The numerous cranes and bulldozers at work in the Innovista, to say nothing of the emerging biomass generating station on Sumter Street, the Horizon Center research facility on Blossom Street, the Discovery Center Biomedical Sciences Laboratories on Greene Street, and the new Honors College building at the corner of Main and Blossom. The structures give inescapable evidence that we have a building boom going on all around us. Alumni who come back to visit and parents of our students -- including the more than 1,000 who attended receptions at our home and on the Horseshoe over Parents Weekend, invariably comment on how dramatically our campus is growing. But our growth in facilities must be paralleled by growth in the quality of education we offer.

Our three-fold plan for attracting and retaining our state's young people is simple: first, attract the most talented high school students to our University; second, give them a first-rate education so that they can acquire the skills to perform intellectually challenging yet financially rewarding jobs; and third, stimulate the growth of companies within the state that require a sophisticated work force so that they will have ample employment opportunities.

Let's look at each phase of this three-fold plan. The data from our incoming students demonstrate unequivocally that the first phase is working. The quality of the 3,690 students enrolled in the freshman class at Columbia this fall is the best in the history of the University -- their 3.9 high school grade point average and their SAT average of 1183, up 12 points from last year, are the highest in Carolina's history.
This is made more remarkable by the fact that across the nation there was a 7 point decline in average SAT scores, and our state had a 6 point decline. Our entering freshman class average high school GPA has risen for six years in a row, bucking the national trend. While increasing the size of the fall freshman class only slightly – by 63 students, the number of applicants went up by more than 1,000 to a total of over 15,000 -- causing the ratio of applicants to openings to be 4.1:1, the highest in our history.

Similarly impressive gains in the quality of incoming students have been reported by USC Aiken, USC Beaufort, and USC Upstate. Thanks to the Education Lottery scholarships, far more of South Carolina's best high school seniors are opting to stay in the state to attend college, and USC is attracting more than its fair share of them: of the South Carolina students who enrolled as freshmen at Columbia this fall, 98.5 percent received financial assistance from the Lottery. In fact, 80 percent of our undergraduates in Columbia are from in state, and on each of our other campuses the percentage on in-state residents is even higher.

The University of South Carolina at Columbia has truly become a "destination of choice." Over the past four years we have kept the size of the incoming class of the Honors College relatively constant, while maintaining their average SAT score around 1400. I congratulate Dean Davis Baird and his colleagues for their excellent work.

The Capstone Scholars, an innovative living-learning program in only its second year, enrolled an impressive 488 students in 2005 -- its first year, and this fall grew by 28 percent to 625, with an average SAT of 1299. I congratulate Dr. John Spurrier, who is doing marvelous work as the Capstone Principal.

It's essential that our University -- on all our campuses -- continues to dedicate itself to educating all South Carolinians and not just those who come from families that can afford the extracurricular activities and tutorial programs clearly associated with higher grades and test scores. Thus I'm pleased to report that nearly one-quarter of our Columbia students receive a Pell Grant, which is linked to low family income. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education recently reported that in a state where the average family income of African-Americans is substantially lower than that of white families, the University of South Carolina at Columbia -- with a 15 percent African-American enrollment, ranks number one among all 50 public flagship institutions throughout the United States in the proportion of black students.

Our ability to increase the academic quality of our students while concomitantly enhancing access to our University System for all South Carolinians truly sets us apart: it is a success story for the rest of the nation. Although it is abundantly evident that we are attracting outstanding students, I am particularly pleased that our new admissions process looks beyond standardized test scores and grade point averages.

Three years ago I asked our admissions committee to develop a holistic process that was more sensitive to students whose extenuating circumstances merit more careful consideration than just looking at those numbers. Consider the case of one of our students starting at Columbia last year, who had no siblings living at home, and whose single mother had to undergo multiple surgeries each year during his high school career. He often had to stay home from school to care for her, and keeping up with his academic work was a real struggle. Some semesters he did poorly. During his senior year, he participated in a health careers program sponsored by his high school. As he excelled in the program, he became passionate about nursing. When his mom told him to apply to USC, he was shocked. He told her he might not get in, and even if he did make it, he argued they wouldn't be able to afford college anyway. His mother insisted: "Go ahead and apply." He did and was admitted as a nursing major. The University Financial Aid Office then worked with him to construct a financial aid package to attend Carolina. Now he has a chance to pursue his dreams and embark on a career to help others. We have countless other stories like his, which time does not permit me to relate.

We are also attracting highly talented students to our graduate professional programs. This fall, the South Carolina College of Pharmacy, the result of a melding of our College of Pharmacy with the pharmacy program at the Medical University of South Carolina, welcomed its second class of 190 students from a pool of 666 applicants, giving a ratio of 3.5 applicants for each opening. All admitted students were given the choice to enroll here or at the Charleston campus. The majority of them -- three out of every five -- chose to be on the Columbia campus.

