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University Goals

Learn about the goals set by the President's Cabinet and division leaders.

President with group supporting runners at Monte 5K
Opportunities and Priorities

Each year, the President's Cabinet and the leadership teams for each division set goals and key outcomes to set priorities across the university.

2024-25 University-Wide Goals: The Strength of Us

Explore the six goals driving our work in the current academic year. Each division sets its own divisional goals with outcomes and metrics that ensure alignment with the university-wide plan. 

Goal 1: Increase and sustain enrollment growth with a focus on improving student experience

Outcomes

  1. Continue growing our enrollment management structure from the ground up to ensure sustainable and managed growth for the university.
  2. Invest in campus infrastructure that will support enrollment growth, statewide economic labor trends and future areas of enrollment growth.
  3. Continue to implement new brand and launch the “Strength of Us” marketing campaign.
  4. Assess the core academic portfolio and continue to explore degree and academic programs that meet current and future market and labor demands and needs and support increasing FTEs.

Goal 2: Enhance proactive student-centered culture to improve student success and build a sense of belonging

Outcomes

  1. Increase student success by implementing the National Institute for Student Success (NISS) recommendations in the areas of (1) outreach and communications, (2) first-year experience, (3) proactive advising and (4) academic support.
  2. Increase student retention and sense of belonging, especially for students from historically underrepresented backgrounds.
  3. Improve mental health awareness through suggestions from the  mental health task force, including assessing current resources and needs on campus, and opening a new fitness center.
  4. Assess, plan and execute ways to enhance student services to ensure both residential, commuter and online/distance learning students have full access to services and feel like they are part of the Otter Community.
  5. Continue to build traditions to increase our university pride and celebrate the 30th anniversary in a way that connects alumni to their alma mater and builds the reputation of CSUMB for future students.

Goal 3: Continue to investment in community, including people, processes, and infrastructure

Outcomes

  1. Create a sense of belonging for staff, faculty and MPPs that allows them to thrive in their professional and personal development.
  2. Continue the implementation of Campus Works' list of recommendations, including simplifying administrative procedures, developing improved personalization to advance student satisfaction, increasing retention, and improving faculty and staff morale.
  3. Work with each division to create essential Standard Operating Procedures.
  4. Continue to build and maintain the Title IX office to ensure momentum that provides timely responses to investigations and reports while enhancing campus awareness of policies, the office and its processes.
  5. Grow community, communication and transparency with use of technology and process improvements.

Goal 4: Create a culture of fiscal responsibility and sustainability

Outcomes

  1. Deliver and maintain a balanced budget each academic year while managing a responsible reserve and investing in strategic priorities.
  2. Create a culture of budget and financial literacy, specifically providing transparency, measured by continuing the University Budget Committee, town hall meetings, and other opportunities to discuss the budget with all members of our community and through regular reporting on overhead expenditures.

Goal 5: Expand alternative funding sources

Outcomes

  1. Increase philanthropic giving in support of the university’s strategic priorities
    Invest in strengthening support for extramural funding to increase participation.
  2. Increase state and federal funding in support of infrastructure, programs and financial aid support.

Goal 6: Create a culture of strategic planning and assessment

Outcomes

  1. Finalize our new strategic plan to launch in January 2025 upon the sunset of our current plan in December 2024.
  2. Strengthen the process of aligning budget and resources with strategic priorities.
  3. Develop assessment and reporting processes to ensure progress on strategic priorities from all units.

2023-24 Goals: Building a Stronger Future Together

CSUMB's 2023-24 goals built on the university's seven core opportunities, focusing on areas that are most essential for supporting the future success of our institution and establishing a sustainable growth model.

Create a strong sense of community for diverse students, faculty and staff in support of robust enrollment, student retention, and faculty and staff recruitment and retention.

The goal connects most to Opportunity Two with our focus on enrollment goals and student retention. It also aligns with Opportunity One, with an emphasis on improving student success and increasing a sense of belonging and engagement, Opportunity Three, ensuring academic quality and Opportunity Six, embracing inclusive excellence.

