On Saturday, Oct. 23, 2021, the Elizabethtown College Board of Trustees met for a business meeting. The board members first met at 7:30 a.m. for breakfast and time to talk.
At 8 a.m., the board started their meeting with a missions moment from 2011 Etown alumna TaLisa Ramos.
Ramos spoke about her experience before, after and while attending the College. She was a first generation college student whose grandparents were immigrants from Puerto Rico. During her first semester of college, Ramos started to question her belonging and began to socially withdraw and experience symptoms of depression, ending with her failing out the first semester of college.
However, she never gave up. Ramos got a second chance and entered the social work program, telling herself the whole time, “I deserve to be here.” She realized that if she spoke her voice and shared the pain that she went through, she could improve the lives of other people of Latin origin, first generation college students and people of low socio-economic status.
Once Ramos graduated, she went into the mental health field, where she was usually the only woman of color and the only one from the lower class. In 2019, she became the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) officer at Millersville University, where one day, she got a call from Governor Tom Wolf’s office, where she was asked to be the Inaugural DEI Director for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Ramos ended her speech by saying, “In my mind, Elizabethtown College changed my life. Elizabethtown College changed the trajectory of my family.”
She received a standing ovation from the members of the board.
President Cecilia M. McCormick, J.D. then introduced senior occupational therapy major and Office of Community and Civic Engagement assistant Hannah Smith.
Smith spoke about Into the Streets, the annual service project that the College students participate in after her presentation.
Dave Fuchs provided an opening prayer.
Members then voted to accept the consent agenda and call the meeting to order. An Enrollment Management and Marketing Update was then presented for the board members. The presentation included a profile of the incoming class and then transitioned to talking about how to recruit more students.
The strategies for fall 2022 are continued focus on partnerships and communications, event focus, recruitment, video and social media enhancement, international agent relationships and continued aid leveraging. Etown will also continue to be a standardized test-optional school. The marketing plan is to increase inquiry pool, campus visits and completed applications overall, minimize “summer melt,” encourage early deposits and out of home advertising. The College is also currently running video advertisements on streaming services and using geotargeting.
After the presentation, Dean of the School of Graduate and Professional Studies (SGPS) Jack Rice gave a presentation on the strategy of the SGPS going forward. He first spoke about the recent success of the SGPS and the new sense of teamwork at the College, especially between his team, the admissions team and the deans of the different schools. He said that there are many combined efforts across campus.
In the past 18 months, the SGPS has built two new masters degrees, six new graduate certificates, reversed a revenue decline, and launched 80 mini courses on a new non credit platform, called “Etown Edge.”
Then, the market analysis for the SGPS was presented. The goals were the same as the general marketing strategy for the College. The SGPS also has its own logo, EtownGPS, that is used for its advertisements.
The board then took a short break, and went into committee Reports and Executive Sessions, which were for board members only.
