BSU’s President Tromp announces business partnership plan

Boise State University President Marlene Tromp was met with enthusiastic applause for two announcements shared at the annual State of the University event: the formation of the Boise State Business Partnership Hub and the launch of the Institute for Advancing American Values, coupled with a new strategic plan for the college — “Improve Educational Access and Student Success, Innovate for Institutional Impact, Advance Research and Creative Activity, Foster Thriving Community, Trailblaze Programs and Partnerships.”

Efforts for the Boise State Business Partnership Hub — intended to help the university better understand what businesses need through a tighter partnership — will continue in June, Tromp said, when she will be “meeting with a key set of business leaders.”

The announcement of the Institute for Advancing American Values follows intense discussion during the 2021 legislature about funding appropriate programs at the public university level.

“Given this tumultuous year we’ve faced, or we’ve heard people say, ‘Maybe universities don’t have the balance we need,’ we are launching the Institute for Advancing American Values,” Tromp said. “We invite people to learn and grow. We are going to model a healthy dialogue on our campus, between all those voices for the benefit of our state.”

“I am honored to be a part of Boise State University, and I am so grateful for your partnership and your advocacy and your support in the last year,” she added. “And I can’t wait to see what we’ll do together next.”

These State of the University announcements were part of the Boise Metro Chamber’s education focused series, “Higher Education In Idaho.” Tromp’s presentation follows that of Idaho State University President Kevin Satterlee, made earlier this May. The Thursday hybrid luncheon event was livestreamed, making it possible for attendees to attend virtually or be a part of the lunch experience at the Boise Centre (the capacity was for 200 people). A recording of the event, which includes additional announcements of new offerings and success stories of Boise State University, is available on the chamber’s website and social media platforms.

‘We want to know what you (the business community) need’

Tromp underscored the university’s continued partnership with Idaho’s business community, such as by growing academic programs for in-demand fields like cybersecurity (hence the launch last time period of the Institute for Pervasive Cybersecurity) and continuing university resources:

• Small Business Development Center: available advisors.
• Center For Professional Development: a center for professional development offering advisement and helping develop customized education into a business’s workplace.
• Tech Help: helps businesses in creating and testing new products
• The Venture College: helps support entrepreneurship and innovation in Idaho
• The Career Services department: “If you haven’t done so already, I hope you will connect with our career services,” Tromp said. “It’s one of the most important things you can do to help us train the students in the way that you need them to be trained, but also to get those students ready.”
• Bronco Corps (launched last fall): a program that provides small businesses and nonprofit organizations with student interns at no cost, “so that the students get work experience, and those launching businesses get an opportunity to have the insights of a new student,” Partnerships so far include with the Gardner Company, Boise Bicycle Project, American Red Cross, Girl Scouts of Silver Sage, Girls on the Run and Boise Cakery

“These young people are hungry to work with you,” Tromp said. “And we know that that career preparation is important, because we don’t want a student who graduates and who can’t imagine how they’re going to fit into your business.”

In addition to the workforce development collaboration, Tromp highlighted the university’s latest efforts to attract students through its recently added Bronco Gap Year (offering one-on-one mentorship with potential students) and its Community Impact Programs (particularly for rural students), including the True Blue Scholarship Future Forward scholarship for Idaho students.

“What I want is to make sure that we’re accessing that talent and making sure they have access to the highest quality education,” Tromp said. “And we’ve created layers of programs that will allow them to go home and bring their talents home, because we don’t want to just drain talent out of those communities.”

Tromp also promised the university is thriving and “committed to growing our impact,” despite challenges shared with many other higher education institutions nationwide, such as enrollment decline. Institutions saw upwards of 20% enrollment decline; Boise State University had a 3% increase. Audience members immediately applauded.

“I have never seen this in my career that a university could be more efficient than community college because…we have a whole city of people,” Tromp said. “They typically don’t have things like (a) football stadium or basketball stadium; they don’t have a research enterprise that’s making new discoveries every single day that changed people’s lives.…One of the most important things we can do is serve (the) community and learn from you what you need so that we can help train students so that they are successful for you.”

