Everyone seems to be shifting into the semester with ease. Millett Atrium and the Creative Arts Center Commons are always full of students studying, which is a good thing. And the rain finally came!

Day 14 enrollment figures also came out this week and Wright State has 17,595 students, down 1.1% from last year. CoLA is down 4.2% to 2,904 students. The story of the day, however, is the significant increase in international student enrollment by 42%, for a total of 1,505 students. The majority of those students are interested in graduate studies in engineering, but also in other programs such as business and our Masters in Public Administration.

CoLA's LEAP - Learning English for Academic and Professional Purposes - is hugely successful in helping recruit many of these international students who want to learn English to be successful in their chosen career. LEAP has grown by leaps and bounds both in terms of student enrollment and high caliber programming. This semester 161 students are enrolled in LEAP from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Libya, Iran, Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, France, Honduras, Brazil, and Puerto Rico. Data indicate that undergraduate students who completed the LEAP program were better prepared to successfully manage their university studies and earned higher GPAs (3.5 ave GPA) as compared to students who did not (2.9 ave GPA). Way to Go LEAP Faculty! And Way to Go Director Jeannette Horwitz and Assistant Director Catherine Crowley!

There are lots of other international activities happening on campus and in the college as well. This past week we welcomed twelve new exchange visitors for this semester from Xi'an University of Arts and Science and Shaanxi Normal University in China. Two of these scholars, Tie Li and Xiaoxia Lu, are guests in the Department of English Language and Literatures where they hope to learn, share, and develop best practices in the Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and English as a Second Language (ESL), areas in which we excel. Thank you English Department faculty and staff and Chair Carol Loranger for being such great hosts!

As a college we must be increasingly aware of and engaged in our own enrollment management. I truly appreciate every department's hard work to build innovative, strategic marketing and recruitment plans. As we purposefully recruit students and wow them with our successful, solid programs, we will see more students choose Wright State and the College of Liberal Arts.

Kristin Sobolik

Dean 

www.wright.edu/cola