Yellen: “… in the planning phases …”
POUGHKEEPSIE – Marist President David Yellen gave the keynote address to hundreds of members of the Dutchess County Regional Chamber of Commerce at their monthly contact breakfast on Wednesday.
Yellen became the fourth president of Marist College in July 2016, having
left the position of dean of Loyola University Chicago School of Law where,
while serving, he was recognized by National Jurist as one of the 25 most
influential people in legal education.
The liberal arts college has plans to introduce its first doctoral program, said Yellen.
“We are actually in the planning phases for our first doctoral level program, which will be for physical therapy, which has become a field where it is very common to get a doctoral degree and we hope to open that program in a year,” Yellen said.
That program will join the 47 Bachelor’s programs, 14 Master’s programs, and 14 Certificate programs.
Yellen touted the geographic diversity of enrollment at the college that has 75 buildings on 210 acres along the shores of the Hudson River. The incoming freshman class represents enrollment from 30 different states. For the class of 2020, the college received over 11,000 applications and accepted 40 percent of them.
Long-term strategic planning, including construction of several new dormitories, has resulted in over 95 percent of the student body residing on campus. That does not include the students that study abroad at the Marist College Florence, Italy campus. Yellen plans to improve the diversity of the campus even further by addressing issues of race, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic class. Financial incentives will be used to help address the latter because, according to Yellen, Marist is in a very healthy financial position to do so. As of October 2016, Marist had 6,569 total students, 58 percent of which are female.
The campus has also been named one of the “most wired” campuses in the country as a result of partnerships with major technology giants like IBM. The 25 million dollar “high-tech complex” overlooking the campus green and the Hudson River has 312,000 electronic books, 104,000 electronic journals, and 27,000 streaming videos to help students learn in today’s advanced environment.
