On October 22, 2025, President Peter Kilpatrick addressed hundreds of Catholic University of America faculty and staff in the Rossi Auditorium of the Conway School of Nursing.
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Good afternoon, and thank you for coming today for this discussion on the future of The Catholic University of America. Before I get into my remarks, I would like to thank our Staff Leadership Council, led by Julie Cilano of Campus Ministry, that represents our entire valuable staff, for advocating for this opportunity to come together as a community to begin a conversation about what’s next for our University. I would also like to thank my own staff in the Office of the President and Events and Conference Services, for scheduling and organizing this event today. And thank you to my entire leadership team for helping me over the last few months to articulate our strategy going forward, and for helping to prepare these remarks. I would like to particularly thank Ms. Karna Lozoya, who really stepped up to these tasks.
Remembering Who We Are
Before we discuss our current state, I wanted to spend a few moments remembering who we are as a University and community. When Pope Leo XIII established The Catholic University of America in 1887, he charged us with a dual mission that remains as urgent today as it was 138 years ago: to “provide the Church with worthy ministers” and to “give to the Republic her best citizens.” This founding mandate is not merely our history—it is our blueprint for success.
Born from the heart of the Church, Catholic University’s identity and mission permeate every aspect of our institution. We are the only pontifically-chartered R1 research university in the United States, the only university founded by the American bishops, and the only university with six of our alumni up for canonization. All of the active Cardinal archbishops in the United States serve as fellows on our Board of Trustees, and we are the only institution to have welcomed three Popes to our campus—and hopefully a fourth soon! Indeed, I will be meeting with Pope Leo XIV next month in Nicaea, and I intend to invite him personally then.
Catholic University has extraordinary assets that no other American university can claim: our ecclesiastical schools in Theology, Philosophy, and Canon Law; our location in the nation’s capital, surrounded by dozens of religious houses of study and ecclesial institutes; and our deep unique roots in the Catholic intellectual tradition. From the beginning, Catholic University has always considered itself to be fully American, in the very best sense of our heritage of liberty and justice for all, and fully Catholic.
Standing in the tradition of the great universities, we foster an authentic search for truth, guided by the dual lights of faith and reason, welcoming students and scholars of all backgrounds, faith traditions, and ethnicities to an environment where vigorous, thoughtful discourse and innovative research can flourish. We combine our Catholic intellectual tradition with our academic rigor, offering a unique educational experience to our undergraduate and graduate students. We do this in our Conway School of Nursing, which is now ranked No. 28 among all 689 nursing schools in the nation; in our Columbus School of Law, which has flown up the rankings the past few years to 71; in our Busch School of Business, which recently achieved the very selective and coveted AACSB accreditation, placing it in the top 6% of business schools in the world; in our unique ecclesiastical schools; and in every one of our schools and programs.
A university is nothing without its students, to whom we devote tirelessly all of our efforts. This institution’s particular way of being university is distinguished by our twin commitments to offering undergraduate students a foundation in the liberal arts—drawing them into conversations begun in the ancient world, while at the same time directing them toward research, scholarship, employment, and the most modern and innovative of curricula. As it has from its earliest days, this institution also offers rigorous graduate and professional programs befitting the name “university.” We invite all of our students, in every program, to join in the pursuit of knowledge with openness to the Truth and with the confidence, joy, and wonder born of faith in the goodness of our Creator and of the natural world.
Our Resolve Tested
This past year has tested our resolve, forced difficult decisions, and challenged us to confront hard truths about our position in an ever-increasingly competitive higher education landscape. I won’t rehash all that we went through together over the last 12 months, but I do want to express my sincere gratitude for all that this community did to enable us to endure our challenges and come through with flying colors.
The work we accomplished together to reset our budget—reducing operating expenses by 10%—was an ambitious and very painful undertaking, and we all deserve tremendous credit for making it happen. But before I continue, I want to pause here and fully acknowledge the process we lived through to right-size our budget. We cut expenses. We reorganized schools and offices. We lost very good people. And it took an emotional and psychological toll on all of us.
We didn’t always agree on how to make these cuts, but we were all looking at the same numbers, and we all understood what needed to happen. And we did it—together.
So I want to say “thank you!” to our entire community. Thank you for sticking together through this difficult time. Thank you for your patience, your kindness, and your understanding as we navigated these painful decisions together. Thank you for having the hard conversations, making the hard choices, and adjusting to challenging circumstances. And thank you for being here today—for your continued support of Catholic University and for your continued investment in the future of our beloved institution.