Our Law School reported the highest average LSAT score for the entering class in that school's history, and had 1,995 applicants for 215 openings -- 9.3 applicants for each slot. Dean Jack Pratt is off to a terrific start as head of this school. Our School of Medicine also has become increasingly competitive. Dean Don DiPette reports that this entering class had the highest test scores and grade point average of any class since the school's inception in 1975, and had 1,940 applications for 85 openings, a ratio of 22.8 applicants for each slot.

And last month the Wall Street Journal ranked our Moore School of Business number 9 in the world for its international business excellence. This month, Business Week ranked the Moore School number 3 among all U.S. Business Schools for the "fastest return" on our M.B. A. students' investment. For the past ten years our undergraduate international business program has been ranked No. 1 by U.S. News and World Report. Year after year U.S. News and World Report ranks our International Masters in Business Administration as No. 1 or No. 2 in the nation.

The second phase of our plan is to give our students a first-rate education. It is imperative to remember that teaching and learning are at the heart of our mission. But we are increasingly sensitive to the fact that academic success is not limited to classroom and laboratory settings or the library. Each group of students who enters these hallowed halls is more sophisticated about technology than its predecessors. For good or for bad, our students have been bombarded from the cradle onward with an array of visual and auditory stimuli that most of us in our own collegiate years never even dreamed of. Through the ubiquity of the Internet, iPODs, DVDs, Treos, video games, instant messaging, cell phones, and a veritably endless succession of technological inventions, they come to us with expectations that are shaped by those phenomena.

To help our students take advantage of these developments but at the same time enhance their ability to progress academically, we have opened a Student Success Center, also housed in the Thomas Cooper Library. This center includes a number of programs aimed at helping all students, but especially those in their first year, to apply themselves and succeed.

I came to this University with the announced goal of enabling any undergraduate who is so inclined to engage in original research, Dr. Harris Pastides responded to this proposal by developing the Magellan Scholars Program, for which we recently named our second cohort. Our university now has a total of 173 Magellan Scholars with one-half million dollars to support their respective research and scholarly projects. These projects span all academic disciplines, and are being carried out under the supervision of faculty mentors who have generously given of their time. We'll announce the third round of Magellan Scholars next spring, another expansion of our commitment to research opportunities for our undergraduates.

Our launching of the Magellan Scholars, the Capstone Scholars, the Center for Teaching Excellence, and the Student Success Center, as well as our nationally recognized University 101 program, combine to improve the undergraduate learning environment. Its high quality is reflected in our students' success in winning national scholarships and fellowships.

This past academic year we had: 9 Rotary International Scholars, 4 Fulbright Scholars, 2 Goldwater Scholars, 1 Truman Scholar, 7 Gilman Scholars, 2 National Security Education Program Scholars, 2 Tau Beta Phi Scholars, 2 National Oceanographic and Aeronautics Administration Hollings Scholars, 2 Freeman-Asia Scholars, 1 National Science Foundation Research Fellow, 1 U.S. Department of Homeland Security Scholar and 1 EPA Scholar. What an impressive array!

The success rate of our students competing against the best and brightest in our nation's elite institutions is remarkably impressive, greatly facilitated by the thorough preparation they receive from our faculty and staff who have played a critical role in their outstanding performance.

But providing a first-rate education requires that all aspects of the campus environment be oriented to healthy, productive students. Under the leadership of Dr. Dennis Pruitt and his team, we have developed a comprehensive approach to wellness, whose theme is "Healthy Carolina on my Mind." This program ensures that we address the spiritual, physical, psychological, and financial needs of our students. Among the elements in the overall goal of our Healthy Campus 2010 are initiatives in campus safety and disability services, alcohol and drug abuse and gambling, and tobacco use: all of these activities are elements of our "Guide to Wellness." USC Upstate recently launched a comparable campus-wide initiative.

While it is critically important for us to provide a rich learning environment for our students, it is also essential that we address the pedagogical needs of our faculty. All of our faculty are superbly qualified in their respective academic fields, but many could benefit from understanding more about how new technologies may enhance not only their teaching, but also the remarkably expanding learning environment outside of the classroom and laboratory. Through Provost Mark Becker we have created the Center for Teaching Excellence in the Thomas Cooper Library, in order to improve our collective response to these expectations. Professor Jed Lyons, of our Department of Mechanical Engineering, is serving as its director. We have also established the Arts Institute, designed to promote collaboration among faculty and students in the arts and humanities, and make their programs increasingly accessible to students and faculty in other fields.

In responding to strong enrollment across the USC system, this year we hired 214 new faculty in Columbia, 60 new faculty in the senior institutions at Aiken, Beaufort, and Upstate, and another 18 new faculty in our regional campuses at Lancaster, Salkehatchie, Sumter, and Union. The quality of those we are recruiting in all these positions is truly remarkable, and bodes well for continued improvement to learning opportunities for our young people.

In addition to replacing over 100 faculty who are retiring over the next few years, through the Faculty Excellence Initiative and the Centenary Plan we are continuing to add significant numbers of new faculty. Those recruited through the Faculty Excellence Initiative are often hireed in theme-specific clusters transcending several disciplines. Moreover, we are on target to add 100 research faculty to our ranks who are being recruited through the Centenary Plan. These recruitments are focused on research in next energy, nanotechnology, biomedical sciences, and environmental sciences.

