Hey guys, sorry for the long pause in posts. With two startups & a pending car insurance claim I've been dealing with, it's been tough to find the time, so I thought I'd share this post today since I have a few minutes.

Let's take a look over the SFA strategic plan for 2015-2023.

That takes you to the main planning page, which to be honest, isn't well laid out or much coherent.

For comparison, here's the old SFA Strategic plan for 2008-2013.

And our buddies over in Stephenville have put together this strategic plan for Tarleton for 2015-2020 and their old one from 2010-2015.


Now that we have that covered, I'll tackle specific topics, but take the time to look through the plans and let me know your thoughts. The reason I compared Tarleton & SFA is their relative similarity in rural college profile & Tarleton's ability to overcome said profile for recent growth. Not that growth is the end all be all of college measurements.


So for SFA's current strategic plan, it has a few goals.

• Over-arching goal: Transformative Experiences for SFA students
• Foundational Goal: Meaningful & Sustainable Enrollment Growth
• Supporting Goal: Attracting & Supporting High-Quality Faculty & Staff
• Supporting Goal: Fostering Academic & Co-Curricular Innovation
• Supporting Goal: Re-defining University Culture
• Supporting Goal: Increasing connections

I'll end the post here and start putting some of my thoughts in the comments so this thread is more coherent & not too long. I definitely have some opinions to share.

Let me just say I'll try not to be entirely negative and while I'm no expert in University Strategy, our 2015-2023 strategy looks terrible to me. It seems like we bought a few self help books and proceeded to play bullsh$* bingo on our planning teams. Seriously, I looked to see if there were updated versions/presentations on the 2015-2023 strategy, because this one is so lacking in detail or concrete objectives. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, because the above link was the only version I found.

The over-arching goal: Provide a transformative experience for SFA students. It's college, I'm pretty sure a transformative experience is built in.

Let's get onto the Foundational Goal: Sustained enrollment growth. I think this has been our favorite critique of the current state of SFA on this thread. We're not looking for exponential growth, but some growth is needed, especially given population increases & prior university initiatives to increase growth.

While we do need growth, my concern is that our path for getting there is very, very vague. Take Tarleton's 2011 plan for a good example of what we should do(first off, Tarleton spent some time & effort, as evidenced by the production value of said plan. It looks nice, it isn't formatted like a word document.) For every strategic initiative, Tarleton's defined what success looks like. As they say, that which is measured, improves. Or, in SFA's case, as my old boss when I worked for the government used to say "If we measure it, then we'll know how bad we're doing, so don't measure it."

Now onto the foundational goals, I think attracting & retaining quality professors is a must. SFA's finance department had some excellent teacher's while I was there, and outside of interships, I could wipe the floor with graduates of any other Texas universities finance programs in terms of knowledge & applicable skills. Most of the professors I knew liked the laid back atmostphere of Nacogdoches, which is great for families & focusing on teaching vs research. I think that likely extends to more SFA departments, even though our rural location is likely deterring some professors who would otherwise join.

As for the other foundational goals. I'm not particularly impressed by 2 of them. Fostering innovation is great, but they're talking about getting flexible furniture in classrooms. Classroom comfort might be necessary & helpful, but it's not really that innovative. Innovation is all about iteration.

Redefining University culture is not a bad idea, but they seemed to be focused on improving employee moral. I'd be interested in someone defining SFA's culture as an institution and then making that a point of pride among students. Personally, I've always seen our culture as "a teaching university that trains blue collar students for white collar careers". While that's not 100% accurate, I do think a vast majority of our students have a strong work ethic typical of that reminds me of great blue collar workers. I think that's true about Texas in general and applies to our students as well.

I do like the increasing connections goal: Honestly, it might be the best in the entire document. It's subpoints state that SFA needs to do a better job of fostering connections with alumni, local government, corporate partners, & K-12/2 year colleges. Without going to far into detail, becuase this could be a post of it's own, I whole heartedly agree.

I know this has been a long winded post & highly opinionated, but I simply did not have time to write a short letter.

TLDR: SFA's current strategic plan is short on substance, long on 10 cent words, IMO.

Thoughts? Also, feel free to pull in other excellent examples of Strategic Plans from other universities for us to compare with.

Tall,

I think your critique is perfectly on target. You've got to some of the points I've been making for years. We (SFA) have not been specific enough in our planning and poor in execution. "Some" on the Board of Regents have been lulled into believing that the marketing firm that we hired would result in growth just based on some recommendations. None of this has come to fruition. I communicate in bullet points for simplicity's sake. I FULLY REALIZE that these are not simple issues. Here's my guess at the high points on what can be done to move SFA back to a growth mode.

