Spotlight On: Michael Driscoll, President, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Key points:
- • Student support initiatives are driving stronger retention and persistence.
- • Healthcare programs are expanding to meet regional workforce needs.
- • Experiential learning and flexible credentials are shaping IUP’s future.
September 2026 — Invest: spoke with Michael Driscoll, president of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, about IUP’s progress on student success, workforce alignment, healthcare education, and the university’s role in regional growth. “We want every student who is prepared to come to IUP, who is ready to work hard to succeed, to be successful,” said Driscoll.
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Which changes under IUP’s strategic plan have had the greatest impact on student success, and which areas remain a work in progress?
We are impressed with the results we’re seeing from our student success infrastructure, which provides a navigator for every single student to help them work through the bureaucracy and whatever issues they may face. We are also seeing an increasing focus on student success from all our faculty and staff. That culture change, which we started several years ago, is really paying off.
We have seen remarkable increases in retention and persistence of our undergraduate students in particular. For our first-time, full-time, degree-seeking undergraduate cohort, we are at 78.23% retention from that first to second year; that’s up from the 2020 cohort, which was at 71.33%. That is an increase of seven percentage points, which is remarkable in any period of time, and we’re still serving the broad range of students with broad preparation and backgrounds that we’ve always served. I’m really pleased with what we’re changing.
Our students are continuing and persisting; that number shows it. Our upper division persistence into the third year has also gone up dramatically. We are at a little over 66%; that’s up from 60% for the 2019 cohort, so we are seeing those multi-percentage-point increases for our students, and in a population of a couple of thousand students, a percentage point is a significant number.
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the Pittsburgh region need a more educated workforce. Our students get a chance at transforming their lives. We’re seeing really great results there. We’re seeing this kind of increase across the board for all of our student cohorts: students who are the first in their families to attend college, students who come from families who are familiar with college; we’re seeing similar percentage increases across all of those populations.
The most dramatic number I have is for the 2020 cohort of first-generation college students. We went from 63.9% to 74.1% for these students, who are from families where no one had ever gone to college before, who don’t know how college works – and that’s an incredibly important population for us.
We have also completed a significant review of our academic program mix. We eliminated or moved some programs into moratorium – programs that weren’t as popular with students and weren’t in need for the workforce in the commonwealth.
We’ve focused on healthcare. One of the pieces of our recent academic reorganization is moving programs together into a College of Health Sciences. It’s just remarkable what we’re seeing as we look ahead to this fall’s enrollments in key areas, including medical imaging and diagnostic medical sonography. There’s a 30.7% increase in students committing to these programs for the fall; a 95% increase in students committed to the medical imaging echocardiography bachelor’s program; a 26% increase in student committing to nuclear medicine technology; a 60% increase in students coming in for the medical laboratory sciences bachelor’s program; and a 33.5% increase in students committed to the bachelor’s degree in nursing.
That’s a wonderful number; everyone needs more nurses, and we have a great program. We’re going to see a lot more nurses coming out of the pipeline in four years. That’s because potential students are seeing that we are doing the right things, making sure that students are successful and meeting high standards, and we are offering the programs that students want. As we continue to look at those academic programs and the support that students need in those particularly challenging programs, we are going to see continued results there. We are seeing significant increases in enrollment coming in the year ahead in almost all of our health-related programs.
We are doing great work in those programs and always have. Students see that we provide the support for them that they need and recognize that this is a great place to go. We’re keeping our costs low for students to attend, so this is becoming an even better investment.
What does it mean in practice for IUP to be a more student-centered institution?
IUP has maintained our enrollment over the past several years.
All of us are here to make sure our students are successful at meeting the standards we set, so they will be successful when they leave.
The navigators are the most visible example of providing that direct support to students, but all of us have taken a different approach, using tools that make sure that students who need assistance get that assistance, including those students who don’t realize themselves that they need help.
We use data analytics to identify students who may be struggling so we can get to them before they fail. Faculty can report concerns into the system, which helps identify students who may need assistance; that gets factored into the intelligence, and then someone gets an alert that maybe we should check in with that student to see how they are doing, to make sure they are moving ahead, even before they ask for help.
I think those things are key, but it’s about all of us thinking: How is this student doing? What do we need to do to help this student today to make sure they are successful tomorrow? This is something that all of us have a role in. It’s about the culture; that caring for students. We want every student who is prepared to come to IUP, who is ready to work hard to succeed, to be successful. We want to keep every student here, get them to graduate, and we are seeing that happen through the actions that are coming from all of our faculty and staff.
How is IUP demonstrating the return on investment of a college degree?
One of the big challenges is what value do we bring. There’s a lot of public rhetoric about this, as prices for some higher education institutions have gone up. The actual numbers continue to show that a student who completes a baccalaureate degree at IUP will outperform financially in their lifetime versus a student who finishes high school but who doesn’t finish college – a million dollars more over a career. Because we are so reasonably priced for the results that we provide for our students, they will end up paying back their initial investment in just 10 to 12 years; it doesn’t take them long at all.
