August 19, 2025
Dear Colleagues,
With each new day, more and more students are arriving on campus for the start of a new academic year. And with their arrival, our community is beginning to stir with anticipation for all this year will bring. I hope you found moments over the summer to recharge, reconnect with family and friends, and reflect on the meaningful work we do together at Gettysburg College. It truly is inspiring.
Looking back on this past year, I am deeply proud of everything our community accomplished, particularly amid the extraordinary change confronting higher education and our nation more broadly. We strengthened our academic offerings through new majors in Finance, Public Health Policy, and Communication Studies. We launched new graduate partnerships, including with Loyola University Maryland, Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Policy, and Towson University, and we introduced our own online Master of Education, with a special focus in inclusive education, design thinking, and teaching inquiry. Graduating student satisfaction was at its highest level since 2015. We secured our best-ever finish in athletics, earning a No. 29 ranking in the annual Division III Learfield Directors’ Cup standings. We spearheaded significant facilities upgrades in support of our student experience, tackling major renovations of our West Quad residence halls, CUB Ballroom, Plank’s lower level and outdoor patio, and more. And we’re pursuing countless other initiatives that are transforming our Strategic Direction from written plan to lived reality.
I know this work hasn’t always been easy. It’s required the best of us: our creativity, teamwork, and determination. But it is vitally important to our mission and the future of our College, and I am enormously grateful for what each and every one of you brings to the campus every day.
Powered by these new initiatives and the hard work of colleagues across the campus—most especially in Admissions—the College stood at 556 first-year deposits at our high-water mark—achieving a higher percentage of our admissions target than many peers. At the same time, we cautioned of “summer melt”—the fluctuation in first-year enrollment numbers that happens every year between the spring and start of classes. Some of the concerns behind that caution have proved true.
First, the good news: we experienced meaningfully less melt with our domestic first-year class than we have in recent years. Regrettably, that was not true for international students, where changes in federal immigration policy resulted in significant disruption to their educational plans. Eighteen students have been unable to receive a visa in time to matriculate this fall, and we are waiting to hear from five others. While none of this is distinctive to Gettysburg—offers of student visas to study in the U.S. this fall reportedly have dropped 15% compared to last year—it does not change our disappointment for these students and the impact on our community.
As of this writing, we anticipate greeting 505 first-year students this week—with the prospect that the Class of 2029 could stand at roughly 525 students in the spring depending on how the visa situations resolve and other decisions the affected students may make in the meantime.
The experience across higher education and here at Gettysburg again underscores that no institution can afford to stand still. In this intensely competitive environment, we need to continue to adapt, and to adapt boldly, including in how we reach and recruit students. This will be an area of renewed focus as we begin the new year.
On October 8, we will gather for an employee meeting to discuss the year ahead. We will talk about the implications of the size of the incoming class. We will also discuss what else the year has in store, including a continuation of the transformational work we started last year, which we are calling 2.0. All of this will require the community to continue to come together in support of our students and one another—as I know we will.
Even amid these challenges, we have so much to be proud of. Every day, I see a community that believes in our mission and the paths we help set for our students. I am grateful for how we have and will continue to come together to strengthen our College.
Sincerely,
Bob Iuliano
President