Building Our Brighter Future

INTRODUCTION

Columbia College Chicago is a college for creatives. With a curriculum that blends a liberal arts foundation with majors in a range of creative disciplines, we seek to grow students’ capacity for critical thinking and effective communication while developing their creative skills and teaching them practical life and work competencies. This hybrid educational model is fundamental to our distinguishing value proposition, which is that we are an institution that prepares creatives for real world success, whatever their choice of industry or profession.

The year 2022 marks both the end of Columbia College Chicago’s previous strategic plan and a nascent transition to a new era in higher education, one informed by the hardships inflicted, and the opportunities revealed, by the COVID-19 pandemic. Higher education was already facing chronic challenges stemming from a declining traditional-age student population, incessant operating cost pressures, concerns about tuition increases and student debt loads, and heightened political and regulatory scrutiny of institutions’ student outcomes. These challenges have been exacerbated by the pandemic. At the same time, new spaces have opened up for schools to respond to the current environment with appropriate, cost-effective innovations in curricular delivery and pedagogy and new curricular content. In this critical moment, we have engaged in a planning process centered around four institutional imperatives: building our enrollment, improving our first-year retention rate, improving our graduation rate, and expanding students’ engagement with alumni, creative industries, and other communities of creative practice that can facilitate their future professional success.

Our future will be defined by our success in this moment. We must ensure that once they enroll, all Columbia students enjoy a rich educational experience, develop their creative voice, and receive the support that they need to persist to graduation. We must position them to be successful upon graduation – prepared for a range of professional opportunities and possessed of a sound conceptual and practical grounding in their discipline, technical mastery, an adaptable mindset, and a keen awareness of how businesses and organizations operate.

Informed by this context, we are launching this 2022-2027 strategic plan as an affirmation of our mission to educate students who will communicate creatively, shape the public’s perceptions of issues and events, and author the culture of their times. We will continue to strive for excellence and to live out the college’s institutional commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. To achieve our enrollment, retention, graduation, and student engagement goals, we have identified and prioritized action steps that we have grouped within four strategic themes, recognizing that the themes overlap and that successful strategies will cross the boundaries between them:

• Creatives’ Curriculum: We will review, refresh, and strengthen Columbia’s curriculum to provide our students with the core competencies necessary for them to successfully pursue their creative endeavors and professional choices. Both in the Core Curriculum and our academic majors and minors, we will deliver a curriculum that is nimble, innovative, responsive to current creative industry trends and practices, and informed by a multiplicity of viewpoints, narratives, cultural traditions, and histories.

• Student Growth and Student Success: We will support student persistence, student development, and student engagement with an agile and integrated plan that is rooted in a sophisticated understanding of our students’ backgrounds, aspirations, and needs; integrates principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion into co-curricular programming and student support structures; seeks to nurture the well-being and success of all students; and connects what happens in and outside of the classroom.

• Sustainable Engagement: We commit to a model of community engagement that is linked to creative industries and grounded in Chicago’s communities of creative practice, and honors the college’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. We will align our engagement efforts with our mission and academic programs, recognizing that the

Strategic Planning Steering Committee Membership

college’s external relationship-building initiatives must create opportunities for our students to test their creative, business, and leadership skills in real-world settings and also connect us to new ideas and new networks of expertise. Inevitably, this work will challenge our definitions of content and practice.

• Operational Health and Community Well-Being: Over the next five years, we will continue to strengthen the college’s finances and operations, stewarding Columbia’s legacy, and its future, with sound business practices and systems; managing its physical plant in a responsible and sustainable fashion; and ensuring that its resources are deployed to support student success. At the same time, we will strive for Columbia to become known as a preferred employer whose supportive and collaborative workplace environment enables all of its faculty, staff, and students to thrive.

We want to thank those students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends of the college who shared their perspectives and their vision for its future during the planning process. With this plan, we commit to action that is collaborative; inspired by imagination, excitement, and a sense of urgency; supported by targeted investment; and anchored in a single-minded commitment to serving our students and helping them to achieve their future success.

