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University of Puget Sound 2018-28 Strategic Plan: Leadership for a Changing World

University of Puget Sound enters the coming decade in a strong position. We are a stable and well-managed institution, ideally located in the Pacific Northwest, where the ethos of innovation, possibility, and individual determination is very much a part of our campus culture. As we look to the challenges and opportunities of the future, we will build on our strengths to guide our national liberal arts college to its next level of distinction and success.

Throughout 2017-18, the university—its students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents and trustees—worked together to develop Leadership for a Changing World, a student-centered strategic plan guided by our vision and values, built on our mission and educational goals, and supported by a commitment to do all that we can to make a Puget Sound education ever more meaningful, relevant, accessible, and distinctive. Endorsed by the board of trustees in October 2018, the plan guides our work over the coming decade, inspiring us to be bold and forward-looking in the delivery of our residential liberal arts education to meet the needs of this and future generations of students.

Download the 2018-28 Strategic Plan

 

Overview

Over many decades, University of Puget Sound has benefited from disciplined and visionary leadership that has shaped the institution’s future and built upon the strengths of its past, while responding with creativity to the challenges of the present day.

The opportunity
In a rapidly changing environment for higher education, Puget Sound is well-positioned to adapt and be increasingly innovative in offering a challenging and enriching liberal arts education that produces graduates with skills, experiences, and attributes that are highly impactful, relevant and marketable.

The challenge
We compete for students in a dynamic and crowded higher educational market where shifts in demographics, affordability, government regulation, technology, the political environment, and other areas require us to be increasingly strategic and adaptive in not only responding to but anticipating change.

Our response
For Puget Sound to successfully meet the challenges and expectations of higher education, we must be bold and forward-looking in the delivery of our education and in meeting the needs of this and future generations of students. Each of the initiatives in which we will engage in the coming decade must demonstrate the potential to deliver a distinctive university experience, leverage our strategic advantages, support two or more strategic goals, and position the university and our students for long-term success.

Leadership for a Changing World is based on five key strategic goals that affirm and enrich our mission as a national liberal arts college while simultaneously fostering innovative opportunities to advance institutional excellence, academic distinction, and student success.

What will we achieve?
We will become ever more the institution of choice for students seeking a dynamic and engaging liberal arts education, preparing all of our students for postgraduate success in a highly dynamic economy marked by an accelerating pace of change and providing opportunities for advanced study in alignment with our mission. We will fully live our responsibility as an intellectual asset in the broader world, contributing our leadership and vision to advancing civic discourse and addressing the issues of the times in which we live. We will strengthen not only access to but graduation from Puget Sound, and diversify our sources of revenue to ensure our ability to reach our goals.

Realization of these goals will be supported by a series of operational initiatives designed to re-imagine faculty and staff engagement; align efforts to support equity, diversity, and inclusion; create institutional and curricular structures to respond with agility to social, environmental, and technological changes; and develop comprehensive, interconnected long-term approaches in enrollment management, financial and physical resource management, constituent engagement and fundraising, and institutional marketing and communications.

Goals

We will strengthen not only access to but graduation from Puget Sound, provide opportunities for advanced study in alignment with our mission, and diversify our sources of revenue to ensure our ability to reach our goals. In so doing, we commit to fully living our responsibility as an intellectual asset in the broader world, contributing leadership and vision in advancing civic discourse and addressing the issues of the times in which we live.

1. Advance institutional excellence, academic distinction, and student success

We will advance educational excellence and our academic and institutional distinctions to ensure that all students have high-impact engagement that leads to deep learning and strong educational outcomes. We will enhance student recruitment and retention, and promote the visibility and reputation of Puget Sound.

