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Vision - questions and answers

Questions

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Answers

Is this vision consistent with the Cal Poly mission?

Yes. Each of the three primary aspects of the vision statement – premier polytechnic, innovative institution and helping California – aligns and crosslinks to each of the three core aspects of the mission – teaching and learning, scholarship and research, and outreach and service – as expressed in our mission statement:

“Cal Poly fosters teaching, scholarship, and service in a learn-by-doing environment where students and faculty are partners in discovery. As a polytechnic university, Cal Poly promotes the application of theory to practice. As a comprehensive institution, Cal Poly provides a balanced education in the arts, sciences, and technology, while encouraging cross-disciplinary and co-curricular experiences. As an academic community, Cal Poly values free inquiry, cultural and intellectual diversity, mutual respect, civic engagement, and social and environmental responsibility.”

However, while the mission statement describes our historic, enduring and continuing institutional purpose, the vision statement is an elevation, pointing to where we wish to go from our current position.

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Is the vision achievable from our current position?

Our current position is that Cal Poly is a well-established, recognized and highly ranked institution; a comprehensive polytechnic state university, with baccalaureate and graduate level programs in science-, technology- and mathematics-based professions, and academic and professional programs in the arts and sciences. Cal Poly is known for its learn-by-doing environment and comprehensive multi-mode educational experience that prepares graduates for successful lives and careers as long-term performers and leaders in agriculture, architecture, the arts, business, education, engineering and the sciences. Cal Poly and many of our programs enjoy very high ranking. Competition for our unique Cal Poly education is extremely strong as is the demand for Cal Poly graduates because of their ready-on-day-one capabilities and long-term performance and leadership. Cal Poly contributes significantly to the economy and well-being of California. Clearly, our current position is on the trajectory towards achieving the vision.

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What are the gaps between our vision, mission and our current position?

The vision calls us to be the premier comprehensive polytechnic university. Cal Poly graduates must be second to none. The total educational environment and experience we provide must enable the growth and learning of our students so they emerge as premier graduates with the skills they need for sustained future success in the challenges ahead. We must commit to ensuring our curricula and programs are the best and are continuously improving. We must ensure that the student learning we intend – as expressed in our University Learning Objectives, and program and course outcomes – is being achieved and demonstrated by robust assessment methods. In addition, we must make sure that all aspects of our support operations are focused on ensuring the progress and success of our students.

In parallel, we must commit to continuing development and expansion of our individual skills and excellence – faculty continuing their development as teachers, scholars and campus citizens, and staff and administrators continuously improving as skilled professionals and lifelong learners. Every new hire must be better than the last and even better than any one of us! Regardless of position, each of us must be dedicated to the progress and success of our students.

Meanwhile, we must continue to work hard on improving the Cal Poly learning and support infrastructure. In spite of excellent progress on the Master plan at providing many new academic buildings and residence halls during the past decade, continued progress will be far more challenging in the years immediately ahead. Many classrooms are in urgent need of renovation and upgrade. The increasing scholarly expectations on faculty have increased demand for more research laboratories, better computing facilities and an upgraded and expanded library and similar vital “common goods” of a successful university. However, we will need to be more creative and innovative, and where appropriate use technology as part of the solution to these challenges.

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Does the vision align with our preparation for WASC?

Definitely. The principal theme of our WASC self-study has been “Our Polytechnic Identity” examined from different points of view including integrated student learning, the teacher-scholar model and learn-by-doing. These align and crosslink to the three principal aspects of the vision – premier polytechnic, innovative institution, and helping California. The work of all the WASC groups has contributed to the development of the strategic plan and expression of our vision. Link to Cal Poly WASC website.

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Are we committed to being the best at our defined mission? – creates a commitment to continuous reflection, self examination and improvement.

Yes. We have a long history of leadership in undergraduate higher education and because of the reputation we have earned we attract the highest quality student and have built a faculty and staff of the highest standing. Our unique Cal Poly mission remains relevant and central; and our graduates because of their inherent quality, abilities and skill sets they possess are ever more critical to help California meet its current and future challenges.

To continue to be the best, every year we must seek to be better than the year before, with intentional continuous reflection, examination and improvement of all we do, at both the individual and institutional levels. Indeed, the primary purpose of the strategic plan is to provide the common direction and shared core framework for continuous strategic planning and future initiatives as we seek to be even better.

Thus, we need to review all aspects of the mission and prioritize. Then, we will need to track our progress continually and benchmark ourselves against a comparison institutions group to make sure our trajectory and position is right. No single measure and no single point of view will be sufficient so we will need to monitor several – though a limited set of – quantitative progress, quality and resources indicators, balancing the different aspects and perspectives of the Cal Poly mission. Each year, we will report and score our progress, balancing the different aspects, and examine opportunities for improvements, strategic initiatives and investments.