Members:

Co-Chairs: Marcella David, Senior Vice President and Provost | Professor Carmelo Esterrich

Bakkum

Paul Catanese

Jo Cates

Madhurima Chakraborty

Peter Cook

Steve Corey | Paige Cunningham | Douglas Eck

Joshua Fisher

Peter Fitzpatrick

Eric Freedman

Erik Friedman

Reese Givens

Allison Grant Williams

Michael Joseph

Ann Kalayil

Kathie Koch

Lambrini Lukidis

Brian Marth

Suzanne McBride

Jessica Meharry

Rocky Monroe

Niki Nolan

Rosita Sands

Craig

Jerry Tarrer

Diana Vallera

Susan Van Veen

Thelma Vickroy | Sharon Wilson-Taylor

CREATIVES’ CURRICULUM

Central to our mission as a college for creatives is our commitment to providing our students with the core competencies necessary for them to successfully pursue their creative and professional endeavors. In recent years, the faculty have reimagined the Core Curriculum and introduced professional practice experience requirements and content into degree programs. There is more to be done. Both in the Core and beyond, we recommit to delivering a curriculum that is nimble, innovative, responsive to current creative industry trends and practices, and informed by a multiplicity of viewpoints, narratives, cultural traditions, and histories.

ACTION STEPS: UNDERGRADUATE CURRICULAR INNOVATION

As a college that seeks to position itself on the leading edge of creative practice in the twenty-first century, Columbia must prioritize currency and innovation in the development, assessment, and revision of its curriculum. Over the next five years, we will continue to shape a curriculum that teaches creative practice from a theoretical as well as a practical perspective, fosters critical thinking and communication skills, incorporates emerging practice methodologies and new technologies, and builds strong and sustainable bridges to creative fields and industries. We will ground the curriculum in inclusive principles, informed by pedagogical practices that advance student success and wellbeing. We will also support faculty in developing coursework and programs organized around themes, subject matter adjacencies, and paradigms of content and pedagogy that cross traditional disciplinary lines. These objectives will be supported through the following initiatives:

• The Office of the Provost will fund Curriculum Innovation Planning Grants that support departmental proposals to incorporate or further the use of these signature elements in new or existing curriculum. Curriculum Innovation Planning

Grants can fund short-term planning initiatives, including faculty and staff development; curricular revision activities; facilitated consultation with leading practitioners in the field; and technology acquisition. Grants will be awarded on a competitive basis through an annual process devised by the Office of the Provost.

• The College will create a Strategic Curriculum Innovation Investment Fund to support proposals that advance our strategic vision for the curriculum. Funds will be awarded through an annual competitive process, overseen by the Provost, that prioritizes innovation and transdisciplinary approaches to teaching. This long-term funding pool will support faculty and staff hiring and technology and capital investments.

• The Office of the Provost will fund Student Retention and Success Grants to support initiatives that integrate diverse viewpoints, narratives, cultural traditions, and histories into the curriculum or meaningfully advance the college’s strategic goals for enrollment and student persistence. Student Retention and Success Grants will be awarded on a competitive basis through an annual process devised by the Office of the Provost.

ACTION STEPS: CORE CURRICULUM

We remain committed to a Core Curriculum, built around Essential Liberal Arts and Science (ELAS) course requirements and a common undergraduate Core experience, which develops the critical thinking and communications skills that support longterm student success. As part of the 2015-2020 strategic plan, the Common Core was revised with the establishment of the CCCX course sequence, which is organized around the concept of student connection to the physical and cultural realities of Chicago. Our next priorities for the Core are to broaden the range of academic disciplines in which Core courses outside of the CCCX sequence are offered, while ensuring that any new courses deliver faculty-approved Core learning outcomes, and to further integrate content that enhances students’ learning of fundamental business skills into coursework across the curriculum.

