Congratulations New Graduates!

Dear Panther Family,

It’s my favorite time of year in higher education. It’s the time of year when we see excited high school students sharing their college plans, posting selfies with Georgia State pennants and t-shirts on social media, and telling the world they’ll be Georgia State Panthers this fall. It’s also the time of year when our incredible graduates share out their own amazing photos in caps and gowns, telling us where they’re headed with their Georgia State degrees: Fortune 500 companies, graduate school or starting their own business.

We were also excited this week to invite a former student back home to Georgia State to receive an honorary degree. Chris Bridges, aka, Ludacris, attended our master’s ceremony Wednesday and told graduates how Georgia State set him on the path to greatness. While all our 2022 graduates may not go on to star in Blockbuster movie franchises or host sell-out concerts, we are certainly proud of each and every one of them. We can’t wait to welcome the new class and we can’t wait to congratulate the graduating one.

This week, Georgia State is conferring more than 5,200 degrees — a record for the institution. It is indeed a celebration.  I am particularly proud that we will grant nearly 2,000 degrees (1,971 to be exact) to African American students. That’s 38 percent of our total of degrees conferred.

That means Georgia State is on track to once again confer more bachelor’s and associates degrees to African Americans than any other nonprofit college or university in the country — and, I suspect, in the world.

Let that sink in for a moment. Our university — your university — is graduating career-ready African Americans at a pace and scale greater than our peer institutions, both public and private, in Georgia, in the Southeast and across the United States.

For the 2018-19 academic year, the latest for which complete data are available, Georgia State University conferred 2,079 bachelor’s degrees to African Americans, followed by the University of Maryland Global Campus (1,597); the University of Central Florida (1,565); Grand Canyon University (1,554); and Florida International University (1,365).

Considering the population of the United States is just over 12 percent Black, these numbers are outstanding. They represent huge achievements in one of our core strengths — student success. Over the past decade, Georgia State’s innovative approaches to recruitment and retention have garnered national attention because we have eliminated achievement gaps among race and ethnicity.

As a first-generation college graduate, I cannot tell you how proud it makes me to be leading a university whose students — and, more importantly, its graduates — are reflective of the global workforce. Together, we are making great strides to produce graduates who look like the world into which they are graduating.

I am proud of all of our graduates, and I hope you are, too.

 

All the best,