Strategic Plan Overview
The Challenge
Attainment of a college education is rooted in the American Dream. However, this dream is in crisis. While more and more jobs require a college education, for many students, a college degree has become increasingly cost-prohibitive, inaccessible, and underperforming.
Today’s students are choosing nontraditional educational paths—balancing life, family, and career while earning their degree. However, traditional education models (with associated financial aid and student support) are not aligned with non-traditional paths. In fact, many students face obstacles and hurdles that block their path to a degree and leave them with credits, student loan debt, few skills and no degree. Equally troubling is that employers are not convinced that a college degree equips graduates with the skills and engagement needed to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment.
Our Response
Bellevue University believes that everyone, regardless of their status or circumstance, should have the opportunity to earn a quality college degree with the skills and engagement needed to open the door to a promising career and a high quality of life.
To address the challenge and ensure all students have a chance at the American Dream, we set an ambitious vision of becoming "A Premier Open Access University in the United States." Our commitment to this vision signals our intent to build an accessible, yet high performing university, which transforms our students into some of the most diverse, skilled, and engaged workers possible.
Unlike many universities that define success in terms of admissions exclusivity and selectivity, we choose to define our success as providing access with performance to many, regardless of their chosen path in life. From our first day of operation in 1966, we were designed to ensure all students had an accessible path to a quality degree. As the University turns fifty and sets the stage for the next fifty years, we aspire to be one of the best (premier) in the higher education access mission—delivering an accessible degree with the skills needed for success—our students need it more than ever.
Our Focus
While the possibilities are endless and the opportunities vast, resources are not. We are focusing our best efforts and limited resources on five strategic goals with four strategic focus areas we believe will accelerate the drive toward attaining our vision.
This plan illustrates how efforts in these critical areas will unfold over the next five years and what performance measures will be used to ensure we are on a path to success.
Our Strategic Objectives
- Objective 1 (Student Success Outcomes): Increase the 6-year (or 150%) graduation rate from 55.4% to 60% by June 30, 2027.
- Objective 2 (Student & Market Growth Outcome): Develop and deliver a diversified key market portfolio that attains a 5% minimum increase in total unique enrolled students each academic year.
- Objective 3 (People Outcomes): Establish a baseline for an organizational engagement pulse instrument for Staff, Faculty, and Adjuncts that will provide indicators of how to maintain or build engagement across the organization.
- Objective 4 (Financial Outcomes): Maintain an annual Composite Financial Index (CFI) between 6.0 and 8.0.
- Objective 5 (Compliance & Regulatory Outcomes): Attain accreditation reaffirmation from the Higher Learning Commission during the 2024-2025 accreditation cycle.
Our Strategic Focus Areas
Area 1: Advancing Student Performance and Success
Area 2: Growing Our Brand and Markets
Area 3: Building Our People and Culture
Area 4: Building Our Infrastructure to Enable Growth and Mission Effectiveness
Core Themes
Bellevue University strives to deliver value on four mutually beneficial levels, from value delivered to individual learners to the value delivered to society through accessible and high-performance education. The following discussion points should assist our leaders, influencers, and stakeholders on conveying the important and critical mission of Bellevue University.
- We are innovators and collaborators in expanding the national workforce by developing a talented, engaged, and diverse population of high performing graduates.
- We design and deliver personalized learning and support that meets students where they are and transform them into confident, capable, and engaged citizens, regardless of how the world changes, careers change or they change.
- We understand labor market needs and design our learning programs to deliver market-aligned, high-impact outcomes.
- We extend our mission nationally by building unique high-value learning networks consisting of community colleges, universities, the military, corporations, and organizations across the nation.
- To carry out our mission and drive on our vision, we focus on four strategic impact areas: Advancing Student Performance and Success; Growing our Brand and Markets; Building our People and Culture; Building our Infrastructure to Enable Growth.
University to Society Value
Central Theme : Expand the educated workforce and increase national competitiveness through high-performance, open access education.
Strategic Narrative
Our national higher education system is comprised of a vast array of over 4,700 degree granting institutions that advance our national competitiveness and our citizens' quality of life. Our unique role in that array is one of open access and that role is often misunderstood. Traditionally, higher education is seen as exclusionary with arbitrary and sometimes unnecessary barriers to entry. Instead, we offer inclusive and accessible real-world learning for all—it's our societal mission and we are fiercely proud of that role.
