An Interview with Provost Thorp

BY NAHUEL FEFER

Nahuel: Provost Holden Thorp, former chancellor of University of North Carolina Chapel Hill assumed his position as Washington University’s chief academic officer nearly a year ago on July 1, 2013. Provost Thorpe, thank you so much for speaking with me today. How would you say your first year has been going thus far?

Provost Thorp: Well it’s been wonderful becoming part of the Wash U community and seeing all the excellence that’s here and the way people feel about Wash U and how engaged everybody is and what a great place this is to be an undergraduate.

Nahuel: That is terrific to hear. What have been some surprises or challenges?

Provost Thorp: Well, I think just seeing up close how intimate the undergraduate experience is. How engaged the faculty are. And providing undergraduate education at the level that we have here combined with what a strong research university this is, and also just seeing what a welcoming and exciting place St. Louis is. This is a cool city, and Patty and I are really excited to be here.

Nahuel: Nice. So can you talk us through your day to day. What are your responsibilities, briefly?

Provost Thorp: Well I’m in charge of the schools and the administrative areas that are related to academics. The research centers, and admissions, and financial aid, and international, and IT, and student affairs.

Nahuel: So everything.

Provost Thorp: Yeah. If you are a student, if you heard me say what I am in charge of, you would wonder what else is there. But there is the hospital, and the endowment, facilities and I am not in charge of any of those things, and I am not in charge of development.

Nahuel: So which of these areas do you feel is toughest to deal with? What do you think is Washington University’s, like, biggest long-term challenge?

Provost Thorp: Well I think continuing to provide the kind of experience that we provide, at the level that people expect, and doing that in a way that is as responsible as it could possibly be, with regard to both keeping the cost down for the people that are here, but also expanding the group of people who are able to take advantage of all of this.

Nahuel: Yeah. So compared to its peer institutions, of course, Washington University is pretty socio-economically homogeneous. Does the administration consider this a big problem, and if so, what are they doing to tackle it?

Provost Thorp: Yes. Well I am very proud of how far we have been able to move our stance on this since I got here. I came just as the New York Times story that got a lot of attention about our low number of Pell grants came out. That was known before I got here. That list comes out every year.

Nahuel: What do our Pell grant numbers look like compared…?

Provost Thorp: Well I think we are, we are, we are at the bottom out of 50 of our peer schools that report in the same way. I think, you know, we tend to be at the 7 or 8% of our students being Pell eligible. To get to, kind of, the median of our peers, we need that number up to 12 or 13%. That is going to take us several years to do that. But we have begun increasing that. We are allocating more money to financial aid this year than we did last year. We are going to have more Pell eligible students here in the fall than we had last fall. And if we keep that going, we’ll get on a path to addressing this problem. I think we all consider it something we really want to do and the efforts that I have been able to be part of and pushing that have all been met with cooperation and people digging in and rolling up their sleeves to try to figure out how we go about doing this. So, I feel it’s an important challenge for us, maybe the most important challenge, really we have because we have to figure out how to do that without dramatically increasing the costs to the students who are paying tuition and without compromising the great experience that the students here expect.

Nahuel: What are your personal benchmarks for success, one year, five years, ten years, down the line?

Provost Thorp: I think it’s what’s important is, and I feel like we are already at that point, is for us to be at a stance that says “this isn’t ok, we gotta fix it. It’s a challenging problem. We’re gonna keep doing it.” And to be able to show each and every year that we are moving towards that. I think that’s a change from where we have previously been. I feel partly responsible for getting us to that point.   I think as long as we stay on that trajectory, then we are going where I think we are going. I don’t think we can do it overnight because I think if we tried to get to a particular place overnight, we would end up damaging some of the other important things about Wash U that the students have come to expect.

Nahuel: Hypothetically speaking, though, if we were to go away from a need-aware admissions practice to a need-blind admissions practice, what would happen?

Provost Thorp: We would have to make some significant changes in the course offerings and the services that we are providing. I don’t even know how you’d go about toting up what all of those are would be, it would be a pretty drastic change that you would have to make, and I don’t think, like I said, I don’t think it’s feasible to do that overnight.

Nahuel: I guess the two sides of it are, on the one hand, how would the demographics change, and on the other, what would be the academic tradeoffs?

Provost Thorp: Right. Well the demographic part of it, as far as the socio-economic status is concerned, would be, something like, 70 to 100% more students from the Pell eligible category than we do right now.

Nahuel: How many do we have right now?

Provost Thorp: I would have to think about how many students it is, but like 7% or so of…

Nahuel: Of six thousand

Provost Thorp: of six thousand

Nahuel: So around 400?

Provost Thorp: Yeah.

Nahuel: So a 70% to 100% increase would mean…

Provost Thorp: Seven or eight hundred. Yeah.

Nahuel: So does that mean that these students are currently academically qualified to attend Wash U, but can’t attend because of their low income?

Provost Thorp: Yeah. There are, the way we do it is we have a certain amount of money that we can spend on financial aid. This is how every one of our peers does it. Then we admit a class that is academically well qualified and then we admit as many of the ones that need large amounts of financial aid as we can, based on the budget that we have allocated to that.

