In a virtual town hall held on the afternoon of November 19, Stevens’ Strategic Planning Steering Committee unveiled additional details about the formation process for Stevens’ 2022-2032 Strategic Plan. The presentation offered a look at the process and timeline for the plan’s development, with a focus on the goals of each of the sub-committees which constitute the Steering Committee.
A recording of the town hall, as well as the slides used in the presentation, were made available to Stevens students on November 30 through the Strategic Plan development intranet page. The page also contains a link to a community survey for the plan open for submission until Wednesday, December 8, a timeline of the planning process, and a list of the members of the Steering Committee, which was previously announced via email by President Farvardin. The survey is aimed towards soliciting feedback from the Stevens community on what goals they deem most important for the committee to prioritize in the next 10-year plan.
Members of the Steering Committee include the Chair, Dr. Jianmin Qu (Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs), as well as Cindy Chin (Associate Provost), Sara Klein (Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs), several professors and teaching faculty, and others.
The last 10-year plan, 2012-2022, titled “The Future. Ours to Create” by Stevens, served as Stevens’ guide that saw large growth in metrics such as student body size, alumni engagement, financial stability, and campus resources. The next plan is intended to maintain this momentum and further improve Stevens’ educational quality and academic prestige over the next decade.
Notable upcoming stages in the process include more town halls with alumni and the Stevens community through January 2022, the finalization of the project’s major goals, metrics, initiatives in late February 2022, and the completion of the preliminary draft of the plan in late March 2022. Currently, the strategic plan’s final approval by the Board of Trustees is scheduled for June 2022.
Each of the Steering Committee’s sub-committees is responsible for a specialized domain of the comprehensive Strategic Plan, and are named according to the broad goals they would like to see represented in its final form. The sub-committees that were presented during the town hall were Building Internal Community, Innovating Undergraduate Education, Transforming Graduate Education, Empowering Scholarship, Discovery, and Invention, Strengthening Alumni Engagement and Building External Communities, and University Infrastructure.
The Innovating Undergraduate Education committee revealed several tentative goals for Stevens undergraduate education in the next ten years. A revamped curriculum will include a new set of “Stevens Core” classes, which will aim to provide all students with key communication and technology-related skills, and more flexibility in pursuing outcomes like minors and double majors. Another goal is expanding the number of research opportunities available to undergraduate students. Stevens also aims to “reimagine” the co-op program to be more accommodating to schedules and more available across majors. Goals for the undergraduate community include increasing school pride and improving student interaction and engagement through initiatives like the addition of living-learning communities in residence halls.
The committee members detailed other major focuses of the subcommittees: the development of the community and culture of the university with a focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and sustainability (DEI+S) initiatives; improving financial resources by increasing alumni contributions, launching a new capital campaign, and establishing further partnerships with external organizations, industry, and government; and upgrading the campus with further technological integration and environmentally-friendly improvements.
The Committee noted that the information presented is subject to change given the ongoing nature of the planning process and the importance of feedback from the Stevens community.
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