Opportunities and Priorities

We want our campus to be a welcoming place for all students. Our work in this area has so far included:

• Streamlining operations to ensure that administrative and academic processes are effective while enhancing communication and reporting structures. We are also implementing new communications tools to make it easier for students to find resources. 
• Increasing food service amenities, improving the diversity of food options, and addressing food deserts on our campus by adding vending machines to our buildings and increasing the outside spaces for eating and sitting.
• Enhancing our work to create a sense of belonging on campus, including by fostering campus traditions and community-building opportunities. 
• Revamping and increasing student support through student services in advising, Title IX, Student Disability Resources, and our Health and Wellness services.

Increasing enrollment is a significant priority. Our work in this area so far includes:

• Launching a new marketing campaign.
• Revamp the role of the Vice President of Student Affairs to include enrollment management.
• Enhancing reports and templates to communicate progress on how we are meeting retention and enrollment goals and providing training for their effective use.
• Leveraging digital degree planners to build optimal schedules based on student course needs, improving predictive enrollment models, utilizing waitlists, and running classes at enrollment capacity.
• Realigning first-year and transfer orientation to align with registration.
• Aligning our curriculum with all four neighboring community colleges and building out the Monterey Bay College Pathways Partnership to improve visibility for transfers.

Delivering a high-quality academic experience is at the core of our work at CSUMB. Recent focus areas include:

• Sustaining peer-mentoring resources and expanding them to transfer students.
• Implementing more high-impact practices for Internships and Career Services.
• Implementing the Long-Range Academic Master Planning process.
• Working with faculty to develop an Academic Technology Plan to improve remote and in-person learning opportunities.

A strong community—internal and external—is essential to the health of the university. Here’s what we’re focusing on:

• Supporting economic development through business incubation and entrepreneurial support.
• Strengthening our population health through service and research from our thriving healthcare programs and medical students.
• Partnering with K-12 schools to incubate innovative programs for young students. 
• Increasing our focus on faculty and staff retention by revising tenure and promotion procedures, developing a center for faculty professional development, and creating a Staff Council.
• Expanding and refining our curriculum to support regional needs, like with our new Bachelor of Science in Agribusiness Supply Chain Management, Mechatronics, Ag and Soil Science.

A stable financial base is critical to ensuring the university’s future. We are:

• Creating a multi-year budget process; building out dashboards to help staff with budget development, planning, and management; improving data integration; and working to better model the cost of instruction as part of a project between the Divisions of Academic Affairs and Administration and Finance.
• Launching a new Budget Committee to provide input on major budgetary decisions and ensure that we have transparent communication related to the health of our financial footprint.
• Developing a new budget/financial model based upon Responsibility Center Management (RCM) concepts, allowing us to align budget priorities to university strategic priorities.
• Expanding and modernizing data warehouses to provide enhanced data analysis tools for decision making.

Inclusion must be a central priority in all that we do, from hiring faculty and staff to supporting our students. We are putting our values into practice by:

• Revising hiring and other practices to align with current national best practices to ensure equality.
• Instituting processes to address the disparate retention and graduation pressures that affect students based on race and gender.
• Analyzing all data sets according to gender and race to ensure that we have equality and inclusivity in all major university initiatives.

We have three primary goals for 2030:

• Reducing greenhouse gasses and achieving carbon neutrality;
• Planting 2,030 trees;
• Diverting 90 percent of waste from landfill.

To achieve those goals, we are:

• Assessing current carbon footprint and processes on campus to determine ways to reduce greenhouse gasses.
• Holding planting events on campus with a goal to plant 2,030 trees by 2030.
• Assessing best practices to divert more waste from the landfill, including implementation of SB 1383 (reduction of organic food waste in landfills)
• Working with vendors to eliminate single use plastics on campus.