LGBT Education, Outreach & Services opened a new Gender Affirming Clothing Closet.   

A new AI tool reduced from hours to just 10 minutes the time needed to produce a summary of a student’s academic status, engagement, and wellbeing indicators, helping the ICare team spend more time meeting with students.

Athletics
Ithaca College finished 29th in the Division III LEARFIELD Directors’ Cup standings with a commanding lead over all other Liberty League institutions. Ithaca is one of just five schools to finish within the top 30 every year since the Directors' Cup started in 1995-96.  

Academics
For the first time, the college assigned and pre-registered incoming fall-semester students to their courses, based on intended majors and academic interests.

Life on Campus
Significant changes to our dining program continued to exceed expectations. Satisfaction was up, complaints were down, and staffing remained stable.

IC subsidized free rides for students on Tompkins Consolidated Area Transit.

We welcomed Laine Norton (July 1, 2023) as our new vice president of philanthropy and engagement. Laine focused on building strong frameworks and procedures, most notably bolstering her philanthropy team, including recruiting new leaders, enhancing alumni engagement endeavors, optimizing the phone-a-thon program, and ensuring data integrity. 

The division created comprehensive policies and procedures around planned giving processing, tracking, and reporting in the CRM system.  

P&E audited the College’s documented estate gifts to secure future revenue and confirm donors who qualify as Founder’s Circle members. In tandem with the audit, P&E developed a Founder’s Circle logo and a plan to increase awareness and enrich the stewardship experience.  

Involving alumni, families, and supporters both on and off campus, engagement efforts ranged from pre-game huddles at athletics events to networking gatherings like the Bomber Entrepreneur Network. Events in the LA area held in February drew over 200 alumni and supporters who gathered for socializing and campus updates. Fifty high-level supporters convened to hear insights from IC alums on topics such as the future of work and the role of higher education in workforce preparation. 

To improve data relevance and integrity, the P&E team created structures to provide data; built onboarding and division-wide system training to boost productivity; and conducted a mass data wealth screening of all 250,000 constituents to identify potential donors with the capacity to make significant gifts.