• In keeping with best higher education practice, we will streamline Core requirements to support student retention and degree completion, paying special attention to the needs of transfer students and students entering with advanced credits.

• We will continue to develop ELAS Core courses that are keyed to the interests of our students and can be integrated into our creatives’ curriculum.

• To provide students with greater flexibility in fulfilling Core requirements, we will identify, or create, select foundational courses in non-liberal arts disciplines. All such courses will deliver faculty-approved Core learning outcomes.

• We will recognize and support in the Core self-directed exploration across disciplines, taking advantage of badging and other credentialing options to acknowledge sustained student interest.

• We will leverage the interdisciplinary curriculum in CCCX courses to connect students and faculty across traditional disciplinary boundaries.

• We will invest in faculty and staff development to support innovation in teaching essential Core requirements and initiatives that advance our DEI, recruitment, retention, and graduation goals.

• We will expand opportunities across the curriculum for faculty to teach, and for students to learn, fundamental business skills such as balance sheet analysis, business communication, basic business plan development, contract review, contract and salary negotiation, and workplace environment navigation. Among other strategies, we will explore the following:

o We will designate new foundational business skills courses which meet these learning objectives as fulfilling Columbia Core requirements.

o We will facilitate collaboration between business faculty and faculty in creative disciplines to support the development of business skills modules that can be integrated into non-business classes.

o We will establish an online Business Skills Academy, leveraging the business expertise of our faculty, to expand opportunities for students to learn business skills on a self-paced, non-credit basis, taking advantage of badging and other credentialing options to recognize students’ mastery of the requisite skills and competencies.

ACTION STEPS: INTERDISCIPLINARY WORK AND STUDY

We will undertake an assessment of institutional enrollment trends, the mix and size of our degree programs, and existing course scheduling and teaching assignment obligations, with a view to identifying resources for an expansion of interdisciplinary work and study at the college, including topic- and project-based collaboration among faculty, staff, and students.

ACTION STEPS: LIVED CURRICULUM

As a first step in the establishment of more substantive connections between the academic and co-curricular components of the student experience, academic departments and programs will partner with Residence Life to develop living-learning creative communities that integrate curricular, co-curricular, engagement, and professional development activities into the lived experience of residential students.

ACTION STEPS: GRADUATE EDUCATION

Columbia will continue to offer graduate programs that advance its mission, bolster the quality and raise the profile of its academic programs, position students at the leading edge of creative practice in their fields, and diversify the college’s studentbased revenue streams. We will improve the assessment of our performance in this area by developing a more robust set of graduate student success and wellness metrics. Given the variety of professional paths and life circumstances of our current and prospective graduate student populations, we will make it a priority, taking advantage of ongoing technological innovations in content delivery and pedagogy, to develop high-quality graduate programs that can be delivered in a variety of formats.

• Over time, we will build our graduate programming capacity by expanding the pool of faculty who are qualified to teach graduate students. The ability to teach in a department’s existing or prospective graduate programs should be a consideration in departmental full-time faculty hiring.

• We will continue to grow graduate student enrollment by developing new programs that deliver the signature elements of a Columbia graduate education.

• We will target new graduate student populations and expand graduate program accessibility by launching new programs, or alternative versions of existing programs, in online and hybrid formats.

• We will promote curricular and co-curricular opportunities for graduate students to work with professionals in their fields and pursue creative and industry experiences that will support their transition to professional practice.

• We will invest in formal and informal opportunities for graduate student collaboration across programs and disciplines and create physical spaces for professional interaction and community building.

• To strengthen graduate advising and student wellbeing, we will create a dedicated staff line for a persistence and success advisor who will be embedded in Graduate Education and maintain close relationships with student services, the career center, and academic departments.

ACTION STEPS: SUMMER ACTIVATION

• We will enrich summer programming by creating a rotating sequence of innovative, cross-disciplinary Summer Institutes that explore the intersection between creative practice and issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice. Summer Institutes will also allow Columbia to collaborate strategically with the many creative fairs, festivals, and cultural showcases that are held in Chicago each summer. Examples of possible Summer Institute topics are Social Justice, Arts Education, and Storytelling.

