Education For A World of Change

A Strategic Plan for Centre College: 1999-2005

What kind of college will prosper in the 21st century? In today's fiercely competitive, ever-shifting higher education market, it takes more than good intentions. It takes a plan. Fortunately, Centre has one.

Centre's new strategic plan, "A More Perfect Centre: Education for a World of Change," will guide the College through 2005. The board of trustees put the final seal of approval on the document at its October 1999 meeting.

Centre faces many challenges in the coming decade, as the plan points out. They include demographics (for example, Kentucky's high school population will increase very little), a popular perception that a liberal arts education is too expensive (despite Centre's generous financial aid), and the expensive, seemingly insatiable demands of and for computers and information technology.

And there's more. "Students, along with alumni, parents, and other constituents, expect to share in decision-making, and their diverse opinions present real challenges to governance," Centre's president, John Roush, wrote in Trusteeship magazine (March/April 2000). Although he was referring to higher education in general, Centre cannot escape such altered expectations of 21st-century society. Planning ahead, however, enables the College to turn challenges into opportunities.

The current document represents Centre's third cycle of planning since 1984. When Roush was named president midway through the current plan's development his experience as a strategic planner made him seem a logical choice for a college that had established a solid reputation for expertise in the subject. That reputation is one of the elements that attracted Richard Trollinger, vice president for college relations and co-author of "A More Perfect Centre," to Centre, as well. Both men concur on the importance of making time to think ahead.

"If we're going to ask people to invest in the institution's future, we've got to be able to give them some idea of what that future will be," says Trollinger. "Change is inevitable, but with a strategic plan you can influence the direction."

Margaret Menges Stroup '60, a longtime trustee who chairs Centre's board committee on planning, reiterates the need for a carefully considered guide. "It's important to project where you want to be in five or ten years so that tomorrow your actions can be headed toward that goal," says Stroup. "If you don't know where you're going, any activity or action will do."

It's also essential to create a "living document," notes Stroup. "I've seen too many beautifully written plans that were put in a desk drawer the day after they were finished, and that was the last anyone thought of them."

Centre's new plan includes a time line for completing the various components and names the specific people responsible for completing each section. Many of the plan's objectives are already well under way. Curricular review has already led to a new calendar with a shorter winter term, for example. The endowed lecture series called for in the plan was announced in March.

Alumni can help keep the plan vital by checking in from time to time. "Ask faculty and the administration what progress we've made toward the goal," she suggests. A history major at Centre - who ironically became a professional planner almost by chance - Stroup notes that "history training, particularly at Centre College, is the best training for almost anything in life. What you do in history is gather large amounts of data and draw conclusions. And that's what you do in planning."

She drew on her experience, including 15 years as a strategic planner for Monsanto Chemical Corp., to help guide CentreÍs two-year effort to determine its direction following the conclusion of its 1991 plan.

The process involved nine working groups made up of faculty, students, alumni, and trustees, who looked at every aspect of the College, from academics, to student life, to cultural activities, to how to pay for it all. More than 200 people participated, says Clarence Wyatt '78, who teaches history at Centre. He was chair of the campus planning committee and co-author, with Trollinger, of the plan itself.

"One of the most significant aspects of the 1999 plan is the inclusiveness of the process," Wyatt adds. "We wanted to rebuild a sense of involvement, and we did."

Although the plan enumerates 20 multi-part goals, the focus is clearly on improving what is already very good, especially as it relates to the student experience. It calls for stronger academics, expanded service learning and leadership opportunities, comprehensive technology and marketing plans, and a very slight increase in enrollment (from 1,000 to 1,100).

Centre, the document says,

. . . must become a model for enabling students to use the skills and knowledge developed through a rigorous education in the liberal arts and sciences to engage the world in all of its promise and challenge. To become such a model, Centre must weave together the classroom experience with the exploration of career opportunities, involvement in service to the community, and an immersion in a variety of cultural traditions, both in the U.S. and abroad.

In seeking to become such a model, however, the plan does not change two fundamental characteristics of the College: first, "a continuing quest for higher levels of quality and achievement in its educational experience," and second, "a commitment to offering this experience to qualified students regardless of their financial situations."

Centre, says Wyatt, remains bound to its "dual commitment to quality and accessibility."

In a recent newspaper column, Roush offered a few ideas for how Centre can best serve the students of the new millennium: "The college that will prosper in this century will have certain hallmarks: sensitivity to the nation's changing ethnic, racial, and geographic diversity; programs and services that address issues of technology and the changing patterns of learning and working; an awareness that students have needs and expectations that are intellectual, physical, social, and spiritual."

"A More Perfect Centre" is the map to take us there.

Highlights from the strategic plan.