Fall 2023 Message from Interim Dean McKelvie Dear Whitman Alumni and Friends, We recently welcomed our new and returning students to the Whitman School. It’s such a joy to see the energy and excitement return to the building. We had another impressive cohort of incoming students, further reinforcing that Whitman continues to be a school on the rise. While the numbers won’t be made official for a few weeks, I’ll share some key highlights as well as some temporal comparisons to show just how far we’ve come. - This will be the second largest incoming undergraduate class. While smaller than last year’s number of true first year students (626), it is larger than the prior record (slightly less than 500 following a ‘final four’ appearance). We’re looking to have approximately 530 true first year students, not including internal or external transfers.
- We’ll also have the second largest residential MBA/M.S. class in quite some time, including the largest MBA class in about 10 years.
- The academic qualifications of the incoming undergraduate students have retained record-high levels this year.
- For the first time, Whitman has more incoming undergraduate female than male students (approximately 53%). That’s well above the approximately 37% we had in 2018. And for residential master’s level students, it’s about 46% female (up from 43% last year).
- Whitman has its most racially diverse student body to date. Approximately 22% of the incoming undergraduate class is from underrepresented minority backgrounds (up from 15% in 2018). Among MBA/M.S. students, it’s approximately 9% for domestic students – and then significantly more once we account for international students (such as the 9% of the incoming class now coming from Nigeria).
- Our shared programs with other colleges on campus continued to be attractive, with 75 incoming undergraduates being part of dual programs. Our shared graduate programs also continued to attract talented students, including our MD/MBA with SUNY Upstate Medical University, our J.D./MBA with the College of Law, and our 3+2 programs with the College of Engineering & Computer Science and the College of Visual and Performing Arts.
- We have a strong cohort of international students this year. Approximately 8.5% of our incoming undergraduate class is international (up from about 6% in 2018). For our graduate class, 70% are international and represent 17 countries and 5 continents. For comparisons, 84% of our Fall 2018 incoming master’s class was international (and mostly concentrated from two countries).
I’m very grateful for our recruiting teams for bringing in these new cohorts of undergraduate and master’s students to campus. I’ll also add that Whitman attracted more than 7,000 undergraduate applications this year – another record and where we were highly selective in making offers to join us. I hope you can come and join us on campus soon. Perhaps an added incentive is to come and see the new orange wall in the Flaum Grand Hall during Orange Central weekend at the end of September. We’ll be starting that weekend on Friday afternoon with our Orange Tank event where we will showcase some of our student and alumni entrepreneurs, followed by our annual Syracuse Samplings event. All in all, the new academic year is starting off very well. It’s going to be a busy and productive year and I welcome your thoughts on how we can make it a more meaningful one! Alex McKelvie, Interim Dean of the Whitman School | 