Now please allow me to discuss what we have accomplished this fiscal year together while effecting our budget reset. We enrolled 812 full-time first-year students, as well as 70+ transfer students, and with greater net tuition revenue than prior years. We have a balanced budget with embedded policies of fiscal discipline for the first time in a decade. We enrolled more than 500 new master’s students (with nearly a third of those coming from new programs), and we had the largest fundraising year on record this past year: $83 million in gifts and commitments. We achieved a nearly 14% increase in net tuition revenue, something we have not done for more than 15 years.
A key initiative of this past year has been to launch new academic programs. My central guidance has been that the programs must be mission-centric; capable of producing academic excellence in a way that uses our identity and strengths; capable of generating significant gross revenue (>$500K to $1M per year), and able to produce sufficient net revenue to be worth the investment of resources and energy (a minimum margin of 40-50%).
Some particulars regarding these initiatives. We aspired to recruit 50 new pre-ABSN (accelerated bachelor of science in nursing) students in the fall and 50 new ABSN students in the spring. We currently have 60 and 50 deposits, respectively. We targeted 65 new students this fall for the Word on Fire master’s in evangelization and culture and achieved 71 deposits. Together, those two programs could realize a gross-revenue increase of nearly $2.4M. The potential is great for FY26. If we can maintain new student enrollments for cohorts 2-4 in the ABSN and grow the Word on Fire master’s degree program to 102 students, that gross revenue increases to $10.7M in FY27 with a margin of nearly 50%.
There were also a few challenges this year. As many of you know, the rate at which the federal government is denying visas for international students has adversely affected our international student recruitment, particularly for our graduate programs. Additionally, we missed our goal on summer enrollment revenue. We took immediate steps to control costs, including placing a University-wide pause on rehires for a period of time. These cost-cutting measures allowed us largely to make up for the two revenue challenges with expense reductions. While we still have work ahead to get to the point where we are growing revenue every year (with room for investment), we made enormous strides this year.
Our Future
As we continue to strengthen ourselves financially, please know that we are particularly sensitive to the impact of retirement contributions and salary. Restoring the retirement contribution and working toward offering competitive compensation that keeps pace with regional cost of living remain among our highest priorities going forward. I should note that liquidity and addressing deferred maintenance are also very high priorities. While the recent cuts in staffing and projects have been painful, we also now must turn toward opening a new chapter in our history.
Here are three initiatives that we are already working on.
As we were arriving at the end of the budget cuts, we initiated a conversation with several Trustees (along with our Board chair Rob Neal) about what would be needed to come out of our tight financial situation. We identified three key strategic priorities: (1) invest in research and innovation; (2) increase awareness of our university; and (3) grow enrollment revenue and philanthropy. From those conversations, we received personal financial revenue commitments from Board members that grew out of their trust that the University had made the tough decisions and was serious about its future. As a result, Catholic University raised over $33 million in Bridge funds to allow us to act quickly and decisively through FY 2028. The first call on those resources was to cover the faculty buyout packages and provide the most generous severance packages possible to our departing staff. I am immensely grateful that we were able to be as kind and compensative as we were.
Board Chairman Rob Neal played a critical part, as he made a personal unrestricted gift of $10 million to the University. His gift was followed by commitments from seven other Board members, including two who gave $9 million each, until we had $33 million in commitments that will be received and expended over three years.
- As we continue to build our University for future success, we recognize that some of our business processes and policies need updating and improvement. Key leaders across the University will be evaluating our functioning around recognized pain points, with an aim toward simplification and expediency. A key initiative of process improvement will be streamlining and expediting procurement processes. You all do the work of the University, and we look forward to your candid and thoughtful engagement in making these improvements. We have thus far identified nine project areas.
The University will develop a staff and faculty leadership development program called the University Leadership Academy that helps form future leaders and create cross-divisional "connective tissue” for the University. This will be stood up by January 2026, and we will offer at least 1-2 cohorts of 25 each year for the next five years.
In order to guide our efforts over the longer term, I want to present to you today another project we’ve been working on this summer. It is the continuation of the strategic planning process many of you participated in a year or so ago. This past summer, we revisited all of that good work and crafted a renewed and reinvigorated strategic framework for Catholic University that seeks to leverage our distinctive characteristics and capabilities into competitive advantages in the marketplace.
