Susan West Engelkmeyer, president of Nichols College.
February 1, 2016
Shop Talk
Nichols revamping curriculum toward data, ethics, leadership
Susan West Engelkemeyer, president of Nichols College
Susan West Engelkemeyer started her tenure as Nichols College president five years ago, coming to the institution from Babson College. The college with 1,200 undergraduates has always sought to stand out from others in New England higher education by offering a core business education tract, and Engelkemeyer works to ensure the curriculum meets the needs of Central Mass. businesses.
Why does Nichols stress leadership training?
We changed our vision statement to be a college of choice for business and leadership training. Our new tagline is “Learn, Lead, Succeed.” We felt that leadership was something that everyone needs to do, whether you are in front of people or you are going to lead quietly from behind the scenes. Leadership is a differentiator for our students and for our college. Employers that have hired our students say in many cases that our students were ready to hit the ground running.
What other curriculum changes are coming?
With our undergraduate curriculum that rolls out this fall, we have major changes to our business core. We updated it with new topics like analytics and business ethics. In the general education core – the core that all students take regardless of major – we updated that to include professional development.
We know the analytics is something that is getting a lot of attention these days – analytics and big data. We want our students to be better prepared for that. With the ethics piece, when we took a hard look at what is required by our business accreditors, that is one area we felt we could do more than we are doing now.
What else are area employers telling you?
We are always curious about surveys of employers. We survey the employers of our graduates, but we want to know what the needs that are out there. We hear a lot that it is the soft skills that make a hard impression, so we wanted to be sure our students were able to work in teams and to collaborate. Those are the things employers are constantly seeking that they feel don’t necessarily get delivered by all schools.
How have you changed the infrastructure to cater to these new academic changes?
We opened up a new academic building this fall. That includes state-of-the-art classrooms that are all designed to enhance teamwork and collaboration. It includes faculty offices. Before that time, our faculty shared offices, and I should add, they never complained about it, which is amazing. We have student academic services in that building as well.
Will this help you attract new students?
We will continue to focus on business as our specialty area. That keeps us focused on who we are and what we want to deliver, but we will be looking at some other major concentration areas that students are interested in that we currently don’t address.
We have students from 17 different states, but the majority of students come from the local area.
Especially in the Northeast, the number of students graduating from high school and going onto college is on the decline and isn’t expected to recover until about 2021, so all of us are fighting for a piece of a smaller pie. It is a real challenge that all schools face about how you differentiate yourself. What is the value-added proposition at Nichols College?
Will you change that value-added element?
We are completing a strategic plan that will end in 2017. As we start thinking about what we will focus on for the next five to 10 years, one of the questions we will have to answer is, “Are we right size or do we want to grow?” One of the challenges if we do decide to grow is we don’t have enough bed space.
How do you make sure Nichols is affordable?
We have frozen tuition for this next fall. Between 2013 and 2017, we will have only raised tuition 1 percent, so we are very, very conscious about how difficult it is to fund higher education these days. We have also doubled down and increased the number of scholarships. We have almost doubled the amount of endowed scholarships, and we have had some incredible gifts from our alumni. The chairman of our board – John Davis – just made an additional contribution on top of what he has made in the past. He has given $1 million to help some of our students with the highest level of financial need.
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