UA-R-GC-1914-01-01-1990-02_Page-015

President's Report Page 5 May, 1990 Last year (1988/89) some 75 students dropped out at beginning levels (ELI and freshman). As we had admitted 850 the net new addition was about 775, 25 less than planned. This year an even larger number of new students, 176, dropped out. We had admitted even more this year, 893, but the net is therefore only 717. We also found this year that a larger than usual number of students failed freshman English courses. The reasons for these bothersome results are not yet clear. The instinctive reaction of many faculty is that we are taking in dumb students for lots of money, but admission standards have not changed and an analysis a year ago showed that lower ranking students did on the average better than might be expected. In any case we are now starting analysis of these results to see if we can identify one or more clear causes and develop ways to deal with them. II. OBSERVATIONS ON THE FUTURE A. Academic Growth With the strengthening and fleshing out of our curriculum over the past decade AUC is well positioned to cover essential programs in the arts and sciences and to contribute to important Egyptian needs in professional education. Further curricular additions and changes would be helpful, but qualitative improvement now strikes me as our most important next academic objective. The quality of AUC's academic work has steadily improved in the last ten years. Students are more highly qualified, faculty is better, facilities are greatly improved, labs and equipment are much more pervasive, and the curriculum is much stronger. AUC's academic strength is highly valued by the Egyptian community, which regards admission of its children to the University as highly desirable. AUC nevertheless can still best be compared to second tier American liberal arts institutions. We are outstanding in Egypt. In an American context we are good but not outstanding. There is no reason, however, why AUC, within a reasonable number of years, could not rank with Oberlin or Swarthmore or other liberal arts colleges or universities of comparable stature. Certainly we should aspire to that standard