I don’t think it should be news to anyone in this room that our University faces intense competitive pressures across multiple dimensions that threaten its market position and financial sustainability. The University competes primarily on price and value with similarly sized mid-Atlantic regional universities, and we should fare better in these battles.
Meanwhile, the top 50 as judged by U.S. News & World Report remain untouchable, controlling much of the wealth in higher education, with U.S. News rankings reinforcing perceptions of prestige that favor these institutions. A shrinking pool of prospective students is intensifying the competition, as is higher price sensitivity and debt aversion on the part of families. To compete in this landscape, it is imperative for us to lean into what we do better than anyone else.
To that end, we are making a series of long term investments:
- Catholic University is a serious and unique academic institution. We seek to leverage our expertise in the Catholic tradition and identity, together with our professional excellence, to create distinctive, rigorous academic experiences that students can’t find anywhere else.
- Pope Leo XIII mandated Catholic University to form “worthy ministers” for the Church, and we believe nurturing more institutional structures that would support the formation of priests, religious, and lay ministers will create a unique Catholic and academic culture that will stand out in the crowd.
- Pope Leo XIII also mandated that this University “give to the Republic its best citizens.” To that end, we seek to invest resources and forge partnerships that will help our students land top job placements in top professional fields, which will lead to increased inquiries and applications from students and families seeking the same premiere outcomes.
- Our campus is one of our largest and most valuable assets. We can leverage strategic partnerships with other institutions to bring more people to campus and to make more efficient use of our facilities and our services. Additionally, Catholic University can grow its offerings by leveraging the expertise of other institutions.
- One of our great successes of last year is a key element of our plan going forward—namely, building up an array of online offerings for both professionals and non-traditional students that will create new, untapped opportunities to grow revenue.
To help us organize our work going forward, we have identified six core strategic pillars:
● Mission
● Academic Excellence
● Formation of Church Leadership
● Unique Student Experience
● Premiere Outcomes
● Institutional Strength & Partnerships
Mission
We seek to nurture a clear institutional identity and culture that positions Catholic University in the heart of the Church, and to create a truly Catholic culture that is characterized by joy, compassion, and service to God and neighbor. Our educational mission affirms the truth articulated in Vatican 2 that “only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light” (Gaudium et spes, 22).
We have an extraordinary opportunity to transform how our University community understands and lives our mission. Through a beautifully crafted mission book that captures our history, our identity, and our purpose, we will articulate a shared understanding of mission that grounds every meaningful conversation about who we are and why we exist.
Imagine every person who walks through our doors—whether a new trustee, a prospective faculty member, or an incoming or prospective student—encountering our story in a way that genuinely moves them. By developing tailored messaging for each crucial moment—orientation programs, hiring processes, admission events—we will ensure that our entire community is connected to our fundamental values and mission.
Building on the mission book, we will develop annual programming that brings together our leadership, faculty, staff, and students to reconnect with our purpose. We envision a University Day that becomes the heartbeat of our academic year, a true celebration modeled on the best of the dies academicus of European universities. We will create traditions where we pause to honor our foundation, celebrate our achievements, and renew our commitment to scholarship and service. Centered around our patronal feast on January 28 of St. Thomas Aquinas, this could become the defining tradition that sets us apart.
Academic Excellence
Catholic University will further enhance its status as a serious place to think about the most pressing moral, social, and societal issues—where the Church’s 2,000-year intellectual tradition tackles the most pressing contemporary challenges in the most appropriate and prudential ways to utilize artificial intelligence, in healthcare, biomedical advances, social issues, and in the great questions of our time. This isn’t about choosing between faith and academic excellence—it’s about demonstrating that true intellectual and societal leadership flows from the integration of both.
This means further integrating Catholic social teaching and our great Catholic intellectual tradition across every single discipline. Nursing students will graduate understanding Catholic bioethics with sophistication and thus be able to care for their patients in the most virtuous and compassionate ways that acknowledge the infinite dignity of the person. Business students will be formed in principles of human dignity and the common good and how this applies to finance, investing, management, and entrepreneurship. Engineering students will grapple with technology’s impact on human flourishing and will learn how to devise appropriate societal guardrails for new and emerging technologies.
This will require a comprehensive review of our curriculum. The virtues-based approach should be integrated throughout the curriculum and should have measurable outcomes. Academic activities and research must include a focus on the human person, made in the image and likeness of God, with infinite dignity.
