Chapman University President Daniele Struppa recently gave his last state of the university address, saying the school is doing well financially despite a government caused hiccup that caused its enrollment to drop 2% last fall.
“It has been an interesting year for Chapman,” Struppa said. “We really had to exercise our control over the budget.”
Struppa spoke Feb. 28 at his final campus wide address at Chapman, where he spent 10 years as provost and another nine as president. He is retiring to rejoin the mathematics faculty. Succeeding him is Executive Vice President and Chief Advancement Officer Matt Parlow, effective Sept. 2.
“I don’t think the university could be in better hands,” Struppa said.
“He is a person of integrity, great honesty, great vision, passion for the university—he loves Chapman with all of his being—and I think that this is going to be really a spectacular future that waits for us.”
Some of the actions Chapman took to mitigate decreased enrollment included closing 20 open staff positions and using a portion of funds originally intended to go in the endowment toward operations.
Revenue declined this year due to a “flexion in enrollment,” a spokeswoman said. The school declined to provide exact revenue, saying it’s usually around $500 million.
$402M Raised From 19K Donors
The $500 million Inspire campaign has been going “tremendously well,” according to Parlow.
“I can confidently stand here and tell you that I think we will exceed that goal and close it out early” ahead of the 2028 deadline, he said during the address.
Chapman has raised $402 million to date, made up of more than 19,000 donors and over 82,000 gifts.
Notable gifts Chapman received in 2024 include a $5 million workforce development grant from CalOptima Health to help students in OC become healthcare professionals in medically underserved communities, as well as another $5 million gift from alumnus Alex Hayden that established the Alexander E. Hayden School of Real Estate.
The Samueli Foundation also donated two separate gifts to Chapman last year.
The first gift of $3 million went to endow the school’s annual Holocaust art and writing contest, which Susan and Henry Samueli have sponsored and acted as judges for in previous years.
The other, a $1.85 million gift, established a new initiative centered around equipping students with “the skills for civil discourse, digital literacy and nuanced conversations on complex topics.”
For more about the Samueli Foundation’s other initiatives in Orange County, see next week’s issue.
Parlow said that the university will announce another gift next month and that “there’s more coming.”
The Struppa Effect
Chapman announced the leadership transition last December.
Parlow said that the school will soon launch a national search for his successor as chief advancement officer.
During the state of the university address, Parlow gave an overview of Struppa’s contributions to Chapman.
Throughout his 19 years at the university, Struppa launched six new schools and colleges including the Schmid College of Science and Technology and the College of Performing Arts (CoPA).
Struppa also has helped grow Chapman’s reputation as a research institution, having earned R2 status in 2018. The classification indicates a university has high levels of research activity and graduates a certain number of doctorate degrees.
Just 10 years ago, Chapman recorded $5.4 million in research. This year, it’s getting close to spending $50 million. A large portion of that is going toward the sciences and economics, Struppa said.
Chapman has set a more conservative enrollment target of 16,000 applicants for the coming school year.
“I am pretty sure we can meet that, and I’d venture that we do better than that,” Struppa said.
A Government Snafu
Enrollment for the 2024-25 school year for both undergraduates and grad students fell 2% to 9,760 students.
The decline, Struppa said, can be traced to 2020 when Congress passed a bill to overhaul the historically lengthy process of applying for federal aid, scheduled to take effect in the 2024-25 school year. When the new process for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) was rolled out in December of 2023, however, several technical issues prevented students from filling out the form, causing delays and giving them less time to review their financial aid offers ahead of commitment deadlines.
In prior years, Chapman had been steadily increasing the amount of financial aid it was offering students, distributing 2,260 packages in 2022 and 2,709 in 2023.
For the 2024-25 school year, Chapman sent out zero financial aid offers.
Struppa said that the delays in financial aid caused many students to opt for more affordable schools to avoid any risk.
“Imagine you want to send your kid to Chapman and you’re excited,” Struppa said. “The cost is $65,000 to attend, but you don’t have that to spend every year, so you’re waiting to hear what we can offer. Now you don’t know, time goes by and at some point you tell them just go to Fullerton this semester.”
For the current school year, Chapman had about 16,000 applicants for freshmen year, offered admissions to 5,874 students and recorded 1,600 new students, below its goal of 1,800.
Nationwide, the botched FAFSA ÂÂrollout led to a 9% decline in submitted applications among first-time applicants, and an overall decline of about 432,000 applications as of the end of August 2024, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Active Year
Overall, 2024 was an active year for Chapman, Struppa said.
Among his updates included ongoing campus projects and renovations.
Chapman’s renovation of the Lydia D. Killefer School is about 80% complete and is set to open in August. It will serve as the new home for the university’s Institute for Quantum Studies and Advanced Physics Laboratory.
Chapman purchased the facility for $5 million in 2020 and is spending about $15 million to adapt the historic building’s interior for research, offices, meeting spaces and community exhibitions.
“Right now, you can already go and walk by and it’s only two blocks from campus,” Struppa said. “It’s absolutely beautiful.”
The Board of Trustees last October voted to name the entire property the Daniele C.
Struppa Research Park in honor of the retiring president.
This year, Struppa said that the school is doing well financially. Its net assets have increased 3.4% to $1.8 billion. Its endowment has risen to an estimated $860 million, almost triple from when he became president in 2016.
Shortly after Struppa presented Chapman’s financials, protests came from the audience.
The students, identified as members of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Chapman by the university’s school newspaper, accused the university’s endowment of funding genocide.
SJP last year called for Chapman to divest endowment funds from companies that “have profited from the Genocide in Gaza and that aid Israel’s apartheid regime.”
Chapman’s Investment Committee of the Board of Trustees rejected SJP’s proposal. Trustee Jim Burra gave out an official statement saying that the university has “a fiduciary responsibility to preserve and grow the endowment, which directly supports the mission of the university.”
