FACULTY
No
This is a long-winded version of "get more students" - and full of meaningless jargon: "develop cwu's next generation marketing, recruitment, and campus visitation plans that expand our first-year student market share into new geographical areas while maintaining current market share." Wow, that's our #1 Mission/Strategy. Utterly meaningless. As is typical for a CWU document, it's vaguely aspirational while providing no concrete plans or goals (again, beyond "more students". The Strategic Enrollment Plan (SEP) seems to be anything but strategic. In the introduction it claims the plan is "intentional, aspirational and informed by data and analyses". Aspirational, maybe, but I can't find any evidence of intention nor of it being informed. Much of the data is preliminary, and nowhere in the document are the modeling assumptions explained -- certainly not in the section labeled "Underlying Assumptions". One statement in the section on "Underlying Assumptions" is that the SEP is built on "aspirations we hold for our students and faculty". Aspirations, i.e. hopes, are what this plan seems to be all about. The projected growth in this plan is just a bunch of made up numbers. Nowhere is it explained how those numbers are derived or why they might make sense for the population of Washington. This type of modeling is incredibly irresponsible, as it is based on hopes rather than on data and science. Some of the strategies are pure fiction. One strategy is to increase the retention rate. But there is zero data in this plan telling us why students are not retained or what we can do to address this. The strategies mentioned in the plan seem to apply to helping students with academic success, but I don't think we know that academic success is the barrier to retention. I suspect (but don't know, but then, neither do you or the authors of this plan) that financial problems are a greater barrier to retention. In fact, financial problems are also a barrier to academic success -- when students are working 40 hours a week to support themselves, it is all but impossible for them to be successful with a 15 credit load, which represents 15 hours in class per week plus 30 hours of out of class work per week. In addition to this, the housing crunch in the Ellensburg area has left many students struggling to find a place to live. Nowhere in the plan are
FACULTY
No
FINAL DRAFT 2/11/2019 Page 50
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