ACTION STEPS: CONTINUING EDUCATION AND ADULT EDUCATION

• Columbia is already a hub for faculty, staff, alumni, and other creative professionals who are leaders in their fields and have much to share. We will activate opportunities for mature learners to expand their skills and opportunities by working with accomplished teaching artists. We will also devise creative master class experiences in different formats to engage curious and enthusiastic adult learners with disciplines in which we have expertise.

STUDENT GROWTH AND STUDENT SUCCESS

Columbia’s fundamental purpose is to provide its students with an educational experience that propels them to real-world success. That experience is not shaped solely by what goes on in the classroom. To maximize the success of all students, we commit to developing a more seamlessly coordinated approach to the student experience, organizing all of those systems around a common commitment to student growth, wellness, and persistence to graduation.

ACTION STEPS: CAMPUS-WIDE COMMITTEE ON STUDENT WELLNESS

Addressing student wellness needs, particularly in the area of student mental health, is an essential part of any comprehensive student support program. To coordinate the college’s response to these challenges, we will establish a standing committee on Student Wellness that will regularly assess the status of student mental health and wellness on campus, using data from the Student Health Center, Counseling Services, Student Relations, and the Fitness Center; Academic Progress reports and alerts; and other sources. The committee will also develop policies, recommendations, and strategies to enhance faculty and staff awareness of student health and wellness issues and to strengthen systems for faculty and staff referrals of, and communications with, students regarding campus health and wellness resources. Taking a comprehensive view of student wellness, the committee will seek to identify systemic barriers across the campus to student wellness and success and put forward recommendations for eliminating them. Its membership will encompass all appropriate campus offices and will also include students and, as needed, outside community agencies.

ACTION STEPS: EXTENDED CAMPUS ORIENTATION

We will enhance the new student experience by extending New Student Orientation further into the fall semester, using our Student Orientation leaders to support new students’ engagement with the college through expanded student success programming. Amongst other benefits, investment in this holistic approach to welcoming new students will allow the messaging about campus resources conveyed at the start of the semester to be reinforced throughout the fall, keyed to time of need.

• Our extended campus orientation will be linked to expanded investments in Academic Services (Scholars Program and First-Year Group Advising) and Student Affairs (Engage Columbia), the development of a concierge desk model of student support, and improved student communications to connect students to resources that support persistence and wellness.

• We will promote common, consistent, and frequently reinforced messaging regarding student success expectations and

outcomes. We will connect student services with the academic experience in first-semester classrooms, supported by enhanced use of Canvas content, a reimagined use of the Engage platform, and student communication campaigns.

• We will organize periodic communications campaigns around student success themes, including academic resources, financial literacy, career preparation, mental health, and student wellness, and promote them through student and parent communications, classroom activities, and support services activities.

ACTION STEPS: STUDENT CONCIERGE DESK PROVIDING PEER-TO-PEER SUPPORT

Recognizing that student support work often begins with an engaging front-line presence, we will establish a student-staffed Concierge Desk providing peer-to-peer connections to campus and community resources. Partnering with staff, student guides will be trained on campus resources, processes, policies, and support services to provide peer-to-peer assistance in navigating the Columbia experience.

Concierge-level services will be accessible through both in-person support in locations across campus and remote support on a schedule that meets student needs. In addition to providing ready answers to student questions, the concierge desk model will make support more readily available to all students. An added benefit is the student employment and leadership development opportunities that this initiative will establish.

ACTION STEPS: STUDENT CAREER DEVELOPMENT AND PREPARATION

Students’ prospects for real-world success are greatly enhanced by experiential learning and other early career experiences outside of the classroom. Having committed ourselves in the prior strategic plan to building more robust career development structures, we will continue our efforts to expand our students’ ability to pursue such experiences prior to graduation.

