The Full Text

The Next Chapter emerges at a distinctive moment in American higher education and in the College’s history. We come to this moment from a position of strength, including a history of defying gendered expectations, a wealth of multigenerational communities and connections, long-standing curricular and cocurricular relationships with our Bi-Co and Tri-Co consortium partners, and demonstrated courage to apply learnings from the past to the College's future.   

At the same time, higher education now faces what analysts have termed “the demographic cliff,” with fewer students graduating from high school, as well as increased federal scrutiny and regulation of colleges’ missions and operations. Polls show increasing skepticism about the value of higher education and limited public understanding of the liberal arts model. A climate of economic uncertainty and volatility has increased pressure on institutions to offer generous financial aid across the income spectrum to meet well-founded commitments to socioeconomic diversity and diversity broadly.  

Amid these headwinds, the College is strengthening its ability to chart its own destiny by aligning decisions, resources, and investments with the factors that are most critical to institutional strength and reputation. These include competitive financial aid, liberal arts majors aligned with student interests, robust support for student success and completion, stronger connections between our undergraduate and graduate missions, and a compelling residential experience through our residence halls, dining, and cocurricular programs. Success in these areas will form the basis of a powerful academic experience that proves its value across a lifetime.    

II. Leveraging Bryn Mawr’s Distinctive Identity 

As we build Bryn Mawr’s next chapter, we are committed to centering and reasserting what makes the College distinctive and distinctively effective.  

As the scholarly sister/sibling, Bryn Mawr is authentically positioned to lead with its intellectual contributions. The Next Chapter will build on that identity by developing a distinctive undergraduate curriculum that seamlessly bridges the classroom and the residential experience; incorporates meaningful experiential opportunities; responds to students’ interests in addressing complex questions, such as those around climate, migration, democracy, and ethics; and preserves disciplinary depth while enabling interdisciplinarity and collaboration. We will elevate the presence of our vibrant graduate programs—within the Graduate Schools of Social Work and Social Research, and Arts and Sciences—as well as multiple combined degree opportunities and the Post Baccalaureate Pre-Medical Program, as differentiators that make a powerful mission-centric contribution. 

As a community of lifetime membership, Bryn Mawr and its alumnae/i networks are positioned to connect, support, and empower across regions and generations. The Next Chapter calls on the College to foster programs and networks that support students and alums at critical inflection points across their lives and to more intentionally link alums and undergraduates for workplace experience, career opportunities, lifelong learning, and sustained friendships. 

As a college founded for those traditionally excluded from higher education, Bryn Mawr holds individual and collective empowerment as a core value. The Next Chapter will build on our demonstrated commitment to diversity, including our notable Pell enrollments and innovative partnerships with community colleges, to create mobility across class, race, ethnicity, and other demographic identities. Further, we will continue to deepen inclusion through continuous learning, including looking fearlessly at past exclusionary practices as we build for the future.  

III. Bryn Mawr’s Impact on the World 

The promise of colleges and universities is in the differences they make in the lives of their students, faculty, staff, alumnae/i, and broader communities. The Next Chapter positions Bryn Mawr to amplify its impact beyond its traditional circles and campus boundaries through the people it educates and the ways it embodies its mission and values. Even as The Next Chapter strengthens the College itself, each of its five pillars holds the promise of wider societal contributions through thought leadership and knowledge-sharing, generating jobs and career advancement in a knowledge economy, fostering societal connection through ideas, demonstrating and promulgating sustainable environmental practices, and advancing societal change through education.  

IV. The Five Pillars Expanded 

Organizing Bryn Mawr’s efforts around the five pillars will intensify and sharpen the College’s educational effectiveness and impact over the coming decade. Specific initiatives, timelines, deliverables, key performance indicators, and potential funding sources are in development for each pillar. The Next Chapter is intentionally modular in its design, enabling initiatives to move from proposal to piloting to potential implementation at variable speeds, responsive to emergent opportunities and resource constraints.  

Pillar 1: Redoubling our commitment to academic excellence and distinction  

The College will reinforce its commitment to academic excellence—the heart of its mission—to recruit and retain outstanding students and faculty, facilitate students’ exploration of who they are and how they seek to embody their intellect and values in the world, and prepare students for professional and personal success at graduation and beyond. Key initiatives will include shifting to a teaching load of two classes per semester; reorganizing and streamlining advising with a clear mandate to increase retention and graduation rates; increasing faculty-student research partnerships; bringing more intention to external academic distinctions for faculty and students, including competitive national fellowships; aligning graduate and undergraduate education more intentionally; and building a library of the future to serve as the intellectual and cultural heart of the campus. Success will be reflected in Bryn Mawr graduates gaining the academic grounding, skills, and habits of mind to thrive in an increasingly turbulent postgraduate environment, with the capacity to function globally, critically, and analytically throughout their lives. 

