YSU Provost Lays Out Vision for Academic Master Plan

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – An academic master plan will involve people from across campus and ensure people on campus see the big picture for Youngstown State University’s future, the provost told faculty and administrators Thursday morning.

“This academic master plan will be the first ever at Youngstown State University,” Jennifer Pintar, provost and vice president of academic affairs, said Thursday during her State of Academic Affairs address.

It will be vetted by faculty, too.

“The president and the vice presidents have made it very clear that they’re here to support academics,” Pintar said. “I think that message needs to resonate with all of our faculty because they mean it.”

Right now the academic master plan is a blank document. 

“We want to hear from you, and that’s going to start with all of you starting in September,” Pintar said. 

It will start with meetings with departments to gather input, and then surveys will be conducted. In October, four town halls will be convened to show the progress made in developing the plan. It will be presented to the academic senate in November and university trustees in December, with implementation beginning next year.

“With this plan, we’re looking at improving accountability and transparency,” Pintar said.

YSU is also developing plans for enrollment, marketing and communications. They’re all built on the foundation of the YSU Strategic Plan to Take Charge of Our Future, she said.

“They will enforce those answers to the questions of where we’re going academically,” Pintar said.

YSU isn’t becoming a strictly technical school or an online-only institution. But it’s important to offer those options to prospective students who want them.

“Making sure we all know the big picture is the point of this exercise,” she said.

Pintar said her priorities are students – No. 1 – faculty, the community and programming.

Meetings with administrators in laying the groundwork for the plans showed the importance of working together, Pintar said. 

“I believe when we all work together, great things happen,” she said. 

She referred to the demographic cliff, the decreasing number of new high school graduates across the country and in Ohio.

About 132,000 Ohio high school students graduated in 2024. Of that number, only 66% enrolled in two- or four-year colleges, and 11% of those left the state. That left about 53,000 in Ohio.

“Guess how many institutions we have?” Pintar said. “There are 194 Ohio institutions competing for those 53,000 students.”

While all signs at YSU point to an enrollment increase this fall, it’s not in the top five for market share in Ohio. Those five institutions are The Ohio State University, the University of Cincinnati, Columbus State Community College, Sinclair State Community College and Kent State University.

“How do we break into that top five? I would say we break into that by working together,” Pintar said.

She pointed to how the faculty, academic senate and administration worked together to establish 60 new associate and certificate programs at YSU to serve those who formerly attended Eastern Gateway Community College. Eastern Gateway is closing and stopped enrolling students last spring.

“We had a shared vision. We had a common goal,” the provost said. “We were responsive to the needs of the community, and we all worked together.”

She said she wants to build enough shared trust, responsibility and transparency that faculty feel comfortable engaging in conversations like they did while developing the programs to serve former Eastern Gateway students.

One of her visions for the office of academic affairs is open communication, collaborative decision making and transparent leadership.

“And I believe that the more the faculty feel that they’re heard – not only listened to, but heard – the more likely they are to engage with the direction of the institution knowing that we want to break in that top five,” she said.

She started a provost leadership group with a member from every YSU college as another way to hear different perspectives. 

The academic program enhancement and effectiveness initiative continues this year, with some tweaks. The APEEI is a platform that assesses program offerings at other institutions, local and national student demand and employment opportunities for fields of study.

When faculty members wanted to develop new programs in the past, they would talk to the department chair and dean and, if approved, take it to the academic senate and then administration. Now though, once a faculty member gets approval from the department chair and dean, he or she will present it to the provost’s office, which will look at the market research and budget.

And all programs will go through a continuous review cycle to determine what makes them unique and what differentiates them from similar programs at other institutions.

“We’re looking for curricular efficiencies,” Pintar said. “As you all know, we’ve been hitting hard on curricular efficiencies. We’ve made dramatic progress.”

YSU has decreased low enrollment programs from nearly 500 to about 300, Pintar said. There’s more work to do, but she called that a huge success.

YSU reports to the state this year, so department chairpersons will be cracking down on low enrollment courses.

“Our target for undergrad is 100 courses,” Pintar said. 

Some courses may need closer contact, but there are some undergraduate courses running with four or fewer students.

“That’s not good for pedagogy reasons either,” the provost said. 

Last January, YSU started what Pintar called a focus-plus group of courses. Those 12 courses, some of which were identified because of low enrollment, some due to high costs, are going through “shared governance for change,” she said. 

Academic affairs met with those faculty over the spring term to see how they could help them grow those programs. 

“We’re proud to say that we’ve been able to move $1.3 million into a budget line that is going to support those programs and the marketing in all of our specific programs,” Pintar said. 

YSU is embarking on program-specific marketing. 

“Another way that we’re investing is 24 new faculty hires this semester,” she said. 

Tenure and retrenchment were among the topics about which faculty questioned Pintar.

YSU is starting many associate degree programs, and a lot of those faculty positions aren’t tenure track, she explained.

Pintar acknowledged that retrenchment is a difficult process.

“By developing the academic master plan and working together with faculty, that’s the transparency,” she said. 

Working through the focus-plus program involved honest conversations.

“Our goal is to not retrench any faculty,” Pintar said. “We know we can’t cut our way to prosperity. We know that, but there has been, in the past, a bit of an academic drift.”

There have been programs that were good years ago but haven’t updated, she said. 

“We’ll never cut a program that is thriving,” Pintar said.

Pictured at top: Jennifer Pintar, provost and vice president of academic affairs at YSU.

Copyright 2024 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.