Q & A (questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity)

To close the event, Tom Mortell, with Boise Metro Chamber and Hawley Troxell, thanked Tromp for her comments, and the two sat together for a question and answer session, with questions Mortell said were received from some of the event attendees.

BMC: How should the university balance attainment of students, and the academic things that go along with being in a university setting, against this addressing the state’s long term workforce needs?

Tromp: “I really think those are woven together in a fundamental way, because what happens in terms of workforce development is about helping our students chart a path to what one of my colleagues calls, making a living and making a life. So regardless what their major is, they should be thinking from the beginning of their academic career, all the way through graduation, not just as they’re approaching their end of their senior year, but throughout their career…It means we also need to be responsive….So when we see that there’s an incredible demand in the state for nurses, and we see there’s an incredible demand in the state for social workers and for engineers, we have to figure out as a university, ‘How we can help,’ because our job is to serve the students and serve the state.”

BMC: During the past few legislative sessions, we’ve heard a fair amount about diversity programs and, more recently, about critical race theory and social justice being taught at BSU and other schools. Where do you see opportunities to build bridges, and maybe come to a common understanding with the various parties that are on both sides of those important issues?

Tromp: “Thank you so much for that question. … I met with a classroom of students who had watched all of the education hearings that day…they’re actually current principals who want to train to be superintendents…and the question that they asked me is, ‘How do you not lose your cool?’ And I said, ‘I’m a teacher, and my job is to understand why the person I’m interacting with, what their questions are; what their fears are; what their concerns are and to be responsive to those.’ So I think it’s about partnership.

And I can tell you that when I met with some legislators, early on when I first arrived in Idaho, and some of you may remember I got a letter straight away from our Legislature. And I went and met with some of the folks that signed that letter. I kept asking, ‘What at bottom do you fear?’ She said to me, ‘I don’t want a white kid from a small town, Idaho, to show up on your campus and feel ashamed because of things that they don’t know, or because of who they are,’ and I said, ‘Oh, you mean a kid like I was.’ I don’t want that kid to feel ashamed either. I don’t want that kid to feel silenced either. I want every single student who walks on our campus to feel like it is their place, and that they have an opportunity to grow and learn, and for all of their voices to be heard; that’s what that Institute of American values is about; how do we ensure that all of their voices are heard.

So for me, it’s not about a fight. It’s about a conversation. And I do believe that we will get there in that conversation but it really is going to require the help and support of our business community, too, because almost everything that’s happened in Boise State, long before my arrival in the last 15 years, has been in response to you. It was our businesses that told us we need our graduates to be able to be global thinkers, and to be able to work across difference. So we responded to you, and so we need to all be in that conversation, but I truly believe that most people are motivated by good faith. And if you can find the shared terrain that you’re standing on, often you can address the most challenging problems.”

“I do want you to know you have my commitment on behalf of the chamber that we’re going to support you as you work through these issues,” Mortell responded. “These are important to our business community, training the next generation of our workforce and the students that our businesses are going to hire is very important to us.”

BMC: If you could change one thing about higher education, either in Idaho or more broadly, what would it be and how would you go about implementing that change?

Tromp: “It’s the easiest thing I could possibly answer in a million years. 30 years ago, states invested more than twice as much in public education. Now, it’s not because they suddenly didn’t care about education, it’s partly because the demands on states have changed. But it’s become harder and harder for young people to afford college. And what’s happened is the state has invested less proportionally in public higher education; that cost burden has fallen more and more on students and their families. So I am determined to make cost as little a barrier for our students as possible, and if I could wave a magic wand, public education would be free in this country.”

What Tromp said she can do, and is doing, is helping raise scholarship money for Idaho students, but “that is not enough.”

“We’ve held tuition flat for two years in a row, but I have to tell you, of course our employees’ wages have to go up. So we have escalating costs every year. And we’ve done that because we’re so efficient, but we can’t keep doing it so I have to keep finding ways to make sure students can get access, because to me, access and excellence are the two most important things we do.”