1) Continue to emphasize academic competitiveness. I know it sounds counter to the end goal but I believe SFA needs to raise it's entrance standards again. Why? Entrance standards are a key measuring stick for what/how a high school junior or senior views the school they "might" attend. Right now our entrance is about equal to or slightly more difficult than --- Lamar, Tarleton, Angelo St.. About the same as Sam. Do you see a theme? Yes we are now compared to schools that 25 years ago we wouldn't have been. When I applied to college (1979) SFA was considered just a notch below the big guys. Now we are not even in the conversation.

2) Focus fundraising and endowment efforts towards the sciences: Environmental, Engineering, Physics and Chemistry. The core sciences is where the job growth will be in the next 25 years. Emphasize our strength in forestry and agriculture.

3) Rebuild the reputation of our once highly rated business school. Our undergrad accounting and finance schools are still considered some of the best. I think it would be interesting if we tried something different at the MBA level. For example: MBA that was combined with a environmental science or forestry bent for business leaders in the natural resources area. Just a thought.... I'm sure it's been tossed around and probably comes down to money!


Just a few thoughts for Sawmill readers....

Agreed.

If you take a look at Texas, or Tech, or even Tarleton, they are very specific in what they want to accomplish.

Hell, Texas even quoted Yogi Berra.

Quote:

---

If you don't know where you're going, you might not get there. ~Yogi Berra

---

That's what I'm worried about, I'm not sure our current board of Regents & admin know where we are or where we are going.

• I totally agree on the academic excellence piece. Per my professors when I was at UT, UT wants the top researchers in the world, they don't care if they can teach. We're a teaching college and in my opinion, we should position ourselves as the "missing middle" in Texas higher education. We're not Texas/UT Dallas/A&M focused on research, but we're the best option for quality kids who aren't the standouts in the top of their class. UT Dallas is an excellent example, they focused on academics and now they're one of the top schools in the state. IMO, they put out some of the best graduates, but weren't so research focused that you couldn't meet with a professor.

I'd love to see us as the leading "mid tier" university in the state.

• On the fundraising efforts, I agree that we should focus towards the sciences, but I'd also include the health sciences as well. We've got a great speech therapy school & nursing too. As boomers continue to retire, there's going to continue to be huge job growth in that space. This partially goes back to point 1 as well, but I think our emphasis as a teaching university with a focus on academics should give us a huge advantage over both research & typical institutions. Being able to drop by and chat with your professor is a huge deal. Professors who are excellent teachers create quality professionals who can dive right into their first job in their field. The physicists, engineers, etc at the big schools will go into research, work on giant projects at the biggest firms. We have a chance to turn out quality employees for all the other firms & projects. Follow the steel mini mill model,imo.

Although, I should point out that back in the day we had a top scientist come out of SFA.

• I agree on the business school. I think our finance & accounting programs are still great(atleast they were in 2011). I think we need to do a better job of connecting our finance & accounting students with internships in large metros. That will create a snowball where in 5-7 years they'll be in a management role & can mentor current SFA grads & hire them at their firms.
As far as the rest of the business school, I think they should focus on adding a highly desired skill to help our students get jobs. For marketing, that could be SEO, Content Marketing, or Social Media expertise. For management, we should have focuses on logistics, real estate, etc. Other skills that make them more marketable. I agree on the MBA, I think an environmental or forestry track could give them a great edge. Partner with an oil company and add an energy track. MBA programs across the country are taking a hit, because the perception is they are just a gateway to a management job, not an actual necessity. At UT Austin, they've focused on creating shorter, 1 year master's programs that give you a marketable skillset. That includes a technology commercialization program, IT Management, & business analytics. That may not be the answer for SFA, but other schools are dealing with similar problems and looking at new solutions. Perhaps we could look at business programs that fit neatly with our other competencies. Masters of Hospital Finance, Masters of School Finance, Master's of Health Administration, etc. Those could fit under the Business school.

Overall, I think we're lacking vision at the top, and that includes the President's office and the BoR. Several things point to that IMO, from the lack of a real strategic plan, to hiring a marketing firm that rolled out a widespread billboard effort to attract students who spend most of their time on social media.

However, I don't think this staleness is irreversible, but I'm afraid that in 10 years, it might be. Everyone has spent the past 10 years leaning on the rapid growth in Texas to expand & improve their colleges. That's why we see Tarleton catching up, Texas & A&M rising rapidly in global rankings, UT Dallas & UTSA adding huge numbers of students. SFA's made some progress, but I'm afraid it wasn't enough to keep up. The STEM school is great, the Nursing programs has improved by leaps & bounds, but we need a better vision from the top down to stay relevant.