Funding Priorities
UMass Boston seeks to strengthen student success, foster innovation in teaching and learning, enhance research, and invest in its campus infrastructure.
Student Success
With their drive to learn and strong work ethic, UMass Boston's students deserve the very best support we can offer. We seek funds to offer more need-based financial aid, as well as specialized initiatives to ensure student success. Examples include:
- New freshman-success initiatives patterned after highly successful programs in the College of Liberal Arts and the College of Science and Mathematics.
- Expansion of college-specific advising, tailored to the needs of each college’s students.
- Additional career collaborations with local healthcare organizations and businesses.
- More, and better-supported, study-abroad opportunities for students and faculty.
- New service-learning programs.
Innovation in Teaching and Learning
UMass Boston’s founders wanted access and affordability to coexist with engagement in university-level learning and thinking, so that students from all socioeconomic backgrounds could compete on equal terms with graduates from the best private institutions. In addition to boosting efforts to recruit the best faculty, UMass Boston seeks resources to support a comprehensive career-span faculty development and mentoring program; a rebalancing of time allocated to teaching, research, and service; endowment support for distinguished faculty; innovation funding to encourage new ideas for teaching-centered research and student engagement; and other faculty-incentive programs.
Research
UMass Boston’s research enterprise has been steadily growing, particularly in the past several years; research and development expenditures more than doubled from FY2001 to FY2011. Recently the university reached a significant milestone, earning the Carnegie Foundation’s “Research/High” ranking. UMass Boston's research has also expanded into vital, wide-ranging areas, reflecting an evolution in our urban identity and our concept of civic engagement. Benefiting from Boston as a center of research, technology, education, medicine, and commerce, we celebrate the advantages of “the urban” as we confront its social problems. Long experience has given UMass Boston a keen instinct for urban complexities and their implications for society at large. And civic engagement has always been integral to our teaching, learning, and research, yielding new knowledge applicable to urban situations nearby and around the world. The university seeks additional funds for research.
Investing in the Campus
UMass Boston’s 25-year Master Plan has provided a blueprint for the transformation of the physical campus of the university. More than $700 million will have been spent by early 2017 on executing that plan, including the 2009 purchase of the 20-acre former Bayside Expo property.
The current plan calls for two new classroom buildings with physical and functional flexibility suitable for our current enrollment; a new Integrated Sciences Complex to replace the existing Science Center; student residences; an upgrade of the library and two major existing academic buildings; accommodation of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Study of the Senate; and creation of new parking garages. Funds are sought to support components of these capital improvements.
To learn more about how your support can make a difference, please contact Gina Cappello, vice chancellor for University Advancement.