We will continue to focus on research investments where it has been a position of strength and is distinctively mission-oriented. Our R1 status must be maintained but should be seen as a continuing integration of our Catholic intellectual tradition and not as an end in itself. Specific and achievable research metrics should be set up and monitored to advance this academic excellence. We will promote interdisciplinary collaborations among our faculty on issues of relevance to the mission and Catholic identity of the university. For example, we are in the process of launching the Leonine Institute of AI and Emerging Technologies, led by Taylor Black, who is renowned for his expertise in AI.
The University must maintain a special position of excellence in the fields of theology, philosophy, and canon law. These fields are the bedrock of the academic founding of our University. The Catholic University of America will be the convening authority and national hub engaging the world as the leader in the Catholic intellectual tradition.
Revenue growth strategies include transitioning current popular graduate programs offered in-person to online. The M.S. in data analytics, the MBA, the masters in public policy, and the M.S. in information systems are already moving online. The University will launch new graduate programs that build on the success of undergraduate ones, with master’s-level degrees in criminology and accounting as examples of such new launches.
New graduate programs will also be launched, based on market analysis of student and regional demand, competitive intensity, wages, skills, and jobs, all guided by our mission. The University also utilizes market data to predict annual enrollments. Generally, the market is showing high growth potential in allied health and mental health. Twenty new graduate programs have been identified, and the deans are currently working with their leadership teams on assessing the feasibility and revenue potential of these programs.
We will also launch a dedicated online division for Catholic professionals, homeschool families, and global religious communities. We will offer stackable credentials in AI ethics, Catholic bioethics, catechetics, and nonprofit leadership. We envision a robust community of thousands of non-traditional adult learners benefiting from our deep expertise in Catholic thought.
Formation of Church Leadership
At its heart, Catholic University remains the Church’s and the Bishops’ university. The institution will expand its welcoming infrastructure for seminarians, priests, religious, and lay ecclesial leaders. The campus will become even more of a “Little Rome”—a place where future Church leaders receive not just academic training, but comprehensive human, spiritual, intellectual, and pastoral formation for ecclesial service at home and abroad.
This includes enhanced housing for priests and religious, expanded partnerships with dioceses and religious communities, and innovative programs that prepare both ordained and lay ministers for 21st-century challenges.
Unique Student Experience
The University rejects the false choice between being boldly Catholic and academically rigorous. We seek to lead in combining robust academics, rigorous thinking and moral formation, while also leveraging our location in Washington, D.C., and our campus in Rome to provide unparalleled experiential learning opportunities.
It also means robust campus ministry, vibrant residential life, and Division III athletics that embody the commitment to excellence in all things. It means small classes, high-touch advising, and the kind of formative community that creates lifelong bonds.
Service must be at the heart of formation and student experience, as it is at the heart of the Catholic mission and Catholic social teaching. The University will continue to build out virtue learning, taking what the Academy has done in integrating virtue learning throughout the curriculum and expanding it to all aspects of campus life. In athletics, the University will fully develop the virtuous leadership model in collaboration with Campus Ministry. In campus life, the University will work to build a model of community and residential life around virtuous education, creating a virtuous leadership model for RAs in their training sessions.
A central initiative of this pillar is to build out a new community life model for our residential students and commuters. The model will seek to be grounded in the institution's commitment to virtuous education, fidelity to the founding mission, its capacity to attract and retain exceptional students, and its effectiveness in fostering student development toward their fullest potential.
Premiere Outcomes
The purpose of this pillar is to strengthen student persistence, belonging, and post-graduation outcomes through a coordinated, data-driven approach that aligns retention, advising, and experiential learning efforts across divisions.
The University will convene the Retention Committee to deliver an actionable one-, three-, and five-year retention improvement plan this semester. The committee will collect and synthesize data, compiling recent analyses—especially the commuter cohort study—and integrating historical retention data, Navigate (EAB) advising metrics, and cohort-level insights from Institutional Research.
Immediate interventions include launching commuter engagement programming and assigning faculty/alumni mentors. The university will replenish and expand the Retention Assistance Fund for students facing financial hardship and build a real-time retention dashboard for monitoring. An external review will evaluate whether a third-party assessment is needed in analyzing retention gaps and predictive modeling.
The University will clarify and align by convening stakeholders, such as Career Services, Academic Deans, Institutional Research, Communications, and Advancement, to establish shared definitions of internships, clinicals, and experiential learning and standardize data collection.
