For nearly 15 years, John Ettling was president of SUNY Plattsburgh, a campus with about 5,700 students in northern New York. He recently retired and is looking back at the challenges he faced and that colleges and universities continue to encounter in the changing educational environment. He sat down recently with WAMC North Country Bureau Chief Pat Bradley and recalled that until the Great Recession a decade ago, enrollments and the budget at his SUNY campus had been growing.
“I really had gotten used to and was taking for granted that from one year to the next, 2004 – 2009, the number of applications was increasing by double-digit numbers. But then that all changed.”
Dr. John Ettling retired as President of SUNY Plattsburgh at the end of June. The college’s new president, Dr. Alexander Enyedi, provost of Humboldt State University in California, starts work on January 21, 2020.