Vision, Mission, & Strategic Priorities

Vision

We believe a top tier institution should be the preeminent undergraduate choice for pre-professional health careers students in their region and a model of excellence and innovation in that field.

Mission

Through superior academic advising and support, Pre-Professional Health Careers partners with students as they pursue academic, personal, and career success.

Strategic Priorities, Goals, & Strategies

Strategic Priority: Educate and empower a diverse student body

Goal 1: Advance and sustain a campus climate and culture characterized by accessibility, inclusiveness, and high academic quality.

Goal 2: Nurture and enhance a learning environment that fosters success and wellness.

Goal 3: Deliver unique and transformative learning opportunities and experiences.

Goal 4: Increase retention and graduation rates, and placement of graduates.

Strategies:
• Implement recruitment campaign to increase application quantity and quality, conversion rates, and diversity of incoming student populations.
• Monitor and report on incoming student populations to inform programmatic decision-making.
• Implement pre-professional health careers student outcomes for all strategies, identifying appropriate assessment points and multiple measures.
• Support student major exploration and selection processes via earned credit hour, satisfactory academic progress, and GPA policies and through the use of semester-by-semester curricula.
• Develop accurate measures for and take steps to improve student success metrics (including but not limited to degree completion, admission to health programs, financial support, professional outcomes, and engagement).
• Increase awareness of opportunities in undergraduate research, service learning, studies abroad, etc.
• Work with students, groups, and partners to celebrate and promote student success.
• Deploy consistent and comprehensive advisor performance and advising effectiveness assessments.
• Leverage resources to recognize, compensate, and retain high-performing advisors.
• Create advisor transition strategy in alignment with strategic priorities.
• Design financial practices and policies to allow for growth but that are geared for efficiency, sustainability, and excellence in strategic priorities.
• Develop benchmarks and objectives for vital financial measures (including but not limited to SCH generation, administrative cost/operating budget, and operating cost/FTE enrollment).
• Prepare and distribute term and annual financial reports.
• Design practices and policies for effective and efficient use of space, equipment, and materials.
• Partner with relevant campus entities to ensure financial and infrastructure compliance and build for excellence.

Strategic Priority: Enable innovative research and creative activities

Goal 1: Increase the impact of scholarship on practice to advance knowledge, benefit society, improve quality of life, and contribute to economic development.

Goal 2: Enhance capacity and opportunities for research, scholarship, and creative activity for faculty, students, and staff.

Goal 3: Advance entrepreneurial activity, collaboration, innovation, and technology transfer.

Strategies:
• Establish culture of professional activity.
• Enact place workflow and evaluation structures that support professional activity.
• Incentivize submission of proposals, presentations, publishing, service, leadership, and research with relevant professional organizations.
• Research effects of professional activity on desired student outcomes.
• Report on investment in professional activity annually.
• Explore scholarship and research partnerships both on and off-campus.
• Explore career development tracking and development, merit pay and recognition options, and professional progression.
• Establish a culture supportive of personal and family needs without sacrificing performance or policy compliance and actively monitor.
• Support and promote faculty teaching, scholarship, and professional excellence efforts and measures.

Strategic Priority: Transform lives and communities through strategic outreach and engaged scholarship

Goal 1: Foster an engaged campus that recognizes outreach and engaged scholarship as an essential component of institutional activity.

Goal 2: Achieve a sustainable outreach and engaged scholarship program through diverse funding streams and long-term campus-community partnerships.

Goal 3: Enhance recognition of faculty and staff who contribute to outreach and engaged scholarship activities that impact local, state, national, and global communities.

Goal 4: Increase and strengthen collaborative, mutually beneficial community partnerships that stimulate creativity, innovation, and social and economic development.

Strategies
• Increase student, staff, and faculty participation in outreach and engagement activities.
• Demonstrate connections between outreach and engagement participation with traditional measures of success.
• Encourage, support, and recognize pursuit of related awards.
• Establish a shared understanding of outreach and engagement that emphasizes community and collaboration.
• Prioritize advantageous partnerships where good-fit pathways already exist when considering new activities.
• Develop unified and standardized channels of communication, both internal and external, that highlight outreach and engagement activities.