The 2010-15 IUS Strategic Plan has been approved and lays out the goals the university needs to accomplish in the next five years.
The plan is a list of eight goals the university has set out, ranging from enrollment management to alumni relations. It’s serves as a guideline as to where the institution should be in five years and how to get there.
“[The Strategic Plan] gives us a road map on how we will take the institution to the next level,” Chancellor Sandra Patterson-Randles said. “It also gives us something to measure our performance with.”
The reason behind having the strategic plan other than to guide the institution into the next few years is because IU Southeast gets a review from the North Central Association of the Higher Learning Commission every 10 years.
The review the association gave in 1999 had a lot of “bad grades” and areas for the university to work on. One of the major areas that needed work was strategic planning.
The review that was given in 2010 was much better, and a lot of that had to do with the creation and execution of the previous strategic plan.
IU Southeast never had a comprehensive strategic plan before.
One area the first strategic plan focused on was enrollment management, the university had lost a good amount of students had to drop out due to the economy.
“We had to find a way to get students to come back to IU Southeast, and by setting up a goal in the strategic plan and properly executing it, we were able to get our numbers back up,” Patterson-Randles said.
Patterson-Randles organized a committee to get a strategic plan together with 27 members from the school and the outlying community.
After the final review of the previous strategic plan, it turned out to be 95 percent effective in the goals and objectives that were outlined in it.
“You cannot have a successful plan without first taking some steps to find out more about what is needed in improvements, a self-study has to be completed,” Patterson-Randles said.
By carrying out these steps, the committee was able to come up with eight goals for the 2010-15 strategic plan.
These goals range from educational excellence and enrollment management to marketing and enhanced community engagement, as well as a few others goals.
The goals and their initiatives can be found in full at the Office of the Chancellor Web page on the IUS website.
The biggest difference between the previous plan and the new one is the committee added another goal to the list relating to alumni, which could turn out to be quite a challenge as more than 30 percent of the students at IU Southeast are from Kentucky.
“We need all of the alumni to get reconnected and help the students,” Patterson-Randles said.
By BRYAN JONES
Staff
jonesbry@umail.iu.edu