We are both an innovator and collaborator in expanding the national workforce by developing a talented, engaged, and diverse population of high-performing graduates. We understand labor market needs and design our learning programs to help students achieve their goals and support and improve their economic mobility.
Another role cast for Bellevue is that of a standard bearer for educating students on American Vision and Values and our unique American heritage. Because of our renowned Kirkpatrick Signature Series, our graduates become aware and engaged citizens contributing tens of thousands of hours in service each year in communities across our nation, yet again extending the impact and reach of our education model.
Finally, as an influential innovator and a tuition-driven institution, we are unafraid to break from tradition while continuing to employ sound business practices and disciplined financial management to sustain the university's ability to carry out our mission.
University to Network Value
Central Theme : Address national challenges by building strong relationships that leverage innovation across among partners.
Strategic Narrative
Collectively, our nation spends over $500 billion each year delivering higher education. Even at that expenditure level, our higher education system is being challenged for not providing sufficient access and under-performing on the tasks of developing student skills, knowledge, and engagement needed to advance our national competitiveness and enhance our citizens’ quality of life.
We are visionaries and leaders in addressing those challenges by building unique high-value learning networks consisting of community colleges, universities, the military, corporations, and organizations. Our global learning network brings together some of the best public and private, thought leaders, innovators, educators, and talent-forward organizations seeking to both leverage higher education to advance their performance as well as improve the performance of higher education.
Learning networks we have built include the nation’s largest community college partner network—The Premier Partnership Network, our Corporate Learning Network, as well as our Transnational Learning Network. Participation in our global learning network serves to strengthen partner capabilities, increase growth, and accelerate the reach and impact of our access mission by co-utilizing partner assets and expertise to extend education access across the nation—from the plains of Western Nebraska to inner-city Baltimore; from Southern California to Upstate New York; and from Northern Michigan down to South Texas and everywhere online.
Conversely, we are also strong and engaged partners in existing learning networks, lending vision, innovation, design, and expertise to collaborative initiatives that are mutually beneficial to students, employers, and our communities at large.
University to Business Value
Central Theme : Answer the challenge of developing an educated, engaged, and highly productive workforce for our nation’s organizations and corporations.
Strategic Narrative
With the pace of competition and change accelerating each year, an agile, engaged, and highly skilled workforce is a mandatory requirement for talent forward corporations and organizations with a desire to win in the modern global marketplace.
From the mid-1980s to today, we have been visionaries and leaders in addressing national challenges related to developing an highly-educated and engaged workforce. Whether its partnering with corporations and organizations by providing "education as a benefit" to attract, engage, and retain a high-performance workforce to providing customized "education for development" that closes performance gaps by targeting PowerSkillsTM, our unique and high-value learning networks coupled with our Skills To Performance™ learning model develops students with in-demand skills and an ability to engage and perform, helping organizations of all sizes and industries advance and accelerate their performance and enhance their global competitiveness.
University to Student Value
Central Theme :
Strategic Narrative
We know that for each student a college education is a precursor to achieving the American dream. A college education prepares students for long-term career success and fulfillment today and well into the future as well as makes students perpetually adaptable to change. Our commitment to Real Learning for Real Life means we provide our students with high performance/high outcome learning programs that make them confident, capable and engaged, regardless of how the world changes, careers change or they change. And in the process we provide the nation with a highly talented, diverse, and agile workforce.
With a deep understanding and appreciation that each student is truly unique and diverse in backgrounds, aspirations, readiness, and definitions of success, we design and deliver personalized learning and support that meets students where they and transform them into confident, capable, and engaged citizens, regardless of how the world changes, careers change or they change.
We are highly attentive to student needs, both inside and outside the classroom. Support services for our learning programs are key drivers of student success. Through our coaching model for advisors, with personal attention in our learning labs and library, we help students graduate on time and with manageable debt. To ensure we are providing the right services, we leverage the work of Fred Reichheld of Harvard in measuring Net Promoter Score across our teaching and support services to proactively recognize and address areas for improvement and systemic change. Because we listen to the voice of the student, our scores, learning uptake rates, persistence rates, and graduation rates are continuously improving.
And in the process we provide the nation with a highly talented, diverse, and agile workforce.
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