• We will grow the percentage of students who complete at least one structured internship before graduation, increasing the number of students registered for internships from 500 to 1,200 per year.

• We will provide holistic support across the college for student portfolio development so that students are better prepared to present their creative work, experiences, and academic accomplishments to prospective employers.

• We will enhance partnerships between the Career Center and faculty and staff to better prepare students for industry and workplace expectations, and provide career readiness support in the classroom, during academic advising, and in other appropriate forums.

• We will more actively promote Columbia’s 4+1 Combined Degree program to provide current students with additional options for degree completion and post-Columbia career plans.

ACTION STEPS: MENTORSHIP AND STUDENT DEVELOPMENT

We will expand mentorship opportunities that support student development by connecting students to their peers and to faculty, staff, and alumni.

• We will create incentives for academic departments to incorporate mentoring and leadership development opportunities into academic programming.

• We will formalize expectations regarding direct faculty mentorship of students and create incentives for departments to imagine new ways for students to build such relationships with faculty.

• To enhance student persistence and student engagement, we will expand current peer and alumni mentoring programs that demonstrate high utilization and significant student interactions with mentors, and develop additional scalable alternatives for student-alumni mentoring.

• We will create incentives for faculty to integrate academic courses more formally with alumni mentoring activities and expand our efforts to bring alumni to campus to engage with current and prospective students in a range of public programs. These initiatives will help to build a sustainable foundation for future industry relationships and mentorship opportunities.

• We will expand our efforts to chronicle and celebrate alumni achievements as a way of demonstrating the value of a Columbia education.

• In recognition of the crucial contributions that parents, guardians, and families make to student success, we will develop online resources to better engage these advocates and partners with the Columbia student experience. We will increase family awareness of campus resources, success and wellness benchmarks and milestones, and student expectations.

ACTION STEP: SUPPORT OF TIMELY STUDENT GRADUATION

Using emerging technology, we will create a more robust infrastructure for designing interactive and individualized four-year and transfer degree plans to support students’ progress towards their degree. The plans will include the sequence of program requirements and other critical milestones and benchmarks of student success, such as the number of credit hours expected, internship expectations, portfolio submissions, a summary of extra-curricular activities, and other evidence of student engagement.

SUSTAINABLE ENGAGEMENT

In this plan, we commit to a model of engagement that is linked to creative industries and grounded in Chicago’s creative practice communities, and that honors our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. We will align our engagement efforts with our mission and academic programs, recognizing that the college’s external relationship-building initiatives must create opportunities for our students to test their creative, business, and leadership skills in real-world settings and also connect us to new ideas and new networks of expertise. Inevitably, this work will challenge our definitions of content and practice.

ACTION STEPS: BUILDING DURABLE RELATIONSHIPS

As a diverse community of current and aspiring creative practitioners and scholars, Columbia has greatly benefited from the many external partnerships – some highly structured, others less formal – that its members have built and sustained with a range of creative, community, civic, and not-for-profit organizations. It is incumbent upon us to extend these relationship-building activities in order to support our students’ development as creative professionals, leverage our collective assets as an institution, and share our distinctive story with the world.

• Under the direction of the Special Advisor for Community Engagement, we will continue to track ongoing community engagement activities at the college, develop standards for current and future engagement initiatives, and create rubrics for measuring their success. This work will be overseen by a new college-wide industry and community engagement council that includes representatives from, among others, the career center, the alumni relations office, academic departments, and the senior leadership of the institution.

• We will recognize meaningful community engagement activities by our students, faculty, and staff, utilizing strategies such as badging, awards, and other incentives, and highlight these activities in college publications and materials.

• We will promote, and direct suitable college resources to, partnership opportunities with governmental, business, and not-for-profit organizations within the City of Chicago.

• We will continue to nurture and grow our partnerships with Black, Asian, and Latino/Latinx community stakeholders that support recruitment and retention efforts directed at students from those communities.

