Dear Campus Community,

As we start another academic year, I’ve been thinking a lot about student success. Last week I sent out a communication about new investments in PhD and MFA student funding, as a first step towards achieving our desired growth, which includes not only a larger number of students enrolled at UCR, but also improved outcomes for those students in terms of graduation rates, time to degree, and career placements. We welcomed a new Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies, Dr. Lidia Kos, to campus in July, and I look forward to her leadership in working with the graduate programs toward these shared goals.

I am pleased to report that we have made good progress toward a key intermediate goal for undergraduate student success: increasing our average undergraduate credit load from 14.0 last fall (the lowest in a decade) to 14.4 this fall. We still have work to do to get to fulltime enrollment of 15.0, but we’re on the right track, and I want to thank all the staff and faculty who have worked together to help our students make timely progress toward their degrees.

I’d like to direct your attention to a wealth of information that the Office of Institutional Research maintains on its Academic Data Dashboards site. In addition to dashboards on institutional metrics such as graduation rates, retention rates, time to degree, and student-to-instructor ratios, you can find dashboards on average class sizes, average credit loads, course capacity and fill rates, course grades and equity gaps, course demographics, and many other topics that may be helpful in teaching and advising our undergraduates.

In addition to student success, faculty success is also critical to our mission. Earlier this month, we had a lovely celebratory dinner at the Mission Inn to recognize faculty who were promoted in 2022-23 along with faculty who won major national and international awards. You can see the data on how faculty advanced through merits and promotions in the Year in Review report on the APO website. You can also find other academic personnel data analyses, the dates of events and workshops, the 2023-24 edition of the CALL, and other useful resources on this site.

I wish you all the best for a happy, healthy, and successful fall quarter!

Sincerely,

Liz