Photos courtesy of NDSU
STATE OF THE UNIVERSITIES
With roughly 35,000 students in the area between five colleges and universities, it’s no doubt that our region is filled with countless opportunities for higher education. We sat down with five local college and university presidents to talk about why their institutions are an important piece of our community and how everyone from students to average citizens can benefit from them.
NDSU President Dean Bresciani:
SUCCESS BREEDS SUCCESS
Turn on ESPN and you won’t be surprised to see coverage of North Dakota State University’s five-time national championship football team. But talk to President Dean Bresciani and he’ll dive a little bit deeper and show you that the success extends far beyond athletics.
A FOOTPRINT IN FARGO-MOORHEAD
With 2,637 full-time employees and 2,300 temporary and student workers, NDSU is the second largest employer in Fargo-Moorhead. Add to that the 14,000 plus students and it’s clear that NDSU has a firm footprint in the FM community.
“NDSU’s core philosophical foundation is to serve our citizens, and while our impact is on a statewide, national and international scale, we are very fortunate to be part of a thriving and vibrant community,” said Bresciani. “While we represent one of the largest businesses in the area, we consider our connection to the community to be very much on a person-to-person scale.”
As a nationally ranked top 100-research university, NDSU offers a strong education in agricultural sciences, social sciences, physical sciences, chemistry, psychology and computer sciences. In fact, this national ranking plus small size and affordability are some of the reasons Bresciani believes NDSU is so attractive to students.
“What that means to a student, which has drawn quite a bit of national attention and ranking, is that our return on investment for students is pretty incredible,” said Bresciani. “In fact, it’s one of the highest in the nation among our peers. The icing on the cake is a job market so hungry for college graduates that recruiting is happening in junior and even sophomore years, and most students have a job waiting for them on the day they graduate in a wonderful location in terms of quality-of-life for tarting careers and families.”
According to payscale.com, a website that measures universities and how their alumni fares in the job market, NDSU is tied for 199th for best return on investment with an average ROI over 20 years of $437,000 and only costing $76,900 for four years for North Dakota residents to attend the university.
UNPRECEDENTED SUCCESS
NDSU football games have almost become statewide holidays with an average attendance of 18,622 fans per game at the Fargodome and countless others watching at homes and bars across the state. The five-time FCS National Champion football team is not the only athletic team that has seen such success. The basketball team has gone to the NCAA Tournament two of the last three years, the women’s track and field team hasn’t lost a conference championship since joining the Summit League and throughout all of athletics, student-athletes averaged a GPA of 3.37. This success is huge for NDSU, as Bresciani believes that athletics is the “front porch” of the university.
“While NDSU’s scholarly success and the vibrancy and attractiveness of our community increasingly draw us accolades, I’d argue that not just the success but the quality of our athletic program is still the feature that, on a national basis, most often provides the front porch of attention,” said Bresciani. “It goes without saying that we have one of the winningest overall NCAA Division I athletic programs in the nation, but when I refer to the quality of our program, what I mean is the exceptional academic performance our student-athletes achieve and the community service they contribute. For several years now, every semester, our student-athletes have had a collective overall grade-point average in excess of the student body at large, and more than 60 of them have achieved 4.0 GPAs.”
NDSU is now attempting to bring that success of students to the local business scene. The FM community has been ranked as one of the best college towns in the nation, best places for young professionals and best places for entrepreneurs and new start-ups. In June, Bresciani announced a $4.5 million endowment through the NDSU Foundation and Alumni Association that established the President Jim Ozbun Chair of Entrepreneurship that will encourage students to pursue entrepreneurialism.
“Students are coming here because of those features and arrive planning to engage with the business community,” said Bresciani. “Our business community is welcoming them with open arms and increasingly providing internship and other related opportunities. NDSU will be able to further fuel those relationships through an extraordinary private gift to create a $4.5 million endowment for entrepreneurship. In combination, the FM area won’t be just talking the talk, we’ll be walking the walk in very real ways as one of the most attractive locations in the nation for young people to attend college.”
“NDSU’s core philosophical foundation is to serve our citizens, and while our impact is on a statewide, national and international scale, we are very fortunate to be part of a thriving and vibrant community.”
— NDSU President Dean Bresciani
FACELIFT
Drive by NDSU’s campus and you will see plenty of construction. The new A. Glenn Hill (STEM building), which will house 4,000 to 5,000 students a day, was recently completed. The Sanford Health Athletic Complex also opens this fall and will be the new home of NDSU Athletics. The building will be the main arena for basketball and wrestling with enough seating for 5,700. The building will also house weight rooms, coaches’ offices and much more.
“The various complex facilities, in combination with the Fargodome, will represent the largest proximal collection of athletic and event spaces anywhere in the multi-state area around us,” said Bresciani. “What they represent as an asset, not just for NDSU but our entire community, is still hard to fully grasp but bodes very exciting potentials. Add to all that a breadth of building and classroom renovations, infrastructure upgrades and landscape work, it would be fair to say that this fall, NDSU students are being greeted by the best campus and facilities we’ve ever offered.”
All this construction is just what NDSU needs if they are to reach Bresciani’s enrollment goal of 18,000 students. With enrollment currently at more than 14,000 students, Bresciani and NDSU believe that this lofty goal is what the FM area needs right now.
“Due to the critical and still growing job vacancy rate in our state, and particularly the FM area, our state desperately needs NDSU to grow and produce more graduates,” said Bresciani. “As it turns out, that’s likely to happen organically due to the growth of the FM area and the burgeoning annual net enrollment growth we are seeing in the three FM K-12 school districts.”
340 Administration Ave., Fargo
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