Business View Magazine | February 2021

223 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 2021 BENEDI CT COLLEGE for our graduates. We also doubled down on our engineering programs and other high demand fields for young people. The review resulted in our focusing significant resources on those areas, while maintaining our stalwart programs in education, social work, the arts, biology, and business. We are reaching toward the future in terms of employability for our students. “We have fundamentally shifted the institution on its axis, and as you might imagine that does come with a good deal of anxiety for the institution and perhaps to some extent for its constituents who have always known it. We conducted a holistic assessment of the entire campus; recognizing that our students deserve our very best at all times and that required us to really look across the institution and make adjustments.” BVM: What adjustments were made? Artis: “First and foremost we addressed our business model and our staffing. In many respects we were overstaffed for the population that we were serving, so we made significant adjustments. Importantly, we did not just take away, we began to add. We focused on our outcomes, our graduation rates, our retention completion and recognized that we needed a focused effort on retention. It is of little value for an institution like Benedict College to recruit students who are not capable of persistence and graduation, without sufficient support. Therefore, we added a new retention and student success office. “We also did a tuition reset. Benedict was, in my eyes, somewhat expensive. Eighty four percent of my students are low wealth students with very little access to resources, and over 74 percent were first generation college students. They don’t come from college-educated wealthy families and the sacrifice it takes to commit