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Dr. Anthony Tricoli stepped onto the Georgia Perimeter College campus like a walking burst of sunshine; clearing away the dread that hovered over the campus like insidious storm clouds. Prognosticators and pundits promoted the type of foreboding forecasts that would hijack any campus CEO’s appetite and cause him to raid the medicine cabinet. Tricoli and the faculty of Georgia Perimeter College (GPC) were told their campus, for a myriad of reasons, was about to lose one-third of its student body. Hundreds of jobs would be expunged. But GPC immediately implemented multiple audacious measures to repel the downsizing onslaught. A year later, Georgia Perimeter now boasts the largest student body in school history — in the same time period that other colleges experienced substantial enrollment decreases — sending shockwaves that reverberated statewide and nationwide. Additionally, GPC recently reported the largest freshman class of any college campus in Georgia, in fact larger than many GPC sister institutions combined.

“I didn’t doubt ever for a moment that our numbers would hold or be increased. You can’t. If you doubt it, you’re ripped,” Tricoli says. “You just need to think positive and do everything you can to convince the team around you that you can make it, that you can build. And to some extent, being a president is about creating relationships, it’s about building a team, it’s about being a cheerleader, and rooting for your team and convincing your team that they can do well.”

While some might bask in this monumental admissions victory, Tricoli’s eyes are firmly leveled on the future and where he sees the campus going. That includes taking enrollment even higher as well as establishing GPC as a world-class institution. “Because we’re a best practice institution without the star, [we] want that gold star to be stamped on our forehead. In order to get that gold star stamped on our foreheads and be recognized as a national best-practice institution, we have to get out [and] make national presentations,” he says. -terry shropshire

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