After losing $7 million in state funding in 2014, Florida Atlantic University’s President John Kelly is changing the mentality about FAU.

“You don’t play and just see how you do,” Kelly said Friday. “You play to win.”

Kelly joined the university in January 2014 and quickly began implementing his plan to make FAU the country’s fastest-improving public research university.

He reported on FAU’s progress Friday in a State of the University address at the Carole and Barry Kaye Auditorium.

To illustrate the cutting-edge work FAU students are doing, Kelly invited graduate students Charles Weinthal and Chad Coarsey onto the stage to discuss the prosthetic hand they built using a 3D printer.

“Doctors started hitting us up,” bio-engineering student Coarsey said. “We had patients, parents, emailing us sending us pictures ‘please help our son, help our daughter she has a condition just like you.’”

“The great thing is, we are able to help these people,” he told the crowd of about 250.

Kelly also acknowledged FAU’s challenges.

“There are some things we had to fix,” he said. “We did not do well in the Board of Governors metrics.”

Before Kelly’s arrival, FAU lost $7 million in state funding based on graduation rates. Since then, the university has improved students’ graduation rate from 40 percent to 45 percent.

Kelly credited this increase to the hiring of 26 advisers and the addition of “flight plans” to help keep students on track. Both changes help support FAU’s more than 3,500 new students, the largest freshman class admitted in the university’s history, Kelly said.

In addition, the school’s minimum admission standards will increase from a 3.3 to a 3.6 GPA, he said.

Kelly also talked about the next generation of students.

FAU High, the dual enrollment high school on FAU’s Boca campus, is the highest ranked lab school in Florida, and ranked 14th nationally, Kelly noted.

Hannah Herbst, a freshman at FAU high, was named “America’s Top Young Scientist,” by 3M. She developed an ocean energy probe prototype designed to use ocean currents to provide stable power.

Other FAU High students included in the program were Emil and Dariel, known for their Rock Cello performance on America’s Got Talent. They took to the stage to perform Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”

Kelly explained why he is pushing for higher admission standards for FAU students.

“When someone sits in somebody else’s seat for eight years, when they could have sat in there for four, somebody else doesn’t get the opportunity,” Kelly said. “I don’t feel guilty at all about pushing on admission standards and on graduation rates, because you’re taking someone else’s seat. It’s just not fair.”

Gregory Cox is the managing editor of the University Press. If you would like to contact him regarding this or other articles, email him at [email protected], or follow him on Twitter.