Pillar 2: Providing holistic support for students and alumnae/i 

The College will more intentionally align students’ academic, cocurricular, and extracurricular experiences, with the goal of providing holistic support from the time they matriculate through their years as alums. Key initiatives will include more closely aligning academics and experiential learning; modernizing dining and residence halls, especially those configured as living and learning communities; expanding opportunities for connection and support among current students and recent alumnae/I to enhance student daily living and learning; and creating programs that demonstrate the value of lifetime membership in multigenerational communities composed predominantly of women. This approach will bring into sharper relief the powerful intergenerational community available to students and alumnae/i at critical inflection points throughout their lives.  

Pillar 3: Advancing a community approach to access and inclusion 

The College will continue its mission-based commitment to access, inclusion, and belonging, to ensure that people from a wide range of backgrounds are inspired and able to join, thrive in, and strengthen the Bryn Mawr community as faculty, staff, students, parents, friends, and alumnae/i. Key initiatives will include expanding financial aid with the ultimate goal of need-blind admissions; building on the Beacon Initiative; and continuing to invest in undergraduate educational access through expanded partnerships with community colleges, community-based organizations that support college access, and international partners. We will also model access and inclusion by investing in professional development and educational attainment for our staff. We will continue to learn from our past in honest and clear-eyed ways, with such Initiatives as Art Remediating Campus Histories (The ARCH Project) and the Don’t Forget to Remember (Me) monument serving as models and exemplars, and engage in an ongoing process of reckoning with and honoring its layered history. Taken together, such work will realize Bryn Mawr's values in action, notably the call in the College’s mission statement to “build fair, open and welcoming institutional structures, values, and culture.”  

Pillar 4: Enhancing visibility, reputation, and impact 

The College will expand its efforts to uplift, celebrate, and proudly share its accomplishments with local, national, and international audiences. Key initiatives will include hiring an inaugural vice president for external relations; supporting and training faculty in generating visibility for their scholarship and thought leadership; leveraging the president’s presence to establish strategic relationships beyond the campus; and creating partnerships and public convenings around vital conversations of our time, such as gender equality and women’s leadership, education access, environmental sustainability, civic engagement and democracy, freedom of speech and the value of expertise and truth. Asserting Bryn Mawr’s voice in the world will broaden public awareness of the College’s distinctively powerful educational model, expand the enrollment pipeline, build students’ career opportunities, and strengthen alumnae/i pride as they serve as our ambassadors across their professions and networks.  

Pillar 5: Modernizing infrastructure, facilities and operating systems 

The College’s outstanding faculty, staff, and students deserve to be supported by modern, efficient systems that enable them to focus their energies on their work. Key initiatives will include modernizing our buildings, landscapes, and physical infrastructure through the comprehensive campus plan; implementing state-of-the-art technologies and systems; exploring the potential for AI-informed work systems; and organizing staffing to meet today’s needs. To move toward carbon neutrality by 2035, the College will weigh decisions and resource allocations for environmental impact and alignment with climate equity and justice. In buildings, grounds, systems, and organizational models grounded in sustainability, accessibility, and efficiency, the College will optimize its financial and human resources toward its core academic mission.  

V. A Bold Vision Realized 

Success across the five pillars will make visible how living and learning in Bryn Mawr’s distinctive context helps students develop their own voices, grow into their own styles of leadership, and advocate for their place and well-being in the world during and beyond their college experience. 

Through reflection, cocreation, and investment, Bryn Mawr will be widely recognized for its commitment to academic excellence and its own blend of undergraduate and graduate study. Its highly research-active faculty will be supported in their own work and in meaningful research partnerships with students. A library of the future will serve as an intellectual beacon and the cultural heart of the campus. A curriculum steeped in the liberal arts and responsive to students’ emerging interests and needs will position graduates for professional and personal success. Graduate programs will continue to prepare scholars and practitioners for professional impact and distinction. And our cooperative relationship with partner institutions will continue to ensure that the whole of our shared educational enterprise is far greater than the sum of its parts. 

Financial aid that responds to families’ circumstances will help make a Bryn Mawr education accessible to those who seek it. The built environment of the campus and the programs it makes possible will embody and facilitate the College’s commitment to community. Renovated residence halls will offer the opportunity to live in intentional communities around shared interests. Intentional relationship-building from the moment students matriculate through their lives as alums will showcase the salience of the community built at or through the College.  

Enacting The Next Chapter will bring Bryn Mawr’s distinctive contributions boldly and broadly into the public light. The College’s forward-focused trajectory will be clearly visible in its modernized physical campus, its leadership in higher education, and its commitment to defying gender stereotypes. It will be visible in the transformative ways that its students and alumnae/i lead—in their own voices and as an empowered community—as they drive and support societal change. The light that has always burned brightly in the lives of Bryn Mawr students and alumnae/i will shine with unprecedented radiance around the world.