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This month Wheaton College announces a capital campaign, The Promise of Wheaton, to raise $260 million by the year 2010. Previously kept in a “quiet phase,” the College has raised $161 million of the goal to date. The campaign has three main goals: keeping tuition affordable, providing a high-quality education in state-of-the-art facilities, and to help our students become well-rounded.
Keep Wheaton Affordable
When it comes to college costs and affordability, we recognize a liberal arts education is incredibly expensive. Wheaton must provide a high caliber education without allowing it to be priced out of reach of the very people we want to educate. How? Three ways.
1. Scholarships: The Promise seeks to increase by 30% Wheaton’s endowment dedicated to undesignated scholarships, providing enough interest income on a perennial basis to minimize financial barriers to a Wheaton education.
2. The Wheaton Fund: The Wheaton Fund consists of the unrestricted dollars in the College’s endowment. The monies are used to help cover the actual costs to run the College annually. Without the Wheaton Fund, these costs would be passed on to the students. Increasing the fund is crucial to keeping tuition costs low.
3. Planned Gifts: Since 1898, the College’s gift annuity program has helped subsidize the cost of a Wheaton education. Charitable remainder trusts are another vehicle that help ensure Wheaton is affordable for the students of tomorrow.
Provide Excellent Academic Experience
The College has identified key academic areas that require attention in the next several years.
1. New Science Center and Endowment for Collaborative Research and Equipment: Wheaton’s science program has long earned national recognition despite limitations in facilities, equipment, and research funding relative to other liberal arts colleges and universities. To provide a twenty-first century science education worthy of our students, a new science center will be constructed at the intersection of University and Howard streets, just east of the Todd M. Beamer Student Center. The building will have 128,000 square feet of space featuring a unique atrium museum that will house Perry the Mastadon, a geology exhibit, a natural history exhibit, and space for additional exhibits—all open to the public. Every faculty member will be given a unique research space. The center will be constructed to LEED standards and include innovations that enable energy recovery and energy efficiency, such as a roof made of self-sustaining ground cover and special shades to control or reflect light.
2. The Arts: Adams Hall, home of our outstanding art department, was the College’s first gymnasium beginning in the late 1890s. Enlarging existing space by almost 70 percent, the renovations will provide a much needed lecture hall, gallery spaces, air conditioning and disability accessibility.
Renovations are also underway at Edman Chapel. This excellent performance venue has long lacked proper staging and dressing room spaces. The addition to the back of Edman will also add classroom, rehearsal and faculty office space.
This initiative also includes a Fine Arts Program Endowment, to sustain and expand instruction, purchase instruments and equipment, and increase the Conservatory’s scope and visibility.
3. The Library: The Promise of Wheaton has called for improving the functioning of the library by renovating and reorganizing the facility to better serve our students. This step has been completed using funds raised so far
4. Hastert Center: Wheaton's Memorial Student Center is now home to a new Center, a new Chair, and two of Wheaton's academic departments. The J. Dennis Hastert Center for Business, Economics and Public Policy has a mission to complement the historic mission of Wheaton College with resources devoted to the study of economics, politics, and values in multiple arenas of business, government, and ministry. The Memorial Student Center renovations earned a LEED silver award.
Shape the Whole Student for Christ
Shaping the whole student for Christ is a final initiative affirming the College’s mission “to help build the church and improve society worldwide by promoting the development of whole and effective Christians.”
1. Faculty-to-Student Mentoring: Each Wheaton undergraduate will be given an opportunity to be taught, discipled and mentored by faculty in ways that go beyond what is possible in the classroom.
2. Beyond-the-Classroom Opportunities: This endowment will help make possible the concerted institutional effort to expand students’ opportunities for learning “beyond the classroom.” These include more semester or summer professional internships, and increased off-campus study programs—often in another culture.
3. Evangelism: This endowment will fund the ongoing effort to expand our students’ appreciation of and participation in the church’s evangelistic task.
For more information on any of the initiatives, and for fundraising updates, please visit promise.wheaton.edu.
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