My Colby-Sawyer Experience
“You need to have certain characteristics to be a teacher. The ability to relate well to students and to communicate with them is important.” - Jason Hartwell '06
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colby-sawyer strategic plan
The Colby-Sawyer College Strategic Plan serves as an essential guide for the college community, providing three overarching goals whose achievement requires collaborative efforts across the campus.
This concise plan and the collaborative process that proceeded it, which enabled all community members to have a voice in the college's priorities and direction, continues to serve as a model for subsequent strategic planning efforts.
The Strategic Plan was approved by the Board of Trustees on May 13, 2005.
Strategic Plan
Goal One: Exemplary Quality of our Educational Programs
Colby-Sawyer College's distinctive academic and intellectual environment inspires us to claim, practice and celebrate a new level of excellence. Nourished by a strongly collaborative community, we are now poised to establish exemplary status among small residential colleges that educate promising students for life and livelihood. To achieve this aim in the fullest possible way, we intend:
To strengthen the foundation of liberal arts and sciences throughout the student experience, and to improve our offerings, our teaching practices, our students' achievements and outcomes, and our overall expectations of students and each other.
To focus our admissions goals for gradual growth by enrolling students who are most likely to flourish at Colby-Sawyer, and who will bring distinctive abilities, talents, and backgrounds from an increasingly wider spectrum of traditional-aged students.
To sustain an ever stronger community of faculty and staff by supporting their professional development throughout their academic careers so that they may engage, challenge, and inspire students.
To feature our athletics and recreational programs as an integral part of our mission and as one effective strategy for developing healthy, active habits of mind and body among our students, faculty, and staff.
To view our entire intellectual and physical community as a vibrant setting for learning by allowing this view to guide our curricular, programmatic, technology, and infrastructure planning.
Goal Two: Extending the Values of our Community
The community of Colby-Sawyer extends to wherever Colby-Sawyer people are. The cohesiveness of this community starts on campus with the devotion of faculty and staff to our students, fostering strong relationships through all aspects of their lives.
Our college community also extends beyond our campus. For alumni, the ties of the past are transformed into ties of interest, engagement and support for the college in the present and future. Colby-Sawyer also welcomes residents of New London and surrounding towns to the college for intellectual and cultural events, healthful exercise, and our Adventures in Learning program.
We regularly rely on our community for philanthropic and essential volunteer support. Our friends respond generously with interest and time, talents, and philanthropy. Our community also includes parents and families of past and present students, whose attachments spring from the experiences of their children. Clearly, the college community and the wider community prosper together. In order to foster community on campus and beyond, we intend:
To create and sustain a learning environment in which all members of the college community hold themselves and others to the highest standards of excellence, integrity, and mutual respect.
To assume the equal potential of all by inviting the voice of each individual.
To create opportunities to encourage diversity of background and perspective in the life of the college community.
To reaffirm the optimal size for our coeducational student body, assuring that the college remains a small institution that is viable and vital.
To center our student life experience on engagement and community responsibility, especially through residence life, campus clubs and organizations.
To evaluate, improve, and focus our community-oriented programs to align them with the college's mission and to continue to bring people from the local area closer to the college.
To engage alumni from all eras of our college's history and to draw them closer to the college through initiatives such as the President's Alumni Advisory Council.
To assure that any physical changes to our campus will enhance our sense of community, while considering the quality of our learning environment, as well as function, safety, capacity and the overall student experience.
To develop a cohesive and dynamic communications strategy for the college that includes an integrated voice and high standard for all our communications.
Goal Three: Financial Strength for the Future
We have achieved our current financial stability through a combination of planned growth in enrollment, prudent management of resources, pursuit of distinctive excellence in our educational program, and increased giving to the college. However, the college continues to depend on tuition revenue to fund a high proportion of our annual operations. As the college approaches an optimal size for student enrollment, we will be required to be even more prudent in managing our resources, defining the rationale for our objectives and programs, and communicating our aims even more effectively.
Solidifying our financial foundation will require that we embark on a multiyear program that is focused on financial strength and resiliency. To help ensure a distinguished future, we intend:
To foster a campus climate in which creative ideas can flourish in support of the college's mission. We must ask, “how do students benefit?,” in order to frame the potential importance and impact of any new initiative.
To continue to invest in our human resources by funding appropriate staffing levels and by providing additional professional development opportunities and strategic improvements in salaries.
To maintain an effective level of financial aid that balances student need with institutional affordability.
To recognize the beauty of the campus as an inheritance to be stewarded by regular attention and by fully budgeting the renewal and replacement of key elements of our physical plant.
To develop a multiyear plan of balanced budgets or surpluses through rigorous budget analysis and projections, and through the identification of possibilities for additional revenue consonant with our mission.
To assure a financially robust future by making the growth of our endowment an institutional priority.
Benchmarks for the Strategic Plan
Each year a set of benchmarks is set to assist the college in meeting the goals of the Strategic Plan:
