5-Year Plan Drivers
What drives the 5-Year Plan? Do we start with the project sustainable student count for each program, or with the desired gross profit and work backwards? How does placement factor into the equation?
Thanks!
Here at the community college level, we are always planning ahead! But what drives this planning seems to be standard procedures rather than issues we can really need to address. We are stressed to work on items when our 7 year accreditation comes due, but many things fall to the way side until that push comes!
In my program, we attempt to be proactive and have a long range plan on where we are going. We have had some ups and downs in leadership over the years. Currently we are stable and have a staff that is all pulling in the same direction now.
Profit does not drive us, but saying that we are driven by enrollment. The college has a blanket statement on how and when to cancel classes due to low enrollment, but our program generates fees that no other program does on campus. We can be the goose that lays a golden egg many terms! I think the business model that drives a private massage school is much different than one that drives a community college. It is a different mentality we struggle with an academic thinking. Common sense can be lacking when it comes to college procedures.
I am currently on a task force for Strategic Objectives in Life Long Learning. It has been a great lesson on how to go about working with the words and ideas of 12 people! One of the things we have been using to accomplish this goal is the Rules to writing a SMART objective:
Specific
Measurable
Actionable
Realistic
Time Bound
I can see how this will help me work towards setting a Strategic 5-year Plan for my program!!
Historically, the 5-year plan has always been based on traditional outcome measures. These elements can be easily manipulated and analyzed to derive projections which are acceptable to the agencies which assign them as 'beneficial' or 'lacking value.' Schools generally are forced to begin planning with project sustainable counts--which is a good place to start, but in continuing planning (i.e. the 5-yr plan) I believe the educational programs which will see the sharpest gain are those who can introduce novel methods of program delivery.
In an evolving culture of social media and the non-conforming schedules of daily living, staying with the 'tried' and 'true' will limit planning and its outcomes to those standards. In other words, if we incorporate student count, campus size or program addition, we will see linear projections. If we incorporate entirely novel programming (delivery, access, or structure--as I recently saw a TV ad where one school is now offering unlimited classes for a fixed 'fee' per time), then the projections for 'placement' are permutations which will introduce marked differences in decision points of the 5-year plan. Here, placement is not a linear variable, but a flexible one.
