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President's Note
Prime Location, Worldwide Reputation
There's a peaceful revolution under way at NYIT. The college that you once knew as Tech is now NYIT-an advanced, progressive institution that is winning rave reviews from our academic peers and other key constituencies.
We have strengthened our curriculum, launched international programs, recruited talented faculty and built a technology infrastructure-spanning data, voice and video-that will carry us into the next decade.
The results have been startling. Our students around the world are proud to attend New York Institute of Technology, and therein lies an indisputable fact: One of NYIT's greatest assets globally is our name.
There are only a dozen or so colleges and universities in America with true global brand equity-Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Columbia and some others. Our name itself is world class and self-authenticating. It says America, it says capital of the world, it says 21st-century technology and commerce. We don't have to argue we are a fine institution. It is assumed.
Still, we realize that we can't live on our name alone. Many international brands-Apple, Disney and Kodak, to name a few-lost their luster in the late 1990s because management didn't adapt quickly enough to market-shifting technologies like the Web. We can certainly learn from those mistakes.
Four years ago, we made a conscious decision to refer to this college as NYIT. From a name and marketing perspective, we must promote ourselves as one institution with eight academic schools.
We updated our logo, unified our messaging and let the world know that we're a world-class institution for higher education.
Those well-planned changes-part of NYIT's broader strategic plan-have paid immediate, quantifiable dividends. Despite the soft global economy, applications to our New York campuses grew a healthy 16 percent for the fall 2002 semester.
Our programs around the world, including those in China, Jordan, Vancouver and even Florida, are in growth mode. We're attracting more students even as we continue to raise our academic standards-which is a rare feat in the academic world.
Your achievements have helped to build NYIT into a front-of-mind college with national and global impact. We're eager to promote your success and our success side by side in this magazine and across other communications media.
I've been meeting individually with one or two alumni weekly-sometimes with larger groups-and it has been extremely gratifying. Across the board your peers have good things to say about their NYIT experience. They attribute elements of their success to our career-oriented approach to education for the professions. And they want to reconnect with NYIT.
Nevertheless, we can't rest on our laurels. That's why NYIT embraces change as a crucial element for future achievement. We must also recognize, define and plan those changes-creating a detailed, structured and disciplined transformation.
"Too many...educational institutions oppose fundamental change and remain committed to outdated models of higher education," argues Mark Taylor, a sociologist at Williams College. And "the most urgent need in education," asserts Dale Lick, associate director of Florida State University's Learning Systems Institute, "is for effectively initiating, implementing, and managing intentional meaningful, planned change."
I certainly concur with Taylor and Lick. That's why NYIT's schools and departments have developed five-year strategic plans, each feeding into NYIT's comprehensive master plan-a "Plan of Plans," if you will.
The result should be a rewarding journey for our students, positive interaction with our alumni and international acclaim for NYIT.
I hope our progress makes you proud. We're certainly proud of your achievements.
Edward Guiliano, Ph.D.
President, NYIT
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