The extraordinary success of this program is illustrated in the quality of faculty we are securing. Among those who joined our full-time ranks this year are people we recruited from the following institutions: five from leading private institutions (Columbia, Chicago, Harvard, and two from Johns Hopkins) and six from prestigious public universities (the Universities of North Carolina, Minnesota, Illinois, Texas - Austin, and two from Michigan).

In spite of the effectiveness of this impressive array of academic offerings, we have a critical state-wide mission beyond the borders of our respective campuses. Many people in South Carolina are looking to our state's research universities to be engines of economic development -- to help bring about the transformation to a knowledge-based economy. The third phase of our plan responds to this expressed desire by attracting industries spawned by the knowledge revolution, so that we may increase substantially the number of high-paying, intellectually challenging jobs in this region.

As a former high school teacher and Presbyterian pastor, I fervently hope that many of our students will enter the human services sector, which is not distinguished by highly compensated jobs. But many of our students have acquired the skills to perform intellectually challenging yet financially rewarding jobs, and want to work in the fields for which they are prepared immediately after graduation. I am pleased to report that the plan to create high-tech positions for them is working.

The first step in this process is to have our scientists and engineers who are making inventions to disclose them to our attorneys. The number of these disclosures each year has nearly doubled over the past four years, going from 48 to 84, with most of the growth occurring in the past two years. The attorneys then file a provisional patent application, which offers protection of the invention for a maximum of one year. At the end of that year, we either apply for a full patent or drop the application. The number of provisional patent applications per year has increased fourteen-fold over the past six years (from 6 to 84), while the number of full patent applications over the same period, which predictably lag behind provisional applications, has trebled (from 14 to 42 per year), indicating a dramatic upswing in the entrepreneurial activity of our faculty.

This marked change in our faculty culture is corroborated by the quadrupling of licenses and options signed each year over the past five years (from 5 to 20), and the noteworthy upsurge in license revenues -- a nearly seven-fold increase from $59,000 in 2002 to $406,000 in 2006.

Quite predictably all of these initiatives are resulting in faculty startups of new companies, going from zero in 2002 to five in 2006. In these ventures we have often taken an equity position in lieu of license revenues. Creating enterprises that build on the scientific discoveries of our faculty is critically important to our state's economy, because we can't expect our most talented students to stay in South Carolina if there aren't enough positions requiring a sophisticated labor force to keep them here. Our hope is that all of our research initiatives, including the Innovista, will help to create jobs that will make it attractive for these young people to be employed here after their graduation.

Now a word about our support from the General Assembly. I am enormously pleased to report that this last legislative session -- my sixth as President-elect and then President -- was by far the best for USC. My primary goal for the next legislative session is to continue securing pay raises for our richly-deserving faculty and staff. In addition to providing most of the funds needed for an average 3 percent pay raise, we received an additional $4 million in recurring funds for hiring additional faculty on the Columbia campus, and noteworthy increases in the budgets of each of the other seven institutions.

We need to continue expanding our IT infrastructure as our uses of electronic technology expand exponentially. Thus we were pleased to receive $3 million for our OneCarolina initiative and another $1.5 million for the Light Rail initiative, which will enable us to link to the National Lambda Rail. And for the fourth consecutive year, we secured an additional $30 million for the endowed chairs program, to be shared with Clemson and MUSC.

All of these supplementary funds, coupled with substantial and unparalleled increases in the budgets of all seven of the other USC institutions, are of paramount importance. The amount of additional recurring dollars from the General Assembly is without precedent in my tenure here.

I offer special thanks to the heads of the other USC institutions, as well as the leaders of the Student Government Association presidents at all eight of Carolina's institutions, for their unstinting and highly effective efforts to secure local legislative support for our budget requests. Under the coordination of Columbia's SGA President Tommy Preston, and Marsha Cole, Executive Director of our Carolina Alumni Association -- with the able leadership of past President Rita McKinney and current President Bill Bethea, and our Board of Trustees, we have mobilized our faculty, staff, students, and alumni to make a compelling case for our University's needs. The results of their coordinated lobbying is transparent.

While we have ample reason to celebrate the accomplishments of the past several years, we must not rest on our laurels if we wish to sustain this momentum. Among the most notable challenges before us are these:

* Persuading our legislature to make greater investments in our state's young people. They are the leaders of tomorrow.

* As the Lehman Brothers team who visited us recently pointed out, we must maintain the delicate balance between increasing tuition revenues while making our education accessible to all South Carolinians.

* Continuing to search for innovative ways to meet the scholarly aspirations of our students and faculty.

* Maintaining parallel emphasis between creating new facilities for our faculty, staff and students -- from state-of-the-art research labs to smart classrooms to accommodating residence halls, while not neglecting the massive deferred maintenance problems we have.

This is obviously only a partial list, but if we approach these problems thoughtfully and in concert, I am fully confident that we shall successfully meet these challenges.

This is truly an extraordinary time in our University's history, and I thank each and every one of you for making it so.