Dr. Tim Gilmour describes how this university has adopted a mentoring philosophy to serve the needs of students.

When Dr. Tim Gilmour joined Wilkes University in 2001 as president, one of his first assignments was to develop a strategic plan for the institution. Luckily, Gilmour came from a strategic planning background: vice president of strategic planning at Georgia Tech University, and university planning specialist in the Office of Budget and Planning at Pennsylvania State University.

Today, Gilmour and his team are deep into implementing that strategic plan, which they call Vision 2010. “The plan entails significant change to the organization, but it also builds on our historic strengths, which really comes down to commitment to our students and their success through individual attention. That has become our brand, which we call mentoring, and we think that will work for all of our students through their entire career with us.”

Show don’t tell
Wilkes University, based in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., rolled out The Majority of One at the beginning of the year, a concept designed to build out its mentoring philosophy. “The idea is to talk to individual students and recruit them, one by one,” Gilmour said.

Dr. Tim Gilmour, President

For example, the university will talk to a student, and include that student in billboards, television ads, and mall kiosks, showing what they know about that candidate. As a result, all potential recruits see the personal side of the recruiting process as well as the university. When Gilmour and his team committed the university to being an institution dedicated to mentoring students, they felt they needed a campaign that didn’t just say Wilkes University was a mentoring institution, but rather showed completely that it is a mentoring institution.

“This is a show-don’t-tell campaign in which we demonstrate our ability to know students before we bring them on board,” Gilmour said. “It’s unusual because it’s a micro message in a macro market, a message intended for one person for everyone to hear. The anti-advertising nature of that captures people’s imagination in a way that is special.”

The campaign has already received an enormous amount of national exposure. “We’ve gotten an incredible number of hits to our Web sites, and online applications are way up. We know from talking to students that the individual high schools that we targeted were very much abuzz with what we’re doing. Those are good indications that our name recognition is being increased among the targeted population,” Gilmour said.

Filling the seats
Over the last five years, Wilkes University has been building the number of enrollments on its main campus. The strategic plan calls for Wilkes to double overall enrollments, particularly in the graduate and continuing studies areas, by 2010. “We plan on going from about 2,350 in 2001 to a total of about 4,000 FTEs on and off campus by that time. We are right on target to make that happen,” said the president.

According to Gilmour, Wilkes was already an institution prepared to handle the size of 4,000 students. “We’re building back up to the capacity that we were already at in the mid ’90s. We’re filling the seats on an empty bus, and it has been a relatively cost-effective move for us.”

Moving up
Gilmour and his team have made substantial investments to further the university’s mentoring philosophy (about $500,000 a year). Gilmour mentioned that figure is likely to increase as Wilkes University begins to enhance its financial performance over the next few years.

“We’re providing students and faculty time to develop model-mentoring relationships that are effective in their disciplines,” the president said. The university also has an e-mentoring program, which precedes its orientation program. Similar to a version of MySpace, students can post pictures and talk about who they are. Upperclassmen and staff members have the opportunity to work with and talk with students about related issues and questions before they arrive to campus.

Overall, Wilkes University’s retention statistics have been up dramatically, and the graduation rate is steadily growing. “Our ultimate objective is to increase these retention and graduation rate statistics and enhance student learning,” Gilmour said. “Frankly, we have some work to do on measuring student learning from where we are right now, but that’s where our next big emphasis is: to make sure what we’re doing in mentoring enhances student learning. What we want to be is very good in comparison with where we’ve been, but we also want to be very good in comparison to our peer institutions.”

Gilmour described Wilkes University as a strategy-driven organization, trying to move forward to enhance its performance. “We want to move the institution up a level or two and create a truly sustainable organization that is going to thrive in the future. You can’t do that without strategy and the commitment to make tough decisions and move things forward.”