Patricia Goldsmith, Scripps’s Vice President for Institutional Advancement, has announced that she will be leaving Claremont Oct. 31 to become Vice President and Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
Goldsmith, who has worked at Scripps for over 16 years, said she was attracted to St. Mary’s because it has a commitment to “change people’s lives and people’s communities.” Founded in 1840, St. Mary’s is a public, nondenominational school which offers a liberal arts education to 2,000 students. Goldsmith praised the school for its “accessibility, affordability, and academic excellence.”
When Goldsmith first came to Scripps in 1995, she served as Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid. She later served as the Dean of First Years and briefly as the Acting Dean of Students when the position was vacant from 1997-1998.
In 1999 Goldsmith was made a Vice President of the college, and in 2009 she was promoted to Vice President for Enrollment, Marketing, and Communication. She moved into the position of Vice President for Institutional Advancement in June 2010.
“Leaving Scripps will be difficult,” Goldsmith said. “This is a magical community, and each year [working in Admissions] I got to fall in love with it again.”
In an email to students announcing Goldsmith’s departure and thanking her for her many years of service to the college, Scripps President Lori Bettison-Varga praised the outgoing VP for her time at the college.
“Pat has been an important presence and voice on Senior Staff and a great source of advice and counsel to me and others throughout the College,” she wrote, adding that Scripps’s rise in visibility and selectivity over the past 15 years owes much to Goldsmith’s diligence and skill.
“I’d like to take full credit for that, but I can’t,” Goldsmith said, referring to Bettison-Varga’s email. She pointed out that the “great increase in quality and quantity of the applicant pool” at Scripps was largely due to efforts on the part of the Admissions Office, faculty, alumnae, and trustees to educate high school seniors about Scripps.
“Everybody has to recruit everybody all the time,” Goldsmith said.