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Priority four: Ensure institutional sustainability

A group of men wearing protective eye wear stand next to a machine

Priority four

Ensure Institutional Sustainability — Embrace sustainable campus operations that ensure wise stewardship of our resources. 

Objectives

  • Adopt agile and lean business practices and systems that ensure efficiency, maintain a focus on solutions, and meet or exceed industry standards. 
  • Invest in and expand our operational focus on the efficient use of energy, reduction of waste and consumption, sustainable development, sustainability, and environmental responsibility. 
  • Strategically invest in and rebalance our portfolio of educational offerings to meet current and future learner, employer and societal needs while remaining accessible and affordable. 
  • Foster a culture of continuous improvement and informed risk-taking through reinvestment of funding into either new programs that create impact or into ideas that create efficiencies. 
  • Implement strategies for new and diversified revenue streams with a focus on enhancing advancement and fundraising activities and identifying mutually beneficial partnerships with other organizations to further the goals of CMU. 

SMART goals

  • Foster a university-wide culture of continuous improvement with a focus on:  
    • Creating a system to review policies and processes that result in inefficiency or stymie innovation, and appoint a cross-divisional team to carry it out.  
      • Measure: Number of policies reviewed, changed or deleted and new processes created by August 2025.  
    • University stakeholders expanding the portfolio of new non-traditional educational offerings.  
      • Measure: Initiate tracking and transcription systems to count learners pursuing credentials and the number of offerings successfully launched by April 2025. 
    • Pursuing additional opportunities for partnerships with other organizations to further the goals of CMU.  
      • Measure: Develop the plan to generate and evaluate opportunities by August 2025. 
    • Creating and implementing a comprehensive technology plan to identify and prioritize academic and operational needs.  
      • Measure: Develop the plan, with annual goals, by August 2025.
  • Review, clarify, and revise division roles, responsibilities and organizational structure with a focus on removing barriers, improving efficiency and accountability, and enhancing customer service.  
    • Measure: Number of internal processes mapped/reviewed and identified for enhancements by August 2025. 
  • Initiate a comprehensive review of programs and strategies targeted towards student retention.  
    • Measure: Establish the criteria to evaluate return on investment, and impact by June 2025. 
  • Continue to develop and implement the planning phase strategies for a comprehensive capital campaign. This includes efforts for staffing, technology, university priorities, prospect identification and qualification, case statement development, etc.  
    • Measure Year One: Determine the feasibility of the campaign and next steps by August 2024.
    • Measure Year Two: Finalize and implement campaign strategies while remaining flexible and nimble to integrate the vision and ideas of the new president by June 2025.

2024 Progress

Successes

  • Established a policy review governance structure and prioritized policies for cyclical review. 
  • Overhauled CMU’s administrative policies page to make policies searchable and easier to find and understand. 
  • Adopted a new software platform to improve the process for reserving space on campus for events. 
  • Achieved a two percentage-point increase in first-to-second-year retention rates, moving from 72.9% to 74.9% retention. 
  • Surpassed fundraising goals and marked CMU’s best-ever year for philanthropic giving by securing more than $29.5 million in contributions. 
  • Implemented a new donor engagement solution and designated additional resources to increase advancement team staffing. 

Ongoing efforts

  • Continuing to review and update or eliminate policies that do not improve efficiency or bolster innovation.
  • Compiling a comprehensive list of non-credit options offered across the university, including those from academic colleges, Innovation and Online, and non-academic units.
  • Developing technology plans to support all divisions of the university.
  • Collecting organizational structure data from all divisions, including synopses of office responsibilities.
  • Conducting a university-wide inventory to capture all retention efforts underway at CMU; developing an assessment tool to determine the return on investment of all efforts.
  • Planning and preparing for the next CMU comprehensive campaign.