A mid-point update to the UCCS 2012-2020 Strategic Plan received a hearty endorsement from the members of the CU Board of Regents during an April 5 meeting at CU Denver.
The regents voted unanimously to approve the update with regents Steve Ludwig, Sue Sharkey and Glen Gallegos each complimenting the plan and the processes used to gather input from faculty, staff and the regents.
“I really appreciated the fact that you had the regents sit down with your various teams,” Ludwig said. “I think that was the most interesting thing that we’ve ever been asked to do when it comes to a campus plan.”
Sharkey complimented the openness of UCCS leadership to discussions about intellectual and political diversity while Regent Glen Gallegos complimented the plan’s focus on southern Colorado and posed questions about graduation rates and total enrollment.
“We’ve moved the needle every cohort group for the last of the five years,” Chancellor Pam Shockley-Zalabak said of graduation rates. “That’s positive. But getting to where I really want to be is as dependent on resources as it is on the quality of students and the support services around them. We need to reduce the amount of time that students need to work per week.”
Shockley-Zalabak said she believes UCCS will have an enrollment between 14,000 and 15,000 students by 2020, figures that were updated from the original plan.
“We expect to be somewhat larger than what you approved in 2012,” Shockley-Zalabak told the regents.
In addition to updating figures for enrollment, construction and finances, the mid-point update expands health and wellness efforts including the Lane Center for Academic Health Sciences and the planned Sports Medicine and Performance Center, projects that were not fully anticipated in the 2012 plan. Additional academic programs as well as additional faculty and staff positions were also added.
An area that was revised downward are targets for enrollment of international students. Shockley-Zalabak explained that internationalization remains a campus goal but enrollment of international students will be lower than anticipated because of global changes. She cited the loss of Brazilian government student support following the country’s economic downturn as an example.
“We still have a global strategy,” Shockley-Zalabak said. “But it’s been adjusted to the world around us.”
A draft of the strategic plan update was emailed to faculty and staff March 15. A final version is available here.
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I’m CONSTANTLY researching post-secondary schools as my 4 children approach college age. What a pleasant surprise to find UCCS, the once-little school in my home town, discussing the need for diversity strategies to include intellectual and political diversity as well as racial.
While I think skin-color is important, I also think that topic overpowers the massive importance of other types of diversity, especially intellectual, in the wider college world today.
College-age adult learners should not be taught what to think, or what to say, or how to feel. They should have the opportunity to learn how to do these things with rigor, honesty and integrity themselves. Colleges can help by demonstrating the wide and spectacular array of thought, belief and discourse in the world today. I’m so pleased to see that this notion is on the minds of the UCCS leadership.
One further note: An additional form of diversity not specifically mentioned in your article is economic diversity. I went to a private liberal arts college and received a great education. But I never met a single student from a family that made less that $100,000 per year. I regard that as a massive weakness in my alma mater, because when you’re surrounded by wealthy people, it’s hard not to regard the world as a place where “the money always just works out.”
UCCS’s tuition is less than $10,000 per year. By comparison, at my alma mater today, the tuition is $48,000 per year. Thus people from a MUCH wider income spectrum can attend UCCS without mortgaging the following 2 decades of their lives, as I have. This is diversity by definition, and a wonderful form of it at that.
Bravo.