President Cudd and the President’s Executive Council leveraged learning from the entire strategic planning process to craft four strategic imperatives that describe the big steps we must take to achieve our 2030 vision.
These draft strategic imperatives are to be approved by the PSU Board of Trustees in fall 2024.
- Create clear pathways for our region’s learners to achieve their educational goals and provide a strong return on investment.
- Ensure that academic pathways are clearly defined, tied to future employment, and that the costs of tuition and fees are clearly communicated.
- Proactively recruit and prepare students from Oregon’s diverse high schools, community colleges, and rural areas, fully leveraging Oregon’s funding model and ensuring PSU meets labor market needs.
- Identify and invest in high-demand undergraduate, graduate, and certificate programs that enhance the professional growth of mid-career and advanced learners.
- Provide research-based and engaged learning experiences that equip our students to be the world’s future problem solvers.
- Lead the Pacific Northwest in serving minoritized students and boosting the college success rate.
- Provide students a culturally engaged academic experience through broad-based, high-impact, and responsive practices that deliver quality education and create a sense of belonging.
- Strategically recruit and retain diverse faculty, staff, and graduate students.
- Improve persistence, retention, and graduation rates for low-income, first-generation, and minoritized students.
- Apply data analytics to improve the effectiveness of student success and completion initiatives that focus on supporting underrepresented students.
- Support and empower our employees and operations.
- Develop effective administrative structures that allow employees to focus on core job responsibilities that are in service to our students.
- Invest in professional development and provide a competitive, comprehensive compensation plan for employees.
- Apply data-informed assessment to improve academic, research, and administrative functions.
- Anchor decision-making in the values and humanity of those impacted by including them in the process and ensuring operational changes adhere to PSU’s Guiding Commitments.
- Drive Portland’s economic, social, and cultural resurgence.
- Build robust public impact-focused and interdisciplinary research partnerships with local and regional industries, entrepreneurs, communities, nonprofits, and public agencies that tackle complex societal issues.
- Provide students vital connections with regional employers through experiential learning, research opportunities, and mentorship to open opportunities for career exploration and skill development, and emphasize the vital role of graduate education in driving our research enterprise.
- Collaborate with local and regional arts and culture organizations, businesses, and entrepreneurs to enhance PSU as a source of creativity and innovation.
- Provide expertise for and convene elected officials, civil servants, and civic leaders to help solve Portland’s vexing social and economic problems, re-establishing the City as a model for urban renaissance.
- Create vibrant and sustainable community spaces that foster connection, learning, and well-being, strengthening PSU’s unique identity as an urban research university.
- Position PSU as the gateway to Portland for talented individuals seeking a network and opportunity to grow meaningful careers in this beautiful, open, and creative city in the Pacific Northwest.