Nearly a full year into Margaret Spellings’ tenure as President of the UNC System, the Board of Governors unanimously approved a new strategic plan at its meeting last Friday

Spellings said after the meeting that there was a lot of time and effort put into this plan but now the hard work will begin.

“That’s actually the easy part,” Spellings said. “The hard part will be putting this into motion and getting the work done, because they’re audacious goals and appropriate goals. And I’m really excited, and I think it shows a lot of solidarity on the board and alignment around the most important things before us.”

The seven-page strategic plan for the 17-campus system identifies definitions and goals for five areas – access, student success, affordability and efficiency, economic impact and community engagement and excellence and diverse institutions.

Board chair Lou Bissette said that finding a way to measure results has been a priority all five years he has served on the board.

“Have measurable goals and be able to have something we can measure by at the end of the year,” Bissette said. “I’m extremely pleased. It was a long process.”

Bissette said he was encouraged with how the board “enthusiastically” embraced the strategic planning process. And Bissette said he was proud of the input provided by system chancellors, faculty and students.

“It’s not a perfect plan, as we said, but I am really pleased,” Bissette said. “We’ll have to see how it works. It’s got to be taken to each campus because they’re all different and they all have different missions.

“But I think it really gives us something to work with that we haven’t had in the past.”

Some of the goals outlined in the strategic plan include increasing enrollment of low-income students by 13 percent over fall 2015 levels by the fall of 2021. The plan also calls for a focus on increasing enrollment among residents from rural North Carolina. The strategic plan calls for an increase in first-time, full-time freshman graduating with a bachelor’s degree in five years by 5.1 percentage points by the 2021-2022 academic year. The system will also have more operational and financial flexibility under the new guidelines, which would include regulatory reform giving more power to campus leadership.

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