• We will capitalize on our institution’s current memberships with entities such as America’s Urban Campus, the Council of Independent Colleges, and Imagining America to build institutional partnerships and collaborative research and learning initiatives.

ACTION STEPS: CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

We recognize the importance of civic engagement - by which we mean individual and collective action, including voting and political activism, to spotlight and address issues of public concern - as essential to connecting members of the Columbia community to the wider society and culture. We will support and promote curricular initiatives and co-curricular activities that advance the civic engagement of our students, faculty, and staff.

ACTION STEPS: OUR SOUTH LOOP NEIGHBORHOOD

In contrast with higher education institutions that have clearly demarcated campuses, Columbia’s buildings are woven indistinguishably into the surrounding neighborhood. This obligates us to remain attuned to the needs and interests of those who occupy the same physical environment that we do. We will strive to be a responsible member of the neighborhood, to present a welcoming public face to our neighbors, and to retain the trust of neighborhood stakeholders.

• We will create a Columbia College Chicago Cultural Passport to grow the audience for our public-facing events and performances.

• We will continue to support and promote the Wabash Arts Corridor.

• In collaboration with local businesses and other neighborhood stakeholders, we will develop a “Neighborhood Discovery Initiative” to encourage Columbia students, faculty, and staff to engage with the surrounding neighborhood.

• We will promote Manifest to the surrounding neighborhood as a celebration of our students’ creative accomplishments and the college’s entrepreneurial and creative spirit.

ACTION STEPS: COLUMBIA AGENCY

As another step in our efforts to support student career development and to connect the college to our city and surrounding communities, the college will establish its own creative agency, to be staffed with creative professionals, leading teams of student workers, who can support a range of production needs and connect their assignments to relevant coursework. The Columbia agency will provide meaningful practical experience to students in the form of employment, internships, and in-class projects that complement their academic work.

• The college will activate suitable public-facing space to support the Columbia agency’s endeavors, including professional space for meetings with clients and creative workspaces outfitted with cutting-edge production tools and technology.

• The agency will also serve as a campus-wide talent booking agency to help prospective clients identify and book Columbia College Chicago talent for events.

ACTION STEPS: CREATIVE INDUSTRY PARTNERSHIPS

To support students’ career opportunities and future professional success, we will build more substantial relationships and external partnerships between creative industries and the College’s academic programs and student body. We will also develop programs and experiences that connect students to industry projects, industry representatives, and professional networks.

• We will create incentives for academic departments and programs to incorporate industry partnerships and internship experiences into their degree programs. We will prioritize partnerships that align with our institutional commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion and with our students’ skills, interests, and aspirations. We will embrace these partnerships as a source of new ideas and practices for future curricular enrichment.

• We will develop an Industry Experience Fund and an associated fundraising initiative to provide stipends for career preparation experiences that are beyond some students’ financial reach, including internships, attendance at industry specific conferences or networking events, professional organization memberships, and other professional development opportunities.

OPERATIONAL HEALTH AND COMMUNITY WELL-BEING

Columbia College Chicago is an institution of higher learning, a not-for-profit enterprise with its own business model, and an employer of a diverse faculty and staff. Over the next five years, we will continue to strengthen the college’s finances and operations, stewarding Columbia’s legacy, and its future, with sound business practices and systems, managing its physical plant in a responsible and sustainable fashion, and ensuring that its resources are deployed to support student success. At the same time, we will strive for Columbia to become known as a preferred employer whose supportive and collaborative workplace environment enables all of its faculty, staff, and students to thrive.

ACTION STEPS: EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION

Improved communication is essential to achieving Columbia College Chicago’s student success, faculty and staff support, and engagement goals.

