Senior Vice President J.J. Davis and Provost David Wu conducted Thursday's town hall meeting on the strategic plan update. Photos by Ron Aira.
At a town hall last week, Senior Vice President J. J. Davis and Provost David Wu recapped the university-wide strategic plan update from November 2017 and laid out a framework for the resources and financing necessary to execute the second half of that 2014-2024 plan.
The 80-minute presentation in the Hub on the Fairfax Campus on Thursday, accessible here, summarized progress since 2014 while framing a smart growth strategy for the future.
“Over the past eight years, almost 50 percent of the enrollment growth in Virginia came from Mason,” Wu said. “We have to take a pause and think intentionally about how we’re going to grow and how to prepare for that growth. With our rising reputation and surging workforce demand, we will be growing anyway—but how do we grow much more intentionally, in a smart way.”
Davis and Wu encouraged faculty and staff to offer input on how to best execute the 12 goals detailed in the strategic plan. Additional feedback can be submitted here by April 12. The many objectives include recruiting and retaining faculty and staff, providing a high-quality and streamlined student experience for an increasingly diverse student body, offering more experiential learning opportunities, upgrading technology platforms, accelerating research to help enhance the university’s R1 status, and urging more multidisciplinary research and teaching.
Davis noted that Mason has two distinct advantages that many institutions do not. One is greater demand from students to pursue a Mason degree—enrollment is projected to grow by 7,000, including 1,700 online students, by 2024. And, secondly, the university has room to grow, with 216 acres on West Campus.
Davis said the key to the university’s future will be the same as the key to its past—the faculty and staff who have built Mason into a top 100 university nationally and top 300 internationally. Mason is projected to add nearly 1,000 faculty and staff members by 2024.
“It’s all about people. We’re in it together—and it’s a marathon, not a sprint,” Davis said. “We didn’t get here without you, and we’re not going to get ‘there’ without you. We need your engagement…. You know best how to help us get there.”
The largest and most diverse public university in Virginia, Mason has earned the distinction as one of 115 top-tier research universities in the country, and the academic credentials of increasingly diverse incoming classes continue to rise.
The university set a goal to graduate 100,000 students between 2014 and 2024 to fill critical gaps in the region and state workforce. The expected influx of students will require greater utilization of existing resources. Davis said a space efficiency study is underway, and the university also is exploring office and housing options off campus.
Mason’s enrollment growth in the coming years will include students who attend Mason through the ADVANCE partnership with Northern Virginia Community College and from online courses through partnerships with Wiley and the Online Virginia Network. The need for growing the online curriculum is evident—81 percent of seats in Mason online classes are filled; the university offered 729 online courses in fall 2017.
“People always say, ‘How can you be R1 and at the same time provide access to a large population of students?’” Wu said. “The answer is to do it smartly and with strategic partnerships. Most universities pick one path or the other—whether you become a prestigious research university or you become an institution that provides access to education to a large population. Mason is one of the very few institutions that strives to do both.”