Dear community of committed individuals,
Imagine our university in the near future:
Imagine that our region looks to us because of our programs. Through our students and graduates, we unmistakably align with solving the most complex challenges of our time while remaining firmly rooted in mission. Enrollment reaches a stable and healthy level, allowing us to offer competitive wages, reinvest in our physical plant, and scale our endowment. We achieve this by being explicit about who we serve and intentionally choosing where we will not compete.
Our graduates are sought out by employers because they understand what an OLLU credential represents. Completion rates rise to national distinction. Our students enter high-demand fields and lift their families and communities toward dignified standards of living.
Because of our commitment, it is unambiguous that we are closing the gap of generational poverty that grips our communities by equipping students to rise as leaders by earning wages that allow them to live livelihoods grounded in their values.
Our university is known for our unwavering focus. For our clarity of purpose. For our distinction.
Faculty, Staff, Colleague, Friend. This future is for us to choose and create and commit.
Each of us carries forward the congregational legacy entrusted to us. The Sisters of Divine Providence understood what it meant to pioneer. They crossed oceans, entered unfamiliar terrain, and responded to the needs of their time with courage rooted in God’s providence. They discerned. They acted. They built.
And as I write this reflection in March 2026, it is clear we are part of their legacy. We are stewards of our university and are entrusted with the lives of 1,600 students and their families. The pace of change today compresses what once unfolded across decades into years, or even months. Higher education, locally and nationally, is being reshaped in real time in many ways, including demographically, economically, and technologically. While we cannot alter the rate of change around us, we do choose how we respond.
Our response will not merely be to find a path, which suggests a fixed trail, mapped once and followed mechanically. Our response will be to establish a rhythm—grounded in attentiveness, discipline, adaptation, and trust.
Our conversation last Thursday affirmed that Focused Differentiation is both the path we will take in 2026 and the rhythm we will establish as the ethos of our university. As we process our loss of market share since 2001, before us is the shifting higher education landscape and our need to make a clear strategic choice . That choice is Focused Differentiation.
The work ahead is about morphing, transforming, and becoming the institution we are called to be. The work ahead is about aligning our strengths, sharpening our impact, and ensuring that every decision moves us closer to fulfilling our mission at the highest level.
In San Antonio alone, approximately 135,000 students are enrolled in higher education. The market is competitive and structurally constrained. Private institutions like ours compete for a small and narrow share.
Focused Differentiation demands that we define who we are for. It requires a narrow target market and a small set of distinctive differentiators—attributes so authentic and focused that they cannot be easily claimed or replicated by others. If another institution can make the same claim, then it is not distinctive, and we will refine.
Part of our rhythm will be continual refinement—clear “we will” and “we will not” decisions.
We will remove friction from the student experience. It will not be complicated to enroll. It will be seamless to re-enroll and retain.
Lent calls us to discernment and refinement; to remove what burdens us so that we may move freely toward what matters most. Focused Differentiation is an act of institutional discernment.
Becoming the premier Catholic institution and a national model for mission-driven innovation and social mobility will only be accomplished together. Our university needs each of us. You matter, and you matter greatly.
We will establish a disciplined rhythm that ensures not merely business sustainability, but faithful sustainability—an institution capable of carrying the Gospel and Catholic social teaching into the next generation with strength. Our founders remind us that we are rooted in profound trust in God’s providential love and care for all.
That trust gives me courage, and I hope it does the same for you. Because as we embark on this mission, together, we will not retreat from change, we will shape it.
Together, we will move toward the horizon before us.
I truly and sincerely value your thinking. Please consider completing this very short, anonymous survey below by Monday, March 9, to help us shape our Focused Differentiation direction.
With prayer and gratitude,
Dr. Abel A. Chávez