Over the course of nine years, the NC State Strategic Plan provides guidelines which have helped make improvements to the university, such as increased student success, positive faculty changes and organizational improvements.
Work on NC State’s Strategic Plan first began in 2010 during Chancellor Randy Woodson’s first year at the university. The plan is meant to help NC State administration achieve goals and track the progress of those goals to improve the university.
“It was developed so that we could all have a shared understanding about where NC State is, and where we want to go, and how we will get there and how we’ll hold ourselves accountable for it,” Woodson said. “That’s any strategic plan.”
The plan includes five key goals the university strives to reach and maintain: enhance student success, invest in faculty and infrastructure, support interdisciplinary scholarship, pursue organizational excellence and engage locally and globally.
“It’s a plan that sets out clear goals,” Woodson said. “It sets out clear measures of progress so that we can track our process. It’s a collection of goals and strategies to move the university forward. Collectively, there are five overarching goals. The number one goal, and it always will be, is student success.”
While the Strategic Plan is an overall framework for the goals, Margery Overton, vice provost for academic strategy and one of the leaders in creating the Strategic Plan, said that the Implementation Plan is also a crucial aspect because it helps to establish how the Strategic Plan’s goals will be carried out.
“The Strategic Plan talks more about the goals, and where we want to go and what we want to have emphasis on,” Overton said. “The Implementation Plan, which is developed every three years, talks about what we actually want to do.”
The plan is split up into three-year increments to accommodate for changes. Every three years, a new Implementation Plan is created to adjust goals for the Strategic Plan. Woodson said one of the biggest adjustments that needs to be accommodated for is funding.
“One of the big changes has been funding, or lack thereof,” Woodson said. “One of our overarching plans was to grow our faculty. We were hoping to grow the faculty by 300 over where it was, and we’ve only been able to grow it by about 60 because frankly we haven’t had the money.”
According to Woodson, one of the biggest accomplishments of the Strategic Plan has been student success. Both the retention rate of freshman students and the graduation rate have increased through implementation of the Strategic Plan. Woodson elaborated on some of the efforts that have been made to help students succeed since the Strategic Plan was put in place.
“We restructured [the Division of Academic and Student Affairs], we created more intensive extracurricular learning activities,” Woodson said. “We’ve tripled the number of students studying abroad, we’ve added Living and Learning Villages to support students in their first year experience [and] we’ve added advisers. A lot of those things are why it’s working. But it was a plan that gave us the pathway to get there.”
Overton also agreed that student success has excelled along with the faculty that have been hired.
“[We have] hired about 72 new faculty on campus [who] are specifically very motivated in interdisciplinary work, meaning going across disciplines, to solve problems and are changing the campus both in the research area, the kinds of things we’re doing there, and into academic programs as well,” Overton said.
While the biggest accomplishment is student success, the university is constantly trying to make strides toward the other goals listed in the Strategic Plan.
“Organizational improvements, I think that this is one that […] we have spent a lot of time over this, six, seven years looking at the way we do business and to be more efficient, to be more effective,” Overton said. “[We] look at all aspects of the university: the student life, the buildings, the infrastructure we have, our transportation systems, our planning for buildings. We spent a lot of time just being better as an organization and doing those things.”
The current Strategic Plan for NC State began in 2011 and will end in 2020, but Overton said that a new one will be developed for the university in the upcoming year with similar and new goals.
More information and updates on NC State’s Strategic Plan can be found on its website.