BMC: Speaking of the finances of the university, you mentioned the tuition freezes. We’ve also had some recent cutbacks from the Legislature, what’s your plan to address those issues?

Tromp: “We’re very fortunate in some ways that we did so much planning during COVID. So like many of you, what we did is we built tiered plans for potential losses. We were one of the only institutions in the country that grew during the pandemic. So, we planned for facing serious and grave losses; we were watching the data. And so we’ve made many cuts already to increase our efficiency, and we are prepared to make more, but the first thing we’re going to do like many of you (is) look into things like, ‘Where are some places that we can touch that won’t impact with the enterprise,’ because already we’ve had so much loss. But then if we have to, we’ve got plans in place that are designed to protect the work our faculty do and to protect our students. … And we, your universities and colleges in the state, are working together like they never had in the state’s history. We’re centralizing amongst us, risk management, purchasing … So we’ve created new efficiencies this year and we hope that will help buffer those cuts.”

BMC: In all of our businesses we learned things for the pandemic; things we can do differently; things that we’re going to continue to do to be more efficient and to utilize technology differently. Tell me some things that university has learned that are going to be takeaways and long-term changes as a result of the pandemic.

Tromp: “There were a lot of restrictions on how we could use the federal relief funds; 50% of that money that came in had to go directly to students, even if we had already refunded dollars to them; that felt right to me. But we had to ask ourselves, ‘Where are we going to invest these dollars?’ (We said,) ‘How do we become more flexible and nimble as a university, on the other side of this pandemic?’ So we installed a lot of new technology in our classrooms that allows students to do remote learning, and that was beneficial if somebody was in quarantine for COVID. What it also does is it allows students who may need to go home for three weeks for a potato harvest, those students either dropped out or didn’t enroll in classes that semester, or they took three weeks off and felt terribly behind. Now, you can go home, go for the harvest, come back in. Attend your class remotely during those three weeks and then come back to campus when you’re ready.”

BMC: Where do you see the capacity of the stadium being this fall? We’re not going to hold you to this, but if you had to guess, are we going to have a full stadium or we’re going to be less than full capacity?

Tromp: “One of the things that we learned this last year, maybe better than any other lesson, is that you can’t make predictions. So I recognize that I can’t make a prediction but what I will tell you is, there is nothing that I want more than the roar of the loudest stadium in the United States of America…what happens in a football stadium is the exact opposite of what happened during the pandemic. That sense of community, that fuels innovation. You may have heard our new AD Jeramiah Dickey say…he’s gonna fill that stadium for every home game this year. We’re gonna need your help doing that. And we will do it as we’ve done everything in the last year and a half; (we will) ensure the safety of the people who come, and of our student athletes, but we’re going to be there to cheer those Broncos on. That is my hope.”

BMC: I solicited (questions) from my partners at my law firm…and the best one that I got back was, ‘What was your first impression when you met Coach Avalos for the first time?’

Tromp: “Oh, that’s a nice question. … I knew I had to hire the AD. So, I wanted the AD to be in alignment with me, and I wanted the head football coach to be in alignment with the AD. And so I hired Jeremiah (Dickey), and then when he said yes, I said, ‘OK, let’s go hire a head football coach.’ And you might think I’m talking about like the next day; nope, in that conversation. Within a day, he and I were meeting Andy remotely. And what I thought to myself was, I couldn’t have given him a script that would have made more perfect alignment between me and Jeremiah and Andy. So much so that Jeremiah and I hung up that call and went, ‘Did he just watch our press conference and like, say it back?’ It is so authentically who he is, and you know, he not only bleeds blue, he is going to burnish in the most beautiful way that culture that we love in Bronco athletics.…People were like, ‘You’re gonna lose all your football players,’ Not one (left), because when they saw that Andy was coming, they all went, ‘I’m in.’ I can’t wait to see him play.”