• Student Communication: With current enrollment at nearly 7,000, and with plans in place to grow it to 8,500, students represent our largest campus constituency. While acknowledging that their disparate needs and communication platform preferences present significant challenges to reaching them with effective, just-in-time communication, we will develop a holistic communication strategy across multiple channels and formats that is proactive and informed by the best practices of student-focused communication. This strategy will convey information that addresses student needs, answers questions in a timely fashion, communicates our expectations, celebrates student successes, and provides a measure of connection to our community.

o We will establish a centralized student communications office that serves a leadership and coordinating function for student communications across the college. A primary responsibility of this office will be to enhance communications related to student academic progress and student health and well-being. The office will be staffed by individuals with expertise in student communication strategies and experience utilizing a broad array of communication channels that reach students. Informing their work with student perspectives, this office will take the lead in realizing the student communication goals that follow.

o We will launch a student-to-alumni life-cycle communication plan, coordinated across different offices, that seamlessly transitions prospective students to campus communication channels. The plan will incorporate best practices for communicating with students, including prioritizing messaging and creating effective static information portals that allow students to easily access important information.

o We will assess the effectiveness of current communication channels and explore and recommend investments in the technology and expertise necessary to activate texting, social media, and other communication platforms across our campus.

o We will leverage our learning management system and other communication platforms to promote student success resources in ways that help faculty members and students access them.

o We will use the “new” Columbia Engage app to aggregate digital links to campus resources for students, improve communications regarding those resources, and create digital channels to connect students with one another. We will support these efforts with the training and resources (e.g., design consultants, additional staff) necessary for users to activate the app’s full functionality.

o We will develop assessment criteria for the newly centralized student communications program to facilitate effective communication across academic and administrative units and boost the “signal-to-noise ratio.”

• Staff and Faculty Communication: We will develop a holistic internal communication strategy, supported by staff- and faculty-specific communication plans, that facilitates the dissemination of information, inclusive employee engagement and collaborative feedback, professional development, and other objectives.

• Communicating our Institutional Values: To highlight our institutional commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, we will develop an annual campus communication plan marking Asian American Heritage, Indigenous Heritage, Latino Heritage, Black History, Women’s History, LGTBQ+ Culture, veterans’ awareness, disability awareness, and related themes, and promote any associated public programming to the off-campus community.

ACTION STEPS: DEI INFRASTRUCTURE

The college’s commitment to principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is a core institutional value and is inextricably bound to our educational purpose as a college for creatives. The 2015 strategic plan called for the college to take a national leadership role in advancing this critically important work, and we have made real progress in this regard, particularly in reimagining curricular content. As next steps:

• We will build a comprehensive administrative and staffing infrastructure to support the college’s DEI work so that the college’s commitment animates all elements of its operations.

• We will establish measurable outcomes and assessment rubrics so that we can gauge and evaluate our ongoing progress and determine areas in need of special focus.

ACTION STEPS: LONG-TERM FINANCIAL VIABILITY

• We will build a sustainable financial model for the college that incorporates a long-term tuition pricing strategy and accurate program-level instructional costs (see below) and reallocates resources to strategic investments in the context of balanced operating budgets.

• In collaboration with the Board of Trustees, we will continue to implement a long-term undergraduate and graduate tuition pricing strategy that increases tuition to a level which reflects the value of a Columbia education, facilitates the more strategic use of student financial aid resources to support student recruitment goals and address student affordability concerns, and generates the annual net student-based income needed to balance the operating budget and stabilize annual operating performance.

• We will develop and implement a strategic retention plan to significantly improve the college’s retention outcomes.

• Working with schools and academic departments, and supported by advanced budgeting tools, the college’s academic and financial leadership will develop strategies to better plan, manage, and contain instructional costs at the academic program level. To ensure financially sustainable enrollment growth, the marginal instructional cost of adding new students to programs will be factored into annual department-level student recruitment plans and targets.

• We will invest the resources in faculty and staff that are required to support the design and delivery of high-quality, innovative academic programs and to achieve our goal of becoming a preferred employer (see below).

• We will move forward with the development and approval of new academic programs that align with the college’s mission, possess demonstrable market appeal, and are projected to be financially viable. Approval will come with an expectation that such programs will be sunset if initial enrollment and net revenue targets prove to be unrealistic.

