Senate Graduate Studies Committee
Meeting Minutes 11/13/2013
Attending: Kelly Goedert, Angela Weisl, Pam Galehouse, Chris Tienken, Richard Stern
The primary item of business was a visit from Stephanie Hauge, Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations. The
purpose of the visit was to have a discussion on ways that faculty might be able to pursue funding for graduate
programs from corporations and foundations. The summary/overview of that discussion is below:
1) Trends in corporate/foundation funding
 Corporations have moved away from “giving away” money in general and, in particular, have moved
education funding away from higher ed to K-12 (e.g., recent article in Harvard Business Review argues that
corporations should not be giving away money given their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders).
 An exception to the above is when a funding initiative will engage the company’s employees in a meaningful
way (e.g., leadership development), or when the funding initiative will help solve a problem faced by the
company (e.g., internationalization). Corporations are trying to find partners.
 Many foundations/corporations do not support scholarships of any kind. For example, Ms. Hauge is
currently putting in an application to American Express to send out grad MPA students to the community
(credit as part of a course) and is trying to figure out how to pitch it/get it funded so that it is not a
scholarship.
 On the foundation side, there is a huge range from small, private foundations to large foundations, with a
rising trend of donor advised funds.
 Foundations tend to fund projects in targeted areas (e.g., medical funding / nursing), oftentimes focused on
a specific societal problem to be addressed (e.g., diverse workforce, nursing shortage).
 Corporations/ are interested in STEM because of computer science and engineering. There is interest also in
STEAM. There is also interest in green initiatives (but this is something that Seton Hall is not good at).
 Programs involving partnering with high schools and bringing high school students to campus and getting
them involved in meaningful ways are more likely to get funded.
 With increasing numbers of disasters, both corporations and foundations are now funneling more
philanthropy in that that direction (e.g., Hurricane Sandy, typhoon in Philippines).
 More corporations are growing in emerging markets, and so more philanthropy is being targeted at those
markets, rather than in US.
2) What we can do
 For a proposal to a foundation or corporation to be successful, you have to convincingly answer the
questions: 1) What problem are you solving? 2) Why Seton Hall? For this second question, there has to be a
critical mass. That is, how many students are benefiting/would benefit? What are the outcomes?
 Although STEM is a potential area for funding, we would need to strengthen that on the SHU campus (e.g.,
small computer science program) to demonstrate potential for high impact.
 Stephanie would find it useful were we to provide her with more current and more detailed information on
what we do and what we are good at, including what kind of programmatic initiatives we might be able to
work on (email: stephanie.hauge@shu.edu ). Currently, she is using the faculty profiles on the Seton Hall
website to target potential faculty when funding announcements come across her desk. To the extent that
these are out of date or unrepresentative of the faculty member’s work, it makes her job more difficult.
 We are part of the Independent College Fund of New Jersey, which is a consortium of private NJ colleges.
Every year we have gotten funds from ICFNJ in various forms (e.g., current undergraduate STEM fellowships
for research).
 To fund graduate, it would be important for us to demonstrate what having that graduate degree means for
society (e.g., if you could track over last 10 years what graduate degree meant).
 Getting funding from corps/foundations is a lot of work. Lot of relationship building. Stay engaged with
alums and try to use alums as gateways to funding. Focus on alums in key corporations that might be target
donors.

Another possibility is to partner with Nancy Lohogan in continuing ed with to develop certificates. People
need knowledge, not necessarily a degree, but a certificate might also get someone in the door to pursue a
degree.
Additional items of business were discussed briefly:
1) PGAB update/report (see report to the Senate).
2) Sub-committee on graduate assistantships
 Ben has started a discussion board on Blackboard to get the work of this sub-committee started. Members
of this sub-committee (Pam Galehouse, Richard Dool, Rong Cheng, Kelly Goedert) should start weighing in
on Blackboard.
3) Members were asked to information from individuals in their own departments: 1) Average number of hours
and minimum/maximum number of hours spent per graduate student per semester; 2) Thesis supervision or
dissertation supervision? 2) Nature of the supervision (e.g., weekly one-on-one teaching and mentoring in
research practices vs. reading completed theses – these are just examples). 3) What is the typical
minimum/maximum number of students supervised per faculty member in your department? 4) What is the
minimum/maximum number of students supervised at a time in your field?
 The data starting to come in as a response to the these questions is highly variable (even within a
department/field). Given that the goal of asking these questions was to have a starting point for creating
categories of supervision for communicating with the administration, it might be easier to start with the
categories (getting feedback from departments along the way). This option will be discussed in more detail
at our next meeting.
4) Year-to-year comparison of graduate numbers
 The problem of not having longitudinal trend data for graduate enrollments was discussed. In the absence of
multi-year data, some programs are being pressed as to why their numbers are down relative to a year in
which their program saw an all-time high enrollment.
The committee will try to meet again early in January after we get back. Kelly Goedert will send out a new Doodle poll to
schedule that meeting.
Respectfully Submitted,
Kelly Goedert, Chair