Iowa State’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences has recently experienced growth and increases in size. This has occurred under the watch of Wendy Wintersteen, Iowa State president-select and former dean of CALS.

The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences has seen a 90% increase in student enrollment since 2006. This has coincided with the growth that the university has seen as well.

Wintersteen said this is what moved the college to work toward efforts to increase enrollment.

“We were hearing from all of our stakeholders, that they could not hire enough employees trained in the areas they wanted them to be trained in, with the degrees they wanted them to have, so we said we would do our best to recruit more students into agriculture,” Wintersteen said.

Wintersteen recalled a memory of her early time as dean when a donor asked how he could help and we discussed him providing funds so that we could have someone work with students on recruitment and retention.

“He gave us funding to hire Andy Zehr and in his first year won the ADDY Award, which is about marketing and advertisement for the campaign he developed to recruit more students into agricultural majors,” Wintersteen said.

Andy Zehr, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ Director of Marketing and New Student Programs, has played a key role in increasing the size of the college, while also having it keep its small feel to it. Potential students when they come for a visit have one-on-one meetings with advisors in majors they express interest in.

“I have this postcard I used to send to parents, I asked some student ambassadors to send me pictures from when they were a kid doing something that they ultimately ended up doing. I got these great pictures of these students when they were eight-years-old holding their dog,” Zehr said. “I created a postcard that shows these students when they were a kid, and when you open it you see them all grown up in a vet smock, and every parent can relate to that.”

2017 marks the ten year anniversary of the College of Agriculture being renamed the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, in an effort to increase interest in the college, by showing it was about more than just production agriculture.

“We’ve grown in size but still have managed, thanks to the leadership of Dean Wintersteen, to maintain the student experience. We really live and breathe in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences that the student experience is core to our growth, making sure that our students have a consistently strong experience, whether we have 4,600 students or 2,300 students,” said Howard Tyle, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Assistant Dean for Student Services.

Tyler believes that the new job opening for the Dean of the College of Agriculture will attract the best people from around the country, and is confident that President-select Wintersteen will make sure the college is in good hands.

“We have a process in place, not all of our programs are growing at the same rate, so as programs increase, they can appeal back to the Dean for more resources to meet the needs of their growing student population,” Tyler said.