Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
Wright State University (WSU) will have a brighter future if it can win partners among Dayton-area businesses, Wright State’s new president, Sue Edwards, told Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce members Friday.
“We’ve had some rough times,” Edwards told a chamber breakfast briefing Friday at Stratacache Tower in downtown Dayton. “We have disappointed the region. And I know that, because my enrollment tells me that.”
Edwards was named president of Wright State late in 2019, as the university struggled to emerge from several years of budgetary, legal and workforce traumas. The university today has about 12,500 students, down from about 18,000 in 2016. About 2,000 of today’s students are graduate students.
WSU trustees slashed about $31 million from the school’s budget in 2017. That wasn’t enough, and the school then cut spending by some $53 million in fiscal 2018.
Further, Wright State has a student retention rate of only 64 percent from the freshman to sophomore academic years — a number Edwards said is too low.
“We have to figure out how to narrow that gap,” she said.
A new day is here, she maintained. “We are not going anywhere,” she said. “We are open for business.”