That’s key to our strategy at IUP in supporting students: keeping our costs as low as we can, keeping tuition low, keeping housing and other costs low. We also provide a great deal of financial aid. About 90% of our entering class receives some form of financial aid, some of it merit-based and some of it need-based, to make sure that IUP is the best possible investment.
I can argue that IUP is a great investment for almost all of our students across the sector, and particularly for IUP, because of the programs we offer, because of our low cost, and high quality of the programmatic experience. Our students are going to get their money’s worth over their career and lifetime.
Many studies also show that people with a rewarding career and who have a good college education are more well-rounded, have stronger engagement in their communities, and overall, are happier with their life experience. The new Carnegie Foundation and American Council on Education classifications recognize IUP for higher access and for its graduates having higher earnings than their peers. That means we are providing more opportunities to students who might not otherwise attend college within our region, and our graduates are earning 50% more than graduates from many comparable institutions.
Beyond educating students, how does IUP contribute to workforce development and community revitalization?
We have looked at our academic program set and connected those programs that we’ve invested in with the needs of the communities that we serve, working to provide an educated workforce. We’ll continue to review our programs to ensure that the programs we offer make sense for the needs of the region and that what we’re doing within those programs makes sense for employers.
We have several partnerships and experiential learning opportunities for students now. A key goal for this year is to bring together the work of the last couple of years so that every one of our students will have at least one, and preferably more than one, experiential learning opportunity before graduating. That means as students are learning, our students are taking their knowledge and their skills out into the communities we serve. Even as first-year students, they will provide value to our communities.
The biggest thing that’s moving forward at IUP is the new College of Osteopathic Medicine. I certainly would talk about that as meeting the needs of rural Pennsylvania and beyond.
In late May, we received pre-accreditation status, which means we meet the standards, we can start admitting medical students, and we can start talking about it as a college of medicine as opposed to a ‘proposed’ college of medicine. We are now recruiting educators to fill the faculty needs and recruiting students for the college. The students will be here next summer. There will be about 64 students in that first class. As of July, we have already received 1,765 applications for those 64 slots.
We’re focusing on primary care physicians who will practice in rural areas of Pennsylvania. Throughout western Pennsylvania, except in the cities, you’ll find there is a great shortage of primary care physicians, and that shortage is getting worse. We’re working to fill those gaps. I think that will be the single biggest impact that we will have that is different from our day-to-day operations of educating students.
It’s a great success story, and we are fortunate to have a great team leading the college of medicine forward. In two years from now, we will start to see those medical students out doing clinical rotations throughout the region at hospitals and medical centers, and in four years, we’ll start to see those students graduate as doctors and focus on practicing in rural Pennsylvania, a key part of our community.
How is IUP preparing students for an economy where employer needs are evolving quickly, especially with artificial intelligence and technology?
Generally, the key has been to maintain a strong connection with our employers. However, our employers are not always perfect at predicting what they will need in five years either, so being active and connected with the national discussion is a good thing. We do not have it all figured out; I do not think anyone has it all figured out. But we have a strong set of technical people in our Department of Mathematical and Computer Science who teach the technology side of artificial intelligence, and we have a number of areas where faculty are starting to introduce artificial intelligence and its use in their classes.
We also have a strong IT support structure with real care being taken about the challenges that AI and these new technologies may present, including producing not quite correct answers, so helping students – and all of us – develop the right kind of cynicism to make sure we check the work and are getting things correct, and to help faculty help students to use AI correctly. A couple of faculty members in our writing center are spearheading an annual symposium about artificial intelligence, reaching a broad range of faculty, students, and staff. We have an interesting engagement at many levels, but it is always something we will need to keep looking at, and I expect it to continue to evolve.
Looking ahead five years, what do you hope will be noticeably different about IUP?
There are a couple of things that are clear.
We will continue to see 18-year-olds coming in to be residential students who need to learn all of the things that come with being that age, including being away from home. We will continue to support them as well as we have been doing for the last 150 years. That’s not going to change.
But I also think we will see students who are different than the ones we see today, who will come in wanting a specific skill, or a one-week module, or a few hours of something, and not want to spend four years for a bachelor’s degree or two years for a master’s degree. What I hope that we see at IUP is something that we’ve already started; that we will be able to provide students with the knowledge and the skill set that they need today, and let them come back to stitch that into a larger credential.
I think we are going to see a university that provides multiple experiential learning opportunities for all of our students that are targeted to what they want to accomplish in their degree program and in their life. I believe we are going to get better and better at developing pathways for the work that happens outside the classroom to complement all the great work that will continue to go on inside the classroom.
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