This Florida university is on a continual quest for improvement. President Arthur Kirk shares a few strategies with Blane Bachelor.

In the mid-1990s, a look around the main campus of Saint Leo University, then a small Catholic college in central Florida called Saint Leo College, didn’t suggest much optimism. Full-time attendance for the campus’ undergraduate program had plummeted to fewer than 400 resident students, buildings had fallen into disrepair, and there was even talk of closing the campus and focusing on operating the school’s more profitable regional centers.

Then, in 1997, Saint Leo’s board of directors took action, bringing aboard new president Arthur Kirk to reverse the troubling trends. Kirk spearheaded an effort that, over the next 10 years, addressed the school’s myriad and complex challenges with a refreshingly simple formula: focus on the needs of its students. The turnaround that followed came as a result of achieving long-term goals such as increasing enrollment, taking care of short-term needs such as maintenance, and maintaining the school’s strong tradition of bringing educational opportunities to the students it serves.

“We focused on the things that were of the utmost importance to the student, whether that was a 37-year-old mother of two, a military student, or an 18-year-old freshman,” Kirk said. “We looked at things we could do to improve their satisfaction, and we improved our marketing and outreach efforts to them.”

Arthur Kirk

Of course, some of those jumps can be attributed to the national trend of increased enrollment in higher education. However, there’s no doubt that Saint Leo’s aggressive approach to improvement has certainly made the grade.

Tailored programs
Saint Leo’s main campus in Pasco County, Fla. is within a few hours’ drive of two of the state’s powerhouse public institutions: the University of Florida and Florida State University. But Saint Leo has earned some name recognition of its own, thanks to a unique history and a longstanding commitment to serving the military sector. The school is currently the largest of four Catholic universities in Florida and a leading provider of education to the military.

Saint Leo was founded in 1889 by a group of Benedictine priests and nuns who set up a small preparatory school in one of the state’s most sparsely inhabited regions. For about 80 years, the Pasco campus was Saint Leo’s only location. In 1973, Avon Park Bombing Range, located in nearby Highlands County, approached Saint Leo with an invitation that would change its history: to offer continuing education classes to servicemen and women stationed on the range.

The program worked so well that Saint Leo was invited later that year to offer classes at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. The school tailored its program to meet the needs of the military student, with nine-week terms and classes in the evening, both of which were designed around the length of military assignments and the fact that many active-duty jobs have day schedules. Soon, other branches in the military began seeking out Saint Leo.

Since then, Saint Leo has expanded into Army, Navy and Air Force bases located throughout the country, with more than 15,000 total students (including military) in locations from San Diego to Key West. In Georgia, where it has a large educational center just outside Atlanta at Fort McPherson, Saint Leo has plans for expansion north into Gwinnett County and will soon implement a criminal justice program at the Atlanta Police Academy, both at the undergraduate and graduate level.

Turbulent waters
As strong as Saint Leo’s partnership with the military has traditionally been, the university experienced a shock in the early 1990s with the first Gulf War. Hundreds of thousands of troops were sent to the Middle East; for Saint Leo, that meant one day there were 17 students in a class, the next day there were five, Kirk said.

That immediate drop, combined with the drastic reduction in the number of military troops over the next several years and the rising costs of education, wreaked havoc on Saint Leo. “Our economics changed from being fine to being disastrous,” Kirk said.

Kirk was hired to reverse those misfortunes, and the first step in that formidable task was a thorough market analysis on how well the school met the needs of prospective students and how it could improve on its operations to attract new ones.

A major component in the transformation has been the implementation of process re-engineering, or the way in which it handles business processes. In 1999, a new management information system was installed to streamline the traditionally complex processes of admissions and financial aid.

Kirk uses numbers to illustrate the dramatic improvements: In 1997, the registrar’s office had a staff of 18 that was overseeing the transcripts of 7,000 students and needed about five weeks to turn around a transcript for a military student; today, a staff of 12 handles the paperwork of 15,000 students and processes that military transcript in less than a week (earning the praise of military students, who are often transferred on short notice).

In 1997 and 1998, the school made the leap online, a calculated risk that has paid off tremendously, Kirk said. The university also began converting to document imaging to process its admissions paperwork, a technological advancement that Kirk estimates has saved the school nearly half a million dollars since it was implemented two years ago.

Those gains are reflective of financial figures that have been on the upswing: revenues rose from $24 million in 1996 to nearly $90 million a decade later, and net assets grew from about $19 million to more than $52 million in that time frame. During the past decade, Saint Leo also has constructed five new buildings and purchased eight others.

But not everything has grown. Kirk points to a class size that averages around 17 students as a longtime draw for Saint Leo. “What students will tell you here, and it’s as true on a military base as it is on campus, is that a relationship with a faculty member is the thing they appreciate most,” he said.

Blane Bachelor is an Atlanta-based freelance writer who covers travel and business. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .