Transcript: President Schmidt Spring 2026 interview

The following is a transcript of our April 13, 2026 interview with President Martin A. Schmidt ’81. The transcript has been cleaned up for clarity.

The Poly: How are you? 

President Schmidt: I'm okay, yeah. 

So, you've spoken most recently at the Town Hall about RPI Forward as a model of financial resilience in the face of the 2039 demographic cliff. How much of this relies on expanding the student base and body versus internal cost cutting? 

So, what it's really about is at some level revenue diversification. So, what we're trying to do is stabilize enrollment management so we can have a predictable class coming in every year, and a lot of that is really just, strengthening our processes and practices. So, you know, we've hired a number of new people to support that, most notably Wendy Lin-Cook, who's now the [Vice Provost] of Enrollment Management. She brings a lot of experience from her time at Montclair State [University] and then also at New Jersey Institute of Technology, I believe. [She] brings a very data analytic face to things, and I think that was one of the things that we probably weren't doing enough on which is using data analysis and being able to send targeted messaging to people and then engage with them proactively. So, that's step one. The second one is increasing our capacity to talk about RPI and to tell our story. To that end, we’ve hired a new Chief Marketing Officer, the first time in the Institute’s history that we have this position filled. Dana Bodine, she comes to us having worked in a variety of industries, from The New York Times, to Time [Inc.]. to Apple and Mastercard. So, [she] brings a lot of experience there but I think it’s going to help us on the marketing side and figure out how we get our messaging out. The full page ad in the New York Times on Sunday was awesome, everybody was excited about that, and Joanie [Quinones]'s been a great contributor to the organization as well. The last thing is again, kind of, with the focus on improving our ability to use analytics in the operation of the Institution, enrollment management being one of them, but others. We brought on a new Chief Administrative Officer, Mark Hampton. I think he met with you guys, right?

Yes.

Okay, great. So, Mark, [has a] long career in higher ed, but brings to RPI also the experience of working at Amazon Web Services for three years on their higher ed products. Again, bring you sort of a digital forward approach to how we operate and consolidate all the functions within the administration. So, now, it's HR, IT, and the traditional administrative functions. And then the second part was to hire a new Chief Information Officer, who joined us very recently: Andrea [Ballinger]. She comes from Oregon State University, where she did a fundamental transformation of the IT function. So basically, adding a lot of people that sort of improved the way in which we execute on things. All of which we think are going to strengthen our ability to land the right sized class consistently. So that's enrollment management—it's not about growing or shrinking, but it's about basically getting a consistent class coming in the door every year. We're also focused on transfers. Historically, RPI has always had a strong transfer pipeline from Hudson Valley Community College, and so we're working with a number of the local community colleges in New York state to see if we can strengthen that. The Semiconductor Scholars Program, which the Dean of Engineering launched several years ago, has been a great pilot to figure out how we could identify students that are at, say, Hudson Valley Community College in their first year that looked like they might be interested in coming to RPI after two years. So, again, a way of getting a stronger pipeline.

The second thing we're focused on is strengthening the amount of sponsored research we do. To put numbers to this, we have an annual operating budget of about 450 million, and about 75 percent of that is derived from undergraduate education. About 80 to 100 million dollars comes in through sponsored research. One of the things we did with the support of the board was we hired a lot of new faculty when I arrived. Tenure track faculty at RPI had declined over the past roughly 10 years, and so we've been restoring that, and focused on hiring in areas where we think we can create research strength. What that does is twofold: one, it brings different types of revenue in, so that if you have one source that gets challenged, you have a diversity. The second is, it generates what's called indirect costs. So when you bring in a dollar or sponsored research, there's a certain amount of that dollar you can spend on. Things like the libraries or on fixing buildings and the like, so that is very helpful to the bottom line. I think it creates more opportunities for undergraduates who are interested in getting involved in research to have those opportunities.

And then the third part is what we call alumni, engagement, and philanthropy. When I arrived at RPI the office that does that work, which we call Institute Advancement, had about 34 people. We have a hundred-and-twelve thousand living alumni, and so when you benchmark that function at other institutions, it typically might have 200 people. So, we were significantly understaffed in the office that both builds relationships with alumni, but then also raises funds. And this is not a criticism of the previous administration because the university had just gone through the pandemic and some significant budget adjustments that led to that. So, again, with the support of the board, we've been building that organization up where, I'm told we're up to 84 and a half people. What we're focused on is really three things: one is bringing in new fundraisers, particularly fundraisers that work directly with the Deans and the department heads to help them pursue philanthropic support from alumni that are prepared to give, but also adding in equal measure at some level, staff that support alumni relations. If there's a chapter in Southern California, can we help them, you know, get the message out when they want to have events, help them find locations to do it, and just some things like that.

And the goal there is really just to build a much more connected alumni [network] connected to each other, but also connected back to the university. I was just on a call this morning with a recent graduate who's working in industry who's very grateful for her experiences at RPI and wanted to know what she could do to help? And the answer is, well, maybe you could mentor other students at RPI who might be interested in careers, and we want to build that kind of network. But to do it, you have to have people in the staff, in the organization. And then the third function that we're strengthening is really the operational elements of the Institute Advancement, which is better databases, better ways to send communications that are relevant to the people that are receiving it rather than just a blast. And there the results have been really encouraging, frankly. And I should have said on the research side, while we haven't grown research, the fact that we've actually maintained it stable through growth in industry is an important foundation. In this current climate it is frankly pretty great. But on the alumni side. You know, we've seen a significant increase in participation in the Pi Day funding. It was 1.2 million [dollars raised], but it's also how many people actually engaged and what I think was really great is that the staff in Institute Advancement really spent a lot of time working with student clubs and groups to, you know, get a challenge grant. So, let's find an alumni who maybe wants to put up five thousand dollars as a match. That's raising that. So I think it gets everybody involved in it and sort of creates that spirit of philanthropy so that any alumni, regardless of their ability to contribute, can participate. But also on the philanthropy side. We're also seeing significant increases in the amount of annual giving coming back to RPI. I think that's the strategy, revenue diversification through those three lines. And, you know, we're a work in progress.

That was very comprehensive. Thank you. Last time we spoke, you spoke on yield rates. In the past, we usually averaged around 15 to 17 percent yield, and yet, for the Class of 2028, we hovered around 13 percent, which is a decline, especially compared to some of our peer universities. Last year, you spoke on targeting specific students who want to, who both apply to RPI and want to come to RPI and using data and analytics to find out who those people are and specifically message to them. What specific data have you used, and has this new method been executed for the recent enrollment cycle of the Class of 2030?

So last year, what we did was try to be more nuanced in our communication. We also worked really hard to make sure everybody on campus contributed and thought about what their role would be. So, getting more of the faculty and Dean's department heads reaching out to applicants who had yet to commit to just basically building a relationship with them which hopefully leads to them coming. We hit our target and the yield rate went up a little bit. This year, with Wendy fully on board, she's using a lot of different analytical tools. We looked very carefully at where we were successful in getting people to enroll. When you look at the number of applicants and then the number of admits, are there parts of the country where we are consistent, where we may admit people from that region, but have been unsuccessful in getting people to enroll. And we've decided for time, until we're ready to build relationships with that part of the country, let's focus on the regions where we know we can be successful. So a lot of Wendy's focus near term has been on using those analytics to really target where we're spending time with people. We've invested a lot in strengthening the Admitted Student Day. The last one this past weekend, I thought, great turnout, a lot of energy, everybody was engaged. The McNeil room was full of people with the clubs and everything, so we're hopeful that all these steps will improve things. But Wendy has a lot more tricks up her sleeve in terms of practices that we haven't been using But you have to build the capacity to do it, which is really engaging students when their sophomores and juniors in high school, build a relationship with them so that RPI is top of mind when they're thinking about where they want to go.

Thank you. Another question with enrollment has to do with the general crisis facing enrollment with higher ed across the United States. One of the largest facets of that has to do with the rising cost of education. But that is a double-edged sword as RPI and many other universities face budgetary issues. What plans does RPI balance that issue between maintaining our budget to strengthen the student experience here at RPI while not pricing out potential students?

Yeah, that's a good question. So, this is where it comes back to a statement I made earlier, we sort of have to right size the class. We have a certain amount of philanthropic support through scholarships. But if we grow the class too much, we're diluting that ability to reduce the cost for people for whom the full sticker price is unmanageable. So that's step one, which is why we're sort of targeting them more of a fourteen to fifteen hundred size class. The second piece is we launched a reboot of the capital campaign that was started in 2017, which was a one billion dollar capital campaign. We've reset it to a 1.5 billion dollar capital campaign. Right now we've raised about 830 million dollars, so we have a good way to go. But this coming year our focus is going to be on scholarships. A lot of focus with the alumni about getting scholarships going. Some of that will be scholarships funding, which will come in as an endowment, so you know you get a certain amount of money. You take five percent of it to pay for scholarships. But also, we're seeing a significant increase in what we call our Patroon Program. These are donors who make an annual contribution of, say, $10,000 a year, but commit to it over four years, which allows us to award a scholarship based upon that amount. And there's more alumni that have the capacity to do that than to make a large endowed gift, so it's a mix of both expendable scholarships through the Patroon Program, as well as pursuing endowed support. 

So, last year, you had mentioned a five to six year plan to double the research funding from 100 million to 200 million. Are we still on track for that, about 10 to 15-ish million annual growth?

We've seen strong growth in industry support and foundation support. For example, this year we received commitments of over six million dollars for the Gates Foundation for two research areas. We received a couple of new centers from the State of New York, Each of which is 10 million dollars roughly over 10 years. We've seen a significant uptick in our industry support. The challenge has been the federal [support]. On that front, what you saw happened, and I might have shared this with you the last time we met. We saw right after the administration change in Washington that what had been typically about 15 to 16 million dollars a quarter of new awards. You find out you got a three million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation. Now, that's not three million that you're going to spend in that one quarter, but it basically means you got a new award, and it's probably a three-year award, so 16 million was whatever sort of run rate was of federal support. In the first quarter of the new administration that dropped to around six [million]. And then the second quarter it recovered to about 12 [million], and we felt like in the third quarter we were getting close to being back. But then the government shutdown led to basically a freeze. So that's been the challenge. New awards are down. Existing awards are relatively flat, so that's the good news is these other research support that have come in are keeping our total research support constant. But it's that decline that decline in the federal. That's probably one of the things I mentioned in my town meeting remarks, and it would have just come out the day of the town meeting was that NIH (National Institutes of Health), as an example, when they were halfway through their fiscal year, they had only allocated 15 percent of the funds that is available to be allocated. We can check in, and we're told that the faucets are going to open up soon and that they're increasing their solicitations and awards. But that hasn’t hit the bottom line just yet.

National trends also show declining international enrollment due to pre-existing and now increased visa challenges. So, is the 10-year plan for an equal number of grads and undergrads still on track? Grads have a lot of international enrollment. Are you focusing now on the domestic growth of grad students?

I think it's a little early to say, I don't think the demographics at the graduate student level have changed dramatically. I think at the undergraduate level there is a reduction in international students, and you could get the exact numbers I think from the undergraduate office. So there's been a, even before this current climate. I think between the pandemic and everything you saw a reduction in international students coming to RPI. So, we've been less impacted by that, and that was a big deal last year. I think I might have mentioned this in the interview with the Poly last year that we saw some really, what I would characterize as new types of behaviors post May 1, the deposit date or May 15, which is some universities that traditionally never open up their wait list, like Duke, opened up their wait list in August. Or Syracuse made a big push post May 1 to try and get people to commit to Syracuse and literally mail the letters to admitted students who hadn't deposited, suggesting that they could give them $80,000 over four years of additional financial aid. I think this was a direct result of some of the really large schools that had relied on very large international populations at the undergraduate level weren't seeing those students coming. And so again, we're in a better spot with that. As far as people being able to get the visas to come, I think that's been very spotty. I don't know if there's any particular country where we're seeing challenges other than I know that certain parts of Africa have been an area of concern. But beyond that, not any massive challenges that we're seeing.

This is going to be a slight deviation, but a big part of RPI Forward is institutional efficiency. And the Title IX and the Sexual Misconduct Office are critical for student safety. Are there any goals to increase staffing in the Title IX office to deal with a high volume of cases that come their way currently? And to also keep up with the complexities of that law that keeps changing its boundaries.

I initiated a review of the Title IX office in my first year and there were a number of recommendations that came from that, one of which was to get focused and dedicated staffing. So we've done that. There are two Title IX coordinators currently. In the past, I think we relied more on outside resources as well. So that's one thing that we definitely did, and there's some other things that really had to do with just internal processes and clarifying processes that we've implemented as a result of that. So, I think at this point, what I see is a  fairly substantial reduction in the number of times that I'm hearing about problems with the Title IX office versus my first year. So that's not necessarily a great indicator, but it is an indicator. I mean, in my first year here, there were a lot of Title IX concerns that surfaced in the office, but I think, at least, those seem to have been minimized. Not to dismiss it, and I think we can always do better.

On a lighter note, congratulations on your DoE appointment!

Oh, thank you!

Could you explain a little bit about what your role entails in that?

Yeah, it's a great question. So, the new head, Under Secretary of Energy for the Office of Sciences, Darío Gil. Darío had been on the RPI Board of Trustees. He had to resign from that when he was confirmed by the Senate for that role. And prior to that role, he was head of research at IBM. So we've had a long relationship with him. I actually knew Dario when he was a graduate student at MIT. He set a very bold ambition for the Office of Science in DoE, which is what he calls the Genesis Mission, which he describes as a Manhattan Project scale effort to accelerate scientific discovery. So his vision is to use the power of the National Laboratories, coupled with AI and autonomous laboratories, and quantum. The notion is that you can do your chemical synthesis in a robotic laboratory in the cloud. And make that heavily instrumented, so you're collecting lots of data as you synthesize a new compound and then test it. All that data can be plowed into a repository, and then you can use AI and potentially quantum to explore and discover new materials. So that's the vision and not exclusively just to materials and chemistry. But across all endeavors of science, he wants to create a nationwide database of information that's powered by these autonomous laboratories, and then, significant investments in AI and quantum-centric supercomputing that allows you to mine that data for information to accelerate discovery. It's very ambitious. Yeah, but it's very exciting. And so the role of the Advisory Board that I'm on is basically to advise him and the offices and what we think they ought to be doing.

You just spoke on AI. Last year, we spoke on the use of artificial intelligence in the classroom and for administrative purposes. In the year since, AI has exploded in popularity in higher ed. Specifically, at RPI, we have the Lally AI Academy as well as talks of an integration of AI into student advising platforms. Where does your opinion of AI stand today, specifically in terms of integrating it into the university? And where do you see its position in the future of RPI? 

I think what Lally is doing is a great controlled experiment so we can figure out how that works out. It's helpful that we have a dean from Lally, who has his bachelors and masters in computer science and then a PhD in economics. So I see that as a controlled experiment, and then what we learn about that will allow us to think about how we might deploy best practices that have emerged from that experiment across the campus, so that's one. And I think a lot of it is around, you know, how does it make it easier for us to do our work? The other area that I think is really intriguing is the use of AI platforms as personalized tutors. So you know the Khan Academy has something called Khanmigo, I think it's called. But this notion of can we create generative AI platforms that allow students to learn material through a personalized tutor that delivers the content in a way in which it's tuned to your learning style, which everybody learns a little bit differently. And so I think we should look at that because if indeed a personalized tutor is a very effective way for people to learn, and it accelerates learning, that opens up the opportunity to create more experiential learning activities on the campus. There's a school called the Alpha School, which is a K-12 school, that has really leaned into this, and they would assert that basically, it's a much more time efficient way to learn. And if that's true, I think we need to look at that really carefully and see if there's a relevant role for that in a higher ed institution like RPI. That again sort of creates the opportunity for you to be more involved in experiential learning and team-based learning rather than, you know, the large lectures. So, I don't know where that's taking us, but I think this technology is changing so rapidly. I think we need to be experimenting with it and figuring out where it has the best impact.

Another facet of AI education is specifically students learning about AI. And combined with other emerging technologies like quantum computing, just this year we got a Quantum Computing minor. Do you see any new educational disciplines popping up over the next few years to tackle these emerging technologies such as AI, such as quantum?

I see these as tools. So the question is, how will they enhance the work we do. How will they fundamentally strengthen or change the way in which we do our work? As an example, will a quantum-centric supercomputer fundamentally change the way I do supply chain management or fundamentally change the way in which I discover new materials or model investment portfolios? So I think this is a moment of exploration where we try and figure out how these technologies are going to sort of change the way we do our work, the way we pursue our scholarship. That’s kind of what I hope to see happen, and I think it's happening in a variety of dimensions with the quantum computer on campus. I really had three hopes for that: one is that we figure out how to use it. And in particular where students can figure out how they can use a quantum computer. How do I program it, and so on and so forth. And the growth of the Quantum Computing Club at RPI is a great signal that students are exploring it. The addition of the minor is another one, so that you can now think about, okay, I'm really interested in biology, but if I get the minor in quantum [computing], maybe I have to start thinking about how quantum is going to impact biology. So I don't see us creating that necessarily a major in quantum, but I see us thinking about how quantum integrates within each discipline, and there's a lot of ways you might think about it. Like, if you go back in time what happened when mainframe computers and then supercomputers came on the scene? It changed the way in which we did certain things in mechanical engineering and so on. And then you did see a computer science department be created, but you also saw computing integrated into each one of the disciplines. I think where we're headed.

I was watching an interview with Commander Wiseman recently, where he came to RPI specifically for computer engineering. So, frontiers like that, do you think RPI could be the next frontier for quantum?

I hope so. There's a lot of attention being paid to the fact that we brought a quantum computer on the campus. We've been working with the governor's office to try and get New York State to really be committed to Quantum Computing because I do think with the leadership that we're seeing from IBM, and now the adoption of quantum in many of the major corporations, particularly in the finance sector in New York, we're starting to see a cluster of quantum computing expertise emerging.I think about when Karthik Bala and his brothers started a computer gaming company in Troy after he got his bachelor's degree from the gaming program here. And now 20 years later, we've got a computer gaming industry in downtown Troy as a result of that. So, what could happen if recent graduates of RPI go out and do something amazing with Quantum Computing?

Talking about Commander Wiseman, how was seeing him lead Artemis II? I know it was a massive point of school pride for all of us, but when you were there, at the splashdown.

I was at the launch. Reid invited me and Lyn [Schmidt], and Provost [Rebecca] Doerge to the launch. So that was amazing. When Reid gave his commencement address in 2024 to the graduates, he talked about RPI teaching him failure resilience, which is how to pick himself up, dust himself off, and get it back at the work. I listened to Reid communicating with NASA while they were on the launch pad and the launch abort system wasn't working and then a battery failed, and I listened to him throughout the mission, and all I heard was someone who very calmly recognized a failure, and then worked the problem. And I think it just personified what he described as what RPI education provided to him. 

Just to exit, what are you excited about for RPI in the next year? Especially coming off of such a moment occasion, the Artemis II Mission, as well as, you've spoken several times about the data analytics of the Marlins. It seems like next year for RPI, it's going to be an interesting one. 

To me, the most important thing is really deeply connecting our incredibly accomplished alumni back to the campus in a way that is mutually supportive. The alumni can help current students in their careers and I just think the more we move that relationship forward. I think that's probably the most important thing for the next century of this institution. 

Thank you so much!

Good to see y'all!