Nahuel: When you say all of our peer institutions do it like this, does this include need-blind institutions?

Provost Thorp: Well, it is hard to know for sure, but I think there are a few schools where there is enough financial aid around that they can be truly need-blind in the way that they do their admissions and give full packages that are needed to the students who enroll. That’s a very small number of institutions that are able to do that. And I think the rest, that have limited financial aid resources, make choices between admitting somebody who has need and then not giving them as much aid as they require, or not admitting that person. What we do at Wash U, which I think is the most honest to deal with this, is to say that we’re not going to admit you unless we can give you all the financial aid that you need to succeed and to be sure that when you leave here, you don’t have so much debt that you can’t go do what you want to do when you graduate. I’d rather be in that stance, working our way towards being closer to need-blind, than I would be at a point where we’re not packaging – we say packaging in the ‘trade’ – not providing adequate resources and trying to work our way up on that. I think where we are is much more sincere, and, you know, I admire Mark Wrighton and Bill Danforth for being straight with being straight with people when we do our admissions.

Nahuel: Have your efforts to increase the amount of money for financial aid available met with any resistance or pushback?

Provost Thorp: Well, any time you go about the process of allocating university budgets, there are all kinds of strong opinions about that, but I what has happened is that there was a pent-up desire to do this, and as I started saying “Let’s work our way towards kind of changing our stance on this,” I think there were a lot of people who were already there who have kind of gotten on board; and then I think there are, you know, I think there’s nobody here who would disagree with the statement that financial aid and access to a Wash U education should be among our top priorities. Operationalizing that in a bureaucratic organization with a complicated budget is a challenge in any organization.

Nahuel: How large is Wash U’s, or I guess the College of Arts and Sciences budget, compared to the budget that would be needed to support 14% Pell grants or something like that?

Provost Thorp: We’re looking at needing $25 million every year, or $20 or $25 million every year in additional financial aid compared to what we have. So that’s a significant amount of money.

Nahuel: And how large are the Wash U schools’ budgets, relatively speaking?

Provost Thorp: It depends. You know, the Sam Fox school’s budget is under $100 million, and Arts and Sciences is a few hundred million, so, you know, the entire Danforth campus’ is $600 million.

Nahuel: Got it, that really helps put that in context. Moving specifically to St. Louis, what efforts is Wash U making to recruit low-income students in St. Louis?

Provost Thorp: Well, we’ve got a lot of different things going. We have a college prep program that we’re launching that Leah Merryfield is running that’ll be a way to bring young kids from St. Louis to Wash U during the summer, to start getting them ready to enroll; we have a great partnership with a group called College Bound, and we work with them on some students that they’re getting moved towards a higher education; and then we’ve announced, and it turns out we won’t do this until next year, but we’ve announced that we’re joining that National College Advising Corps, which is a way for recent college graduates to get involved in high need schools as guidance counselors, working specifically with students who can aspire and should aspire to higher education, and I’m on the board of that organization, so starting next school year, we’ll be recruiting a few Wash U recent graduates to spend a couple years in St. Louis after they graduate helping us get kids ready for college. So those are a few of the things we have going, and I think it’s a good collection of programs.

Nahuel: It definitely seems like a step in the right direction. And what do you think students can do to help Washington University in this mission to become more socioeconomically diverse?

Provost Thorp: The most important thing that students can do is to make sure that the administration knows that this is a high priority for the students. We tend to spend a lot of time speculating on what’s most important to the students, so letting us know that having a more socioeconomically diverse student body is a high priority to the students, is higher than some of the other services and things that are unique and special about a Wash U education, I think that helps us as we internally decide to make the trade-offs that we’re going to have to make to make this whole thing happen.

Nahuel: Exactly, you often describe trade-offs with academia, but could it also be trade-offs with, for example, a new Rubelman Hall, or things like that?

Provost Thorp: Well, yes, every expenditure, you know, my motto with folks is, every time we spend $60,000 a year, are we sure we’d rather spend it on what we’re doing, or would we rather spend it on helping a Pell-eligible student go through Wash U. And it’s taking some time to ingrain that in folks. I think that the Rubelman project will be a great project for the South 40, I think we’ve heard from a lot of students that we want that project, so that’s where I say, you’ve got to balance the costs and amenities that we offer that make Wash U special with the ability to bring people here, and so that’s one of the trade-offs. We’re committed to doing Rubelman – we committed to that really before all of this started – so we’re going to go ahead and get going on that. And the sooner we get our plans executed for the South 40, the sooner we’ll be able to turn more to some of these issues we’ve been talking about. So, yes, those are some of the trade-offs the institutions make.

Nahuel: Do you see the culture here at Wash U changing in the year that you’ve been here?

Provost Thorp: I think that people are talking about financial aid a lot more than they were. I don’t know if that’s, that’s probably partly because I came here, but I think that this was building before. I think that you and your fellow students have done a good job drawing attention to this over the years, and so if I was able to help with that a little bit, then I’m happy about that; but for sure, it’s something that comes up a lot more now than it did when I first got here.