USM Welcomes Students
August 27, 2010
President Botman greets Dickey-Wood Hall students
Staff members in University of Southern Maine residence halls, located on the Gorham campus, welcomed 1,328 students who moved in Saturday and Sunday, August 28 and 29 with the help of their families and friends. Nearly 500 freshman and transfer students arrived Saturday morning and President Selma Botman visited residence halls greeting students and families. Upperclassmen moved in Sunday. See USM’s flickr page to view photographs of students moving in Saturday.
At noon on Sunday, students had opportunities to participate in service projects in Gorham. This year’s projects included scraping and painting the town’s gazebo, now located in front of Gorham’s Town Offices at 75 South St., or clearing the trail behind Narragansett School on Rt. 25, which was damaged by a recent tornado. A full schedule of events for the weekend and the first week of school can be seen at USM Welcome ’10. Classes began on Monday, August 30.
ENROLLMENT TRENDS:
We are seeing a number of positive enrollment trends, among them increases in the number of applications from undergraduate transfer students and deposits from new graduate students. While enrollments will not be finalized until October, we expect to meet our credit hour enrollment targets.
USM RETAINING MORE STUDENTS:
Retention — defined as the number of full-time students who entered USM in 2009 and are returning this fall — is showing especially positive trends. Just over 70 percent of the first-time/full-time students are returning this fall (626 of 892), beating the retention target of 67 percent, while 76 percent of the full-time transfers are returning (458 of 602), beating the retention target of 73 percent. “This is a remarkable increase over last year, a tribute to the hard work of faculty and the Student Success Center personnel,” said USM President Selma Botman.
Last year, USM established Student Success Centers, a consolidation of former student service functions into one unit focused more directly on retaining and graduating more students.
Retention of graduate students also has increased. Some 71 percent of the graduate students are expected to return. The national average is just under 61 percent.
USM PRESIDENT SELMA BOTMAN’S ADDRESS TO FACULTY AND STAFF:
USM President Selma Botman, in her annual address to faculty and staff held the morning of August 27 in Gorham, described a university poised, “…for a new era of reinvestment and strategically managed growth. It is our time to make our mark on public higher education in Maine.” USM, she told some 600 faculty and staff, is in “solid financial shape” and is retaining more students, an important institutional goal.
She also highlighted USM’s academic reorganization, which is being implemented this year and takes effect next fall. Its greatest impact, said Botman, will be an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning that will creatively engage faculty and students in the major issues confronting society in the early 21st-century. Those issues include the value of diversity, the stewardship of our public and natural resources and higher education’s commitment to the intellectual and economic futures of students. This approach, said Botman, “is essential to building a world that continues to see complexity as something to be explored and analyzed, that treats difference as intellectually enriching, and that takes as a given the need to better understand the world as we seek to create a healthier, fairer, more equitable future for ourselves, our families, and our communities.”
Read the full text of Botman’s address at http://usm.maine.edu/pres/publications/.
For more information, please contact Bob Caswell or Judie O’Malley at 207-780-4200.
