With the competition for students becoming more and more intense between colleges and universities across the nation, Northeastern University is making a conscious effort to improve its standing in national rankings.
“We think it is very important when providing the education that we provide to our students that we can prove that this is a top quality education,” said Northeastern spokesman Ed Klotzbier. “We already think we’re doing a very good job. We need to make sure that the ranking people see us doing a good job.”
Northeastern is currently ranked as a third-tier university, or within the top 150 schools, in U.S. News and World Reports’ annual ranking of national colleges and universities.
In his State of the University address in October of 2000, Northeastern President Richard Freeland announced he was setting a goal to put Northeastern among the top 100 schools in the nation by 2010.
“We want to provide first-rate research facilities, improve our classrooms, make sure there’s excellent faculty available for our students and we want to expand our residences halls,” Klotzbier said.
Northeastern has already begun drastically expanding student housing. In only three years, it has added several new dormitories, providing the university with a total of 2,000 beds for students and thereby doubling resident capacity. The university plans to begin construction on a 16-story building that will contain both dorm rooms and classrooms.
“One of the things about Northeastern is that by and large for many years is was a so-called commuter school,” Klotzbier said. “Our goal is to house every undergraduate who wants to live on this campus, and we couldn’t say that a decade ago. So that’s definitely one of the things that we think will lead to better school spirit and people from all over the country wanting to come here because they’ll have the space on which to live on a beautiful, brand-new campus.”
Klotzbier also said Northeastern is “aggressively” recruiting the best faculty it can in order to improve its resources.
“The best thing about this is that it’s Boston,” he said. “It’s the best college town in America. People love to come to Boston, whether that’s trying to convince somebody over at BU or BC that the pasture’s greener over here or if its going to California, Florida or Texas and getting people up to Boston saying that this is a great new campus to be a part of.”
Northeastern will pay for these changes by arranging its budget accordingly. The school recently raised tuition for upperclassmen by 5.5 percent. Klotzbier said this raise wasn’t as high as it seems because the university generally raises tuition by 4 to 5 percent every few years.
Klotzbier agreed with Freeland, and said Northeastern expects to achieve its goal of rising into the top 100 in about 10 years.
“If we do our job here — providing the resources, making sure our reputation is ranked accordingly, work on our retention, work on the selectivity our staff — if we do all those things and do all those things well, we’re pretty confident that the top 100 will follow as a matter of course,” he said.
Northeastern is only one of several schools in Boston planning on expanding its facilities, particularly dorm space. Suffolk University recently announced plans to build more dorms on campus, and the University of Massachusetts at Boston, formerly a strictly commuter school, is discussing adding campus housing. Boston University is in the midst of constructing a new athletic center and adding to the Student Village.
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