• We will seek to implement the recommendations set out in the 2021 Campus Master Plan, investing in the technology and physical spaces needed to support the design and delivery of high-quality, innovative academic programs, and adequately maintaining our physical plant in accordance with the college’s sustainability goals.

• We will develop long-term strategies for the diversification of the college’s revenue streams and the reduction of its excessive reliance on net tuition income.

• We will continue to preserve the college’s ability to access affordable capital by maintaining a solid credit rating via a strong balance sheet, prudent management of operations, and sustainable cash flows.

• We will develop and implement best practice strategies to contain and, where possible, reduce the overhead costs associated with the administration of the college.

• We will champion a culture of giving by trustees, alumni, friends, foundations and corporations, faculty, and staff in support of the college’s fundraising priorities.

ACTION STEPS: PREFERRED WORKPLACE

We will strive to be known as an employer of choice, offering competitive compensation to our faculty and staff and supporting their professional development and health and well-being.

• We will clarify employment expectations for all hires, linking position descriptions to institutional goals, and expand opportunities for employee advancement and professional development.

• We will embrace the lessons of the pandemic experience by instituting a flexible workplace strategy in instances where it does not compromise student learning, student support, or employees’ ability to carry out their professional responsibilities.

• We will invest in faculty and staff development to support innovation in teaching, cross-departmental collaboration, and initiatives that advance the college’s student recruitment, student persistence, and diversity, equity, and inclusion goals.

• We will design and implement an integrated campus-wide strategy to support health, wellness, and well-being for faculty and staff to reduce turnover and burnout.

ACTION STEPS: CAMPUS COMMUNITY

We will foster a collaborative environment and sense of community among the college’s many stakeholders by investing in communication strategies, curriculum, and programming that harnesses and highlights the talents and expertise of all community members.

• As part of our communications strategy (see above), we will establish academic social media accounts that are officially verified and regularly maintained and invest in staffing to ensure that posted content is relevant and stylistically consistent. We will use these resources to showcase our community’s creative work, curricular innovations, success stories, and engagement among faculty, staff, current and prospective students, and alumni. This effort will utilize both external platforms (e.g., Facebook and Instagram) and internal platforms (e.g., Columbia Engage).

• We will create opportunities to celebrate full- and part time faculty and staff, strengthen the camaraderie and sense of common purpose among college employees, support and encourage creative engagement and collaboration, and reenergize relationships between Columbia and faculty and staff who work in or have other professional ties to creative industries.

• We will promote the retention of faculty and staff from underrepresented communities through the creation of effective community support structures that are inclusive and promote equity.

ACTION STEPS: BUSINESS SYSTEMS, PROCESSES, AND PRACTICES

Our business systems, processes, and practices, and the enterprise technologies that facilitate them, will support the college’s academic mission and the work of our faculty and staff in a user-friendly, efficient, and sustainable fashion.

• We will implement and invest in the Business Affairs ERP Roadmap, re-engineering key accounting, procurement, budgeting, and human resources processes and upgrading their supporting enterprise technologies in order to streamline and automate them.

• We will modernize our student information system (currently Jenzabar) to ensure that it effectively supports the college’s evolving data management needs relating to student records, the auditing of student degrees and certifications, course registration, and student business office accounts.

• We will continually assess and update student advising tools and processes with the goal of improving the caliber of student advising services.

• We will invest in Requirements Gathering, Process Design and Reengineering, and Project Management resources – for example, business analysts and project management tools – that will enable the college to effectively address key business challenges. Requirements management is fundamental to ensuring that project and process goals are successfully met and satisfy stakeholders’ immediate and long-term expectations.

• We will conduct periodic reviews of academic and administrative policies to ensure their consistency, currency, and efficacy. A process for soliciting faculty and staff perspectives will be built into the reviews.

• We will begin planning for a digital transformation of our campus with the goal of optimizing processes and operations to support our faculty and staff, the creative work of our campus, and our sustainability goals.