Page 13 - BusinessWest May 12, 2025

“I don’t want
to call it a ‘new
normal,’ because
I think we’re
creating ‘normal,’
and it’s going to
be different. What
that ‘different’ is
... who knows?
But I think we
must remain agile
enough to change
with the times.” when it comes right down to it, places
like Western New England University
— we started as a branch campus for
Northeastern University — are at a place
where we’ve come through world wars,
the Great Depression, the Civil Rights
movement, Jim Crow, the dot-com bubble,
the Great Recession ... and now this. And
we’ll figure this out.
“Anyone who says they have a crystal
ball and understands what it’s going to
look like on the other side is fool’s gold,”
he went on. “The best that we can do is
be agile and try and manage as best we
can given the resources that we have to
emerge from this. It’s not going to be fun
— this is not the golden age of higher edu-
cation post World War II — it is a shift in
the market, and that has to be our view,
and there will be winners and losers.”
These were just some of the thoughts
from Johnson in a wide-ranging interview with Johnson that turned
out to be an exit interview, if you will. Indeed, he announced, just a
few days after he talked with BusinessWest, that he will be stepping
down from the university in August.
As he talked about the current landscape, he came back repeat-
edly to his contention that, to survive this latest shift in the market,
schools will have to be agile and proactive in response to the fac-
tors that created this paradigm. And WNE is doing exactly that, he
said, noting that, through several new strategic initiatives, it has
improved its position.
Indeed, the school enrolled the largest entering class in its his-
tory in the fall of 2024, just two years after it recorded one if its low-
est figures in a quarter century, he said. “Three years ago, we had
just over 6,700 applications for our entering class. This year, we’re
right on the cusp of 13,000 applications.”
This was accomplished, he said, by stressing brand value and
Robert Johnson says that, through aggressive, targeted
marketing, WNE entered its largest class ever in 2024, and is
on pace to do the same this September.
File Photo
return on investment — “including a 94% job-placement rate, start-
ing salaries higher than 52 of the top-100 universities in the country
— 36% higher than any of the other schools in this region.
“That’s the message that we keep driving home,” he went on.
“And it’s showing up in our applications, deposits, campus visits ...
that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”
Beyond marketing, these increases in applications and enroll-
ment are due to new programs designed to provide a bridge to the
workforce, he said, citing the school’s new master’s degree program
in Biopharmaceutical Technology, due to launch in September, as
just one example.
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