Dallal: AUC Reforming Recruitment, Financial Support, and Operations

• By The Caravan

The university is pursuing a student-centered culture as one of the four key pillars in its Strategic Priorities Roadmap, AUC President Ahmad Dallal told the Senate. The other three pillars are academic excellence, civic engagement and the future of work.

In his remarks on October 15, Dallal said that AUC’s initiatives for the future of work are about upskilling the country’s workforce in a number of professional areas.

In terms of supporting students, Dallal emphasized the university’s focus on helping students deal with the decline in the Egyptian pound’s value over the past year. “I think we’ve been able to manage the transition reasonably well, prioritizing support for students and staff, as the members of our community most greatly impacted by the devaluation,” he said.

Given a small drop in enrollment at AUC last year, Dallal pointed to concerted efforts to “manage the devaluation crisis that impacted our students and their ability to enroll at AUC. We have many groups of people working on reforming our approach to student recruitment, including scholarships and financial aid,” he said. “Ultimately, our goal is to recruit outstanding, quality students and mobilize scholarships and financial support to serve that goal.” He added that there has been a change to the way the university approaches recruitment communication and that the results so far have been positive.

However, he said that more work needs to be done after taking stock of what works and what doesn’t.

Dallal also explained that AUC’s new Excellence Scholarship Program, which combines merit with need in its evaluation criteria, has been successful in attracting top students from Egypt and around the world.

Planning for the future is critical.

“As we enter a phase of relative stability, we need to consider models of recruitment under different scenarios and based on what we learned from our experience last year,” said Dallal, adding that the university will be developing a three-year financial plan that is based on a number of assumptions.

“We need to plan for both a steady state situation and potential volatility. And we will do that in a systematic way as we move forward,” he said of potential shocks to the regional financial climate.

Reforming and refining AUC’s management and operations is part and parcel of the university’s commitment to providing the community with better and more efficient services, explained Dallal.

“If we don’t move forward, we’ll slide back, and we should always move out of our comfort zones and make sure that we are service-centered and we’re serving our communities, and that we are doing so efficiently,” Dallal said, describing several initiatives to improve services in the operations and IT areas at the university.

The president added that the university is engaging with donors and potential contributors who are excited about AUC’s impact at the national and potentially regional levels.

“There is tremendous interest in supporting AUC’s vision for the future.”