Delivering Next Level Student Success with a Better Student Experience

Dear Baruch College Faculty and Staff,

At our recent Strategic Plan Midpoint Summit, we took stock of where we are and where we must go next. The message was clear: while we have made meaningful progress across many areas, our first and most important priority—Maximizing Students’ Potential to Succeed—must continue to guide how we evolve as an institution.

Baruch has earned a national reputation for strong student outcomes: high graduation rates, upward social mobility, and exceptional career placement. These achievements reflect the dedication and talent of our faculty and staff.

At the same time, as I listen to our students and to many of you, a consistent theme has emerged. While our outcomes are strong, the path to achieving them is often more complicated than it should be. Students can experience Baruch not as one institution, but as a series of offices, processes, and systems that are not always easy to navigate. Faculty and staff, in turn, often work within structures that make coordination more difficult than it needs to be.

If we are to truly maximize our students’ potential and sustain our leadership in outcomes, we must focus on what we achieve and how we deliver that experience.

This is the context for a new effort we are calling Next Level Student Success.

Led by Provost Essig and a steering committee of faculty and administrative leaders from across the College, this initiative is designed to reimagine the student experience at Baruch—how we operate, how we align our resources, and how we support students from entry through graduation and beyond. Our goal is simple but ambitious: to create a student experience that is more connected, more supportive, and easier to navigate from beginning to end.

To support this work, we partnered with Deloitte’s Higher Education practice to facilitate the process and provide an external perspective informed by national best practices and broad engagement across our community.

Over the past several months, Deloitte completed this initial phase through interviews, focus groups, workshops, data analysis, and benchmarking against peer institutions. Recent workshops explored opportunities to better integrate academic and career advising, strengthen student-facing services such as BOSS, and enhance the learning experience in our classrooms. This work has helped clarify both our strengths and the areas where we can improve.

We are now moving into the next phase of the effort. Building on these insights, the steering committee, working with Deloitte and campus stakeholders, are developing a set of recommendations and an implementation plan. Several themes are already emerging: a more coordinated, high-touch, high-tech approach to student support; more proactive and collaborative services; and stronger alignment between academic experiences and career outcomes. At its core, this work is about making it easier for our students, and for all of us, to succeed.

I also recognize that change, even when needed and welcomed, can bring uncertainty. But this work is not about change for its own sake. It is about making thoughtful, transparent, and meaningful improvements that better support our students, faculty, and staff.

The steering committee will continue this work through May, developing recommendations and implementation plans that I look forward to sharing with you. This is an important moment for Baruch. By aligning our efforts more closely with our strategic priorities—and by rethinking how we deliver on them—we have an opportunity to build on our considerable strengths and create a seamless, supportive, and enriching experience for our students.

Thank you for your continued engagement with and commitment to our students.

Sincerely,

S. David Wu
President, Baruch College