Dear Colleagues,

We submitted a report to the Provost last week identifying revenue-generating ideas that will require his approval. The idea with the shortest timeframe and the most immediate impact on our budget involves our accepting an estimated 64 more undergraduate and graduate students for the fall 2010. I have pasted in the chart from the report to give you a sense of what this means in terms of different types of students:

We are confident that we can accommodate an additional 64 students in our existing programs. The number of students in our programs has actually decreased by 43 students since 2006, even though we have added new faculty, so this represents a net increase of only 21 students from where we were three years ago. The number of professional students has already increased by 16 (12 in Architecture, 4 in Landscape Architecture), so we would need to maintain that in future years. We also have the capacity to increase the number of graduate students by an additional 10, given the number of new faculty.

The $25,000 annual increase in expenses listed above is our estimate of added cost pool charges and general infrastructure costs that will come with additional students.

I will let you know as soon as we get feedback on this from the Provost. We're hoping he says yes!

Tom