External Environmental Analysis the University

External Environmental Analysis

The university must remain affordable for its students. Currently, the university endowment and alumni donations are down. But raising tuition means subjecting cash-strapped and unemployed families of current and future students to even more prohibitive expenses. The recession is the number-one problem facing the university. It makes the school less affordable for current students, impacts the diversity of the future student body, and also limits the university's ability to pay faculty competitive salaries. Affordability, accessibility, and maintaining the quality of the faculty to give students the intimate, intensive education they seek are essential issues that must be addressed in this strategic plan.

Step 2: Strategic issues and opportunities

How can the school remain affordable without 1. raising tuition, 2. limiting financial aid and/or sacrificing need-blind admissions and 3. keeping instruction quality high, by retaining top faculty while containing salary costs?

Step 3: Core values

Learning: Creating an educational environment where the best students are welcome, not simply those students who are best able to pay

Diversity: Multiple perspectives are necessary in the classroom. A diverse student body creates a more complete education for students outside of the classroom

Intimacy: Creating close faculty-student relationships in a way that fosters learning and enhances the personal learning journey of every student

Step 4: Mission

We must create an inclusive, affordable, and challenging educational environment that prepares students for the real world yet also intellectually engages our undergraduates in an academic fashion. We wish to become a playground for the mind, to foster relationships between students and faculty members that last a lifetime, and to serve every student as an individual.

Step 5: Goals and objectives

Maintain need-blind admissions: Admissions decisions must continue to be made regardless of the student's or the student's family's desire to seek financial assistance. This will require some belt-tightening on the part of the university. To accomplish this objective the university will:

Create a temporary hiring freeze on the number of faculty in every department, but keep the educational environment intimate by having small sections composed of 10-15 students taught by graduate students