The $100 million, multiyear effort aims to ensure the University's ability to make an extraordinary impact on the lives of students far into the future.
If you’re reading this article, Adelphi has almost certainly had a powerful impact on your life or on someone you know. If you’re an alum, the friends you made here are still important to you. The things you learned here prepared you for your career and guided your thinking. The experiences you had here have shaped you, inspired you and enriched your life.
Adelphi has always strived to have an impact on our students. These days, we’ve made it our mission to go even further. Our goal is to have an extraordinary impact, leading us to develop new ways to support student success, increase academic offerings and widen access to an Adelphi education.
So Adelphi is proud to announce the largest fundraising initiative in our history—The Momentum Campaign: Extraordinary Impact.
Our goal is ambitious: to raise $100 million for our students, our mission and our future. It’s a big goal, with a big purpose: to ensure that Adelphi can continue making an extraordinary impact for generations to come.
Adelphi Rising
Why are we launching the Momentum Campaign now? It’s the right time.
Adelphi has never been stronger. In the past few years, we have enrolled several of the largest and most diverse classes in our history. We’ve seen remarkable increases in retention and graduation rates. We’ve introduced more than 50 new academic programs. Our students are graduating into rewarding and well-paying careers. And we’ve made a dramatic rise in the national rankings.
These accomplishments are no accident. They’re the product of our determination to reach goals set in our Momentum strategic plans. Everyone at Adelphi has had a hand in creating these successes.
Now we’re determined to build on this success—to do even more for students today and far into the future. That’s what the Momentum Campaign is all about.
The Momentum Campaign: Extraordinary Impact
The Momentum Campaign is not only big in ambition—it’s big in scope, raising funds to provide lasting support for initiatives in six vital areas:
- Scholarships and access to an Adelphi education
- Academic excellence to prepare students for a changing world
- Life-changing student experiences and opportunities
- A modern and beautiful campus to call home
- A diverse community where all students flourish
- The Adelphi Fund: one fund for everyone and everything at Adelphi
Why are these areas so important? What kind of impact do they have on students? Read on.
Scholarships: Opening Doors
Scholarships are the most powerful way to impact the life of a student. They are life-changing, an engine of social mobility.
Adelphi already stands out for opening its doors to students who wouldn’t have the means to attend a private university. More than a third of our students are the first in their family to attend college, and 30 percent are from low-income families. We are proud to support them not only with a wide range of scholarships, but with programs that help them get the most out of their college experience.
Scholarships benefit everyone at Adelphi. They bring new ideas and perspectives to our classrooms. They enrich campus life.
The Momentum Campaign will help significantly enhance our ability to provide the financial support so many of our students need. It will fund endowed scholarships for undergraduate and graduate students, add to the support available to students who experience unexpected financial reversals, and create scholarships for high-achieving student-athletes.
Academics: How Adelphi is Meeting Changing Needs
Everyone knows how quickly our world is changing. No one knows exactly what changes lie ahead.
Universities must be able to adapt quickly to meet the needs and aspirations of students. Adelphi has been doing that over the past decade, creating more than 50 new career-oriented programs. More than 30 of those programs offer online study options, giving working adults flexible, affordable ways to earn career-boosting graduate degrees or finish their undergraduate work.
We’ll continue developing new programs as new technologies, new areas of inquiry and new realities emerge. And we’ll support those programs with internships, research opportunities and experience designed to expand student perspectives.
Adelphi has numerous innovation funds dedicated to exploring new ways to enhance learning and scholarship. The Momentum Campaign will raise donations for all of them, as well as for funds to support our libraries and attract top faculty.
Beyond the Classroom: Life-Changing Experiences
An education with extraordinary impact doesn’t happen in the classroom alone. It happens when students also become part of communities bound by shared interests and ambitions, or when they make a discovery through conducting original research. It happens when students find a calling through an internship or experience the power of helping others. And it happens when students discover something in themselves that they didn’t know they had.
