Office of Institutional Effectiveness

Strategic Planning

 

Kingsborough Community College's Strategic Planning process is crucial in ensuring that the College is always working toward its mission of offering high quality, affordable, innovative, student-centered programs of study that prepare graduates for transfer and the workforce. The process involves taking a look at the history, past, and future of the College and determining the needs of our diverse students, faculty, and staff, and using that look to set goals and develop strategies that will meet those needs.

Strategic Planning starts with the strategic roadmap of the City University of New York. The newest version of CUNY’s Strategic Plan is CUNY Lifting New York, which was approved in Summer 2023. This document provides direction to the University system as a whole and ensures that each individual College is working alongside the other Colleges to ensure student success.

College-wide Strategic Plan

In Spring 2022, Kingsborough Community College approved its current College-wide Strategic Plan, which is used to guide the work of all areas in the College and ensure that each area of the College is working together to meet our goals.

In addition to this over-arching Strategic Plan, the College also has more targeted plans which work alongside the Strategic Plan and focus on specific aspects of the College’s function. The Academic Plan specifically focuses on academic aspects of the College, and the Vision 2023 Enrollment Plan specifically focuses on streamlining and enhancing work related to recruitment, admissions, and enrollment.

Strategic Plan 2021-2025 CUNY Lifting New York: Our New Strategic Plan KCC 2020-2025 Academic Plan KCC 2023-2027 Enrollment Plan

Strategic Plans work together best when they have clear alignment between them. The Academic Plan and Strategic Plan both have large amounts of alignment with the CUNY Strategic Roadmap, which helps them determine how KCC will go about implementing the CUNY Strategic Roadmap in a way that still supports Kingsborough’s institutional mission. These alignment charts show how each plan aligns with the goals and initiatives laid out in the Strategic Roadmap, and with the metrics used to measure progress on the Strategic Roadmap

It is also important that plans within the College show alignment with each other. Here is a chart showing how the Academic Plan aligns with the overarching KCC Strategic Plan:

The development of the College’s current Strategic Plan took place over the course of many years, and was punctuated by the shift to remote work as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. During this work, three major themes arose that were determined to be crucial to the College’s success:

Coordination, which involves ensuring that the various structures of programs, services, and policies work together to serve the mission of the College as effectively as possible

Collaboration, which involves working together across the boundaries of the College’s organizational chart.

Communication, which involves ensuring that information is easily accessible and keeps students, faculty, and staff up to date as services, policies, or circumstances change.

With these three key themes in mind, the Strategic Planning Committee developed the Strategic Framework for its Strategic Plan, which consisted of five Key Pillars:

  • Student Success
  • Operational Excellence
  • Governance and Planning
  • Community and Communication
  • Workforce Development and Strategic Partnerships

After extensive surveys and discussions, definitions of these areas were developed, incorporating feedback and input from surveys and discussion groups to determine how the College defines and achieves each area. These definitions then became the Areas of Emphasis of the Strategic Plan. See the Executive Summary of the Strategic Plan, with the Key Pillars and Areas of Emphasis, here.

From there, the College needed to determine how it would go about achieving each Areas of Emphasis. Through more surveys, discussions, focus groups, and retreats, the Strategic Planning Committee developed a list of recommended Key Strategies and Initiatives that addressed each Area of Emphasis. The Key Strategies were then shared with the heads of divisions for their feedback.

The result of this work is a comprehensive Strategic Plan Implementation Plan, consisting of the 5 Key Pillars, 18 Areas of Emphasis, and 62 Implementation Strategies. See the Implementation Plan, with the Key Pillars, Areas of Emphasis, and Implementation Strategies here.

 

Members of the Strategic Planning Committee

The Strategic Planning Committee is one of the standing committees of the College Council. They meet regularly to review the strategic and financial plans for the College and provide guidance and feedback to the College on how to best ensure that its strategic plans are implemented effectively.

The 2022-23 Strategic Planning Committee consists of the following members

Daniel Kane (Chair)

Dominic Wetzel (Secretary)

Ed Rios

Anna Rozenboym

Judith Cohen

Tyronne Johnson

Dawn Levy

Aba Agolli (Non-voting member)

Colleen Davy (Non-voting member)

*Non-voting members are not members of the College Council (cannot vote during committee meetings) but are viewed as full committee members.
The committee members will change at the next College Council meeting on June 6th when some member's terms expire, and council members may be appointed to a different standing committee.
 

Assessing Progress on the Strategic Plan

Once the Implementation Strategies were devised, the next step is to ensure that the proposed strategies are implemented, and that they are effective achieving their desired outcomes related to each area of emphasis.

The assessment of the Strategic Plan relies heavily on the three themes identified during the Strategic Planning Committee: Collaboration, Coordination, and Communication. Many of the key strategies require collaboration between multiple divisions, or include contributions from multiple divisions, and thus require significant communication and coordination between units. To assist in achieving these goals,

the Office of Institutional Effectiveness plays a key role in collecting and sharing updates from the divisions, as well as conducting assessments to measure the overall impact of these key strategies and initiatives on the College as a whole. 

The Office engages in a variety of projects geared toward tracking progress and assessing the effectiveness of the College’s work related to its Strategic Plan. Some key components of this work include:

  • Reporting on College-wide key performance indicators, such as student enrollment, retention, graduation, and post-graduation outcomes
  • Conducting College-wide assessments, such as the Faculty and Staff Satisfaction Survey
  • Working with individual units or divisions to conduct assessments of specific strategies and initiatives that align with the Strategic Plan

An overview of the assessment approach was presented at Spring 2023 Convocation. The slides are available here.

The Office of Institutional Effectiveness will use annual reporting from units and divisions to provide regular updates to the College on how progress is being made to address the Strategic Plan. Those updates can be found here.

Fall 2022 Strategic Plan Updates