1997–1998 was an exciting, hopeful year at Northeastern University.

We celebrated our centennial with pride. Under trustee Bob Marini’s leadership, we completed our most ambitious fundraising campaign ever and exceeded our goal of $225 million by nearly 20 percent. Finances remained strong and spending disciplined; we ended the year with our second consecutive budget surplus. We beautified the campus, broke ground on a 630-bed student residence, and dedicated the newly renovated Renaissance Park at Northeastern University. We enriched our academic offerings and welcomed eighteen new tenured and tenure-track faculty. And we did all this while attending to our primary business of educating our 24,000 students—4,000 of whom graduated last fall and this spring at joyous centennial commencements.

We remain an institution in the midst of transformation, and our future is rich with promise. Applications for admission are up, and the class we admitted this fall is the best prepared in a generation, with average SATs just under 1100. Total giving for 1997–1998 remained steady at $27 million, rather than falling back to pre-campaign levels, as it had in the past. Faculty research continued to make impressive gains, with a 15 percent jump in external funding compared to 1996–1997.

But what is most encouraging are the achievements of our students. From senior Jeffry Ross, who received the Zerby-Koerner Outstanding Electrical Engineering Student Award from the inter-national Eta Kappa Nu Association, to our MBA case-competition team, which emerged victorious in two international contests over teams from more than thirty-five other colleges and universities, our students are demonstrating the growing quality of our academic programs. Closer to home, our new Presidential Scholarship program—which annually rewards twelve sophomores who best exemplify the links between the liberal arts, their majors, and co-op—brought applications from an impressive contingent of 189 students, all with grade point averages above 3.5. A study of June 1996 graduates found that six months after graduation, 83 percent had full-time positions with
an average annual salary of $33,000, and 15 percent were pursuing full- or part-time graduate study. Our student athletes also continued their recent resurgence, with six varsity teams—men’s football, women’s field hockey, men’s and women’s ice hockey, and men’s and women’s crew—ending their seasons with national rankings.

The achievements of the past year—both on and off campus—come at a propitious time. Last fall, in my first annual report, I discussed our aspiration to gain wider recognition as a national research university that is student-centered, practice-oriented, and urban. During 1997–1998, we mounted a University-wide effort to develop strategies for progress in each of these five facets of our institutional character.

While many opportunities lie before us, none is more compelling than our potential for national leadership in undergraduate education. This opportunity lies in emerging economic, demographic, technological, and social trends, and the impact these trends are having on what students, their parents, their prospective employers, and our public leaders expect a college education to provide.

I believe that the time is ripe for a new model of undergraduate education, one that overcomes traditions that have placed professional preparation at odds with liberal education, and classroom learning in isolation from practical experience. With our history of leadership in cooperative education, Northeastern is perfectly positioned to show the way in developing this new model of teaching and learning, which I call “practice-oriented education.”

This report is divided into three parts. The first elaborates our vision of practice-oriented education. The second contains highlights of the year from around the University. The third presents the year’s financial statements.

Our aspirations are high as we begin our second century. While there is a great deal of work to be done, our vision as a university dedicated to practice-oriented education holds out tremendous promise for our colleges, our faculty, and, most of all, the students who come to Northeastern to prepare for a rewarding career and a meaningful life.