That is why experiential learning is a vital part of an Adelphi education. We offer our students an extraordinary range of life-changing opportunities to step outside the classroom to learn new skills, deepen their understanding, follow their academic interests, volunteer, build leadership abilities and prepare for their career. And Adelphi students take advantage of the opportunities; it is the rare student who does not.
The Momentum Campaign will raise donations for close to a dozen funds supporting student experiences— everything from our Honors College to internships, research, athletics, community engagement, study abroad and beyond.
The Bhisé Global Learning Experience, established by alumnus Bharat Bhisé, MBA ’78, is an incubator for global learning that provides Adelphi students with an immersive study tour of India.
The Two Museums Program—created by David Machlis, PhD, associate professor of finance and economics, to enhance understanding and combat racism and intolerance—took a group of Black and Jewish Adelphi students to Washington, D.C., to visit the National Museum of African American History & Culture and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
A Modern Campus: Building for the Future
State-of-the-art facilities aren’t a luxury any longer. With new technologies and new applications appearing seemingly every day, they’re a necessity. Preparing students for life and careers in a fast-changing world demands them.
We are now planning for the revitalization of numerous buildings on our campus, modernizing classrooms to promote active learning, expanding labs and enhancing their functionality.
Other plans focus on the needs of our students and of society. We’re creating a new Health and Wellness Center to support the physical and mental well-being of our students, and we’re considering upgrading both our athletic facilities and Hagedorn Hall to benefit our student-athletes and students in the Robert B. Willumstad School of Business, respectively. We are also, of course, working on ways to reduce the University’s environmental impact and increase sustainability.
The renovated and expanded Ruth S. Harley University Center opened in January 2021, providing a beautiful, environmentally friendly, state-of-the-art center for campus life.
A Diverse Community: Reflecting Our World
As a university in the incredibly diverse New York City area, welcoming students from 76 countries around the world, Adelphi draws strength from the variety of perspectives, experiences, interests and talents our students bring to campus.
Adelphi has never been more inclusive than it is today. A large percentage of our students are the first in their family to attend college. Our Bridges to Adelphi program helps neurodivergent students flourish. Close to half of our student body identify as nonwhite.
Adelphi will always remain committed to building a community of students from all backgrounds, and we will continue encouraging engagement and the sharing of ideas. And we will always provide guidance and support to help our students succeed.
The Momentum Campaign will enhance and build on our many programs supporting student success, including our award-winning mentoring program, first-generation student programs and our Hispanic Community Partnership Program.
With the help of a Viret Family Faculty Leadership Fellowship, Professor Edmund J.Y. Pajarillo, PhD, developed the Equitable, Targeted and Structured Onboarding Program to prepare adults entering the MS in Healthcare Informatics program for the research and technological challenges of graduate school.
The Adelphi Fund: Impact When and Where It’s Needed
The Momentum Campaign is raising support for initiatives we know will have an impact on the lives of our students. But we can’t anticipate every situation and need.
No one expected a pandemic and the financial distress that it caused some of our Adelphi families. But the University was able to come to the aid of students who were affected and keep them on the path to graduation, thanks in part to help from the Adelphi Fund.
The Adelphi Fund is a source of flexible, ongoing support that can be used whenever and wherever the need is greatest. It supports every student, every classroom and every academic program. It’s the one fund that supports everything we do at Adelphi.
Join Us in Making an Extraordinary Impact
It is an extraordinary moment in Adelphi’s history—a time of strength, a time when we can take the next bold step to an even stronger future.
Our alumni and friends agree, pledging support that has us well on our way to meeting our $100 million goal. But we will commit the next three years, through 2027, to complete the Momentum Campaign.
During that time, we invite everyone in our community—alumni, faculty, staff, students and their families, and friends of the University—to join us in this effort to ensure that Adelphi continues making an extraordinary impact on the lives of students and on the world around us.
This story was featured in the 2024 Issue of the Adelphi University Magazine.