An audit and benchmark review will examine where data currently resides—in Cardinal Careers, departmental tracking—how it is collected, and align with external reporting bodies such as the U.S. News, NACE, and NSSE.
The University will set goals and communicate results, establishing clear targets (such as 90% undergraduate internship participation by 2027) and creating unified messaging for web, print, and rankings submissions.
Institutional Strength & Partnerships
Advancing our mission requires a robust philanthropic operation, robust systems and facilities, robust partnerships, and organizational health.
We are preparing to launch our next comprehensive campaign—which will be the largest in our history. The campaign will focus on scholarships, faculty chairs, facilities and mission-driven institutes. We envision a goal well in excess of the $518 million we raised in Light the Way. To date, we have generated almost $200 million in the quiet phase which began at the mid-point of FY 2024. We anticipate a public launch of this campaign during FY 2028. This initiative will conclude in FY 2032. In the near term, we must pay particular attention to building our alumni engagement efforts in order to expand our volunteer and major donor ranks. We aspire to double our alumni giving participation rate and to develop and expand mentorship networks tied to academic schools.
We will grow a positive cash flow margin for annual operating budget to 7% per year ($20M) by FY28 to enable investment in deferred maintenance and endowment. The endowment should grow to $650 million by 2030. Net tuition revenue will grow by 15-20% each year for the next five years through new post-baccalaureate programs and graduate online programs, as well as through continued strong growth in existing programs that are performing strongly.
We will invest at least $25-30 million in deferred maintenance capital projects in each of FY27 through FY30. We will consider additional ways to monetize our West Campus and South Campus, and we will develop plans to generate at least $10-20 million per year in supplemental income from real estate holdings outside Main Campus—to include Rome and all other properties.
We will increase retention and peer assessment so as to raise our ranking in the U.S. News & World Report to the top 100 by 2030.
We will expand pipelines with Catholic hospitals, dioceses, pontifical universities, DC institutions, and alumni-owned businesses. The goal is to establish 5-10 major institutional partnerships for student and faculty benefit and new revenue. By 2030, the University aims to develop three institutional partnerships that enable it to generate revenue and make much more efficient use of land, buildings, and services.
Our campus is sized for 10,000 students, and we believe that scale is not only achievable but also essential for universities to flourish, particularly comprehensive universities like ours. The market is very competitive, and growing the student body on campus is challenging. We have had success launching new programs and growing them, but much of that has been in online programs (a recent national survey reported that 60% of adult learners desire online program delivery in graduate programs). Accordingly, we are exploring partnerships with other universities and large organizations that would enable us to grow our population.
Our Unique Moment
I have just outlined our strategic priorities for the next five years, and you will all receive a copy of today’s remarks along with more detailed information about each pillar. Over the next month, I will hold a series of seven listening sessions to gather your feedback on these ideas; I encourage deep, thoughtful participation in these discussions. For those who prefer to contribute in writing or have additional thoughts after the sessions, we'll also provide a Google form for written submissions. After we’ve gathered input from our community, we’ll present these refined ideas to the Board of Trustees in December, with the goal of finalizing our strategy by the end of the calendar year.
I am firmly convinced that The Catholic University of America has a particular contribution to make in the current moment facing our nation, our Church, and our world. In an era when many universities have lost their way, we are going to lean into exactly who we are and why we exist. In a time when students and families seek authentic community and clear purpose, we are going to foster a community centered in Christian friendship and service. In an age when the world desperately needs moral leadership, we are going to form leaders equipped with a moral and ethical framework rooted in the infinite dignity of the human person.
We are not just another Catholic university. We are The Catholic University of America—chartered by the Pope, founded by the bishops, located in the capital, connected to Rome, and committed to excellence that transforms both mind and heart.
The bishops who founded Catholic University 138 years ago envisioned an institution that would be proudly American and boldly Catholic. They dreamed of a place where faith and reason together guide our search for truth, where academic excellence serves human flourishing, where graduates would lead with virtue and professional excellence.
The Catholic University of America is ready to claim its role as the intellectual and formative heart of American Catholicism, the hub of Catholic thought and leadership, and the place where the Church’s ancient wisdom meets contemporary challenges.
We stand at the threshold of a new chapter in Catholic University’s history. This vision requires all of us. Together, we will write it boldly.
Thank you, and I am happy to take your questions.