Thus, we will address factors that influence student persistence including:

  • Emphasize focus on enrollment goals: Create an enrollment management strategy that allows for sustainable growth of the university.
  • Eliminate inconsistent experiences: Although we offer various resources, some students don't know about them or don't know how to access them. Thus, a high number of students may be dissatisfied with their experiences.
  • Simplify complex tools: Using straightforward programs and making information accessible is vital for student success.
  • Ensuring academic quality: Continue to develop new and innovative academic programs that appeal to prospective students and offer career-focused learning opportunities for enrolled students, while also enhancing research opportunities for faculty.
  • Increase marketing of the university and financial support: Through robust branding of the university, ensure students, donors and stakeholders understand the strengths of the university and the caliber of the education offered.
  • Create a sense of community: A welcoming learning community will encourage students to make friends within their degree program and spend time with peers as well as faculty and staff who can become support and mentors.

Enhance communication within the university community, with external partners and continue to build community engagement in support of student enrollment and retention, faculty and staff recruitment and retention, and in embracing an inclusive environment.

This goal aligns most closely with Opportunity Four in serving our internal and external communities, including addressing staff and faculty pressures, investing in their development. It also supports Opportunity One, Two, Six and Seven in offering tactics that support initiatives that increase student success and engagement, support enrollment goals, and highlight inclusive excellence, and sustainability. As a commitment to transparency, we will also communicate updates on Opportunity Three, ensuring academic quality and Opportunity Five, ensuring long-term financial sustainability.

  • Provide transparent communication: Continue to expand communication with the campus community including students, faculty and staff that keep them informed of events and activities, changes in policies, leadership updates.

  • Enhance community building: Provide opportunities for students, faculty and staff from diverse backgrounds to connect with peers, colleagues and mentors in a variety of ways that build a strong and vibrant community at the university.

  • Implement or provide training on communication tools: Streamline processes or add new communication tools that will allow accessible communication to students, faculty, staff and community members.

Balance our institutional budgets while maintaining and strengthening core capacity to achieve our strategic priorities of enrollment growth, academic quality, community building, sustainability and inclusive excellence. 

The goal connects most to Opportunity Five, ensuring long-term financial sustainability, but ties in with Opportunities One, Two, Three, Four, Six and Seven in creating more transparency around the resources and funding available to support strategic initiatives and priorities.

  • Answer strategic questions to guide resource allocation: Ensure that we explore answers to strategic questions about CSUMB’s future including building external and internal processes that allow us to direct resources and funding toward strategies and tactics that align with the seven opportunities, specifically supporting student success, enrollment management, inclusive excellence, sustainability and creating a sense of belonging for students, faculty and staff. Develop a strategic platform for resource allocation decisions with input from the Budget Committee, Cabinet and consultants, and ensure we have the voices of students, faculty, and staff represented.

  • Use data to manage budget: Determining the cost and net revenues of existing academic portfolios and services by reorganizing existing data and collecting new data. This effort will be achieved, to a certain extent, by the new Incentive-Based Budget (IBB) model, having a culture that adheres to and manages a budget, providing units a budget and managing to that budget. 

  • Continue the development of a culture of transparency and communication: Be transparent with information and develop a robust plan for communicating, and soliciting feedback, from all members of our community including students, faculty and staff. To this end, we aim to develop a communication plan to address multiple stakeholders through multiple channels.

  • Identify cost savings and areas of revenue growth: Evaluate places for cost savings/efficiencies across the university that align with sustainability goals and continue to allow community building for students, faculty and staff.

Evaluate processes and develop process improvements across the campus to ensure effective use of resources, efficient use of employee time and to ensure alignment of outcomes across the campus university, through gathering information on student, faculty and staff experiences.

This goal aligns most with Opportunity Four, serving our internal and external communities, including addressing staff and faculty pressures and investing in their development. It also aligns with Opportunity One and Two as there is potential to improve processes around student enrollment and retention, Opportunity Three and Five in streamlining academic process, Opportunity Six and Seven in ensuring our processes align with our inclusive excellence, and sustainability goals.

  • Evaluate existing processes: Conduct a large-scale assessment of existing processes at CSUMB within all divisions to evaluate potential improvements, ways to collaborate and to reduce redundancies in work with input from students, faculty and staff.

  • Implement process improvement recommendations: From the evaluation of processes and with input from students, faculty and staff, determine improvement priorities that will have the greatest impact on supporting opportunities specifically student enrollment and engagement, faculty and staff recruitment and retention and ensuring fiscal responsibility of the university.