Key Initiatives

  • Develop a distinctive undergraduate model of education to ensure all students graduate prepared for success
  • Increase connections between graduate and undergraduate programs--and develop new graduate programs in areas of university strength and market demand
  • Consider the development of more flexible pathways to graduation
  • Enhance our strengths in health sciences
  • Develop comprehensive, integrated plans for aggregate annual undergraduate and graduate enrollment, with a goal of 2,800 students
  • Develop comprehensive operational plans for the cocurricular program, including residential and Greek life, academics, and athletic programs
  • Consider the development of new or enhanced signature Puget Sound centers of distinction

2. Enrich our learning environment through increased diversity, inclusion, and access

We will more fully develop a welcoming learning environment through initiatives that increase and support equity, inclusion, access to, and successful graduation from Puget Sound.

Key Initiatives

  • Align institutional efforts to increase and support equity, diversity, and inclusion
  • Develop the Legacies Project, a university-wide set of activities, practices, and curricular initiatives that will empower students, faculty, staff, alumni, and members of the broader community to understand and learn from the diverse histories that have shaped our region, and to acknowledge the role that the university has played
  • Continue efforts to substantially increase, across all measures, the diversity of students, faculty, and staff

3. Support and inspire our faculty and staff

We will support and inspire our faculty and staff members through the promotion of their well-being, professional development, retention, work with students and engagement with each other.

Key Initiatives

  • Examine the nature and definitions of faculty work in a changing landscape for higher education
  • Further develop a faculty and staff total compensation and professional development program
  • Further establish Puget Sound as a great place to work

4. Enhance engagement with the community, including promotion of environmental justice and sustainability

We will more deeply engage with and learn from our local and regional communities to strengthen the quality of a Puget Sound education and our role as a community asset. We will define key actions to which the university will commit to advance environmental justice and sustainability. And we will work closely with alumni to build their lifelong engagement with the university and each other, and to leverage their ability to mentor and guide current students.

Key Initiatives

  • Better coordinate, integrate, and support the university’s community engagement efforts
  • Develop and strengthen partnerships, including corporate partnerships
  • Update institutional goals and commitments related to our long-standing commitment to environmental justice and sustainability as a community-based concern
  • Increase alumni engagement with each other and the university, and in their mentorship of students

5. Pursue entrepreneurial and other opportunities to fully leverage and expand our assets

We will pursue entrepreneurial opportunities consistent with our mission, and will promote the accessibility, affordability and value of a Puget Sound education, strengthen the institution and our financial position, and enhance our ability to anticipate and respond to technological and social change.

Key Initiatives

  • Maximize avenues for revenue generation to strengthen institutional vitality and financial stability
  • Enhance opportunities for students to engage in project-based learning, service learning, clinical and field placements, and other community-based experiences that strengthen their preparation for technological and social change

Educational Goals

Future Loggers will graduate with a deeper and more thoughtful understanding of not just the value of their liberal arts education, but of its utility in the world beyond graduation. Students will be more deeply engaged in their education; develop a coherent, integrated path throughout their curricular and cocurricular experiences; demonstrate an informed and thoughtful sense of justice and a commitment to ethical action; and graduate better prepared for work and life beyond college. Students will display a propensity for being more engaged in the workplace, sustaining lifelong well-being and adaptability as they imagine, create, and serve the future.

A student completing the undergraduate curriculum will be able to:

  • think critically and creatively;
  • communicate clearly and effectively, both orally and in writing; and
  • develop and apply knowledge both independently and collaboratively.

They will have developed:

  • familiarity with diverse fields of knowledge and the ability to draw connections among them;
  • solid grounding in the field of the student’s choosing;
  • understanding of self, others, and influence in the world; and
  • an informed and thoughtful sense of justice and a commitment to ethical action.

Graduate students will benefit from components of this framework as they pursue high-impact learning in clinical practicums, fieldwork, and teaching and counseling placements, guided by key mentors, and using e-portfolios to support their professional development and training. Enhanced integration of undergraduate and graduate programs, both current and new, including greater attention to inter-professional preparation, will prepare educators, health care practitioners, and other professionals for service to their dynamically changing fields.

We believe that the Leadership for a Changing World strategic plan provides Puget Sound with a distinctive means of achieving our vision to challenge and support our students as they become broadly and deeply educated lifelong learners, prepared to create and serve the future and to become the world’s next generation of visionary leaders.