For example, we need to pay more attention to improving the graduation rate and student progress to degree; we need to systematically listen to alumni and employers to ensure the quality of our education and graduates is always relevant and moving forward; we also need to develop ways to demonstrate and highlight faculty scholarship in its fullest sense and showcase these important contributions; and we need to continually upgrade our facilities and infrastructure.

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Do we agree that Cal Poly is defined as a comprehensive polytechnic university with the mix of professional, STEM, humanities and social science programs that implies?

Yes. We are both a comprehensive university and a polytechnic university and these two overlapping aspects of the Cal Poly identity reinforce each other. The range of our programs provides us intellectual breadth, balance and institutional strength and is an important reason for our continued success and durability. An important arm of our strategy is to continue to enhance this competitive advantage of our institutional differentiation.

Cal Poly is a polytechnic university, one of only 12 four-year universities/campuses nationwide with “polytechnic” in their name. A feature common to most “polytechnic” institutions is a focus on programs in math-, science- and technology-based professions. Certainly this is true for Cal Poly with over 1/3 of the degrees being in the STEM fields, 3/4 of the degrees in the Professions, and 84% of our degrees in the Professions and STEM combined.

In addition, the Professions and STEM is a common unifying component of our Cal Poly identity. For example, all Cal Poly colleges have at least one program that is in the Professions, and almost all our colleges have programs that are in STEM. Further, CLA and CSM, in addition to their majors in the Professions, STEM, and other academic disciplines, play a critical role in the foundational general education core of all our graduates.

Cal Poly is also a comprehensive university. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching classifies institutions by their graduate programs using four field groupings: Humanities, Social Sciences, STEM and the Professions. Carnegie identifies an institution as “comprehensive” only if it has graduate-level programs and graduates in all four Carnegie field groupings. Perhaps surprisingly only 21% of the 1213 institutions overall and only 13% of the 804 master’s level institutions are in this category. Of the 12 “polytechnic” and 24 “institute of technology” four-year institutions combined only 5 are classified as comprehensive: three doctoral level research universities and two master’s level universities; and only three are designated as polytechnic. We are one of only very few “comprehensive polytechnic” universities. See the Appendix for more information on Carnegie classifications and Cal Poly.

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Do we wish to define ourselves in terms of polytechnic colleges, polytechnic programs and/or polytechnic students?

For many years, we have used the total enrollment in CAFES, CAED and CENG as our surrogate measure of how “polytechnic” we are, but that is a limiting construct and not fully representative of the broader scope of the polytechnic identity of Cal Poly today. Polytechnic universities have a significant focus on undergraduate and graduate programs – typically technology, science, or math-based – that prepare individuals for professional careers. This is certainly true of Cal Poly but we now have programs in the Professions in every college, i.e. extending well beyond our historic “polytechnic” colleges.

Regardless of their major, all Cal Poly graduates will need much more of their education to tackle the challenges of the future. Of course, they will continue to need the depth of knowledge of their discipline that we have always provided. But this depth must also be integrated with breadth, balance and literacy in technology, the arts and sciences – a comprehensive polytechnic general education. Therefore, we will need to develop our programs further to prepare all our students regardless of the major to become “comprehensive polytechnic” graduates.

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Do we accept the recommendation to expand our expectations of students to emerge from Cal Poly as whole-system thinkers – implies an expansion of project based learning to highly interdisciplinary teams?

It is clear that the problems of today and the challenges of tomorrow for California and in a global context will need graduates who have depth and breadth in an integrated education and are whole-system thinkers. The challenges are many and most are complex requiring a multi-disciplinary and integrated interdisciplinary team rather than a solo individual approach.

Cal Poly graduates are valued for being “ready day one” and also being long-term high performers and typically have the characteristics needed. However, we need to ensure this is an intentional outcome and added value of the educational experience we provide. We should look at all our programs both individually and collectively to ensure that the full set of learning experiences do indeed prepare our students for the challenges of their future.

Future Cal Poly graduates should have integrated breadth, balance and literacy in technology, the arts and sciences and depth of their total education to be whole-system thinkers and leaders. These will be important differentiators of Cal Poly graduates. They should demonstrate expertise, work effectively and productively as individuals and in multidisciplinary teams, communicate effectively, think critically, understand context, research, think creatively, make reasoned decisions, use their knowledge and skills, and engage in lifelong learning. This will be true for all our graduates regardless of major, preparing them for full and enriching lives, ready for entry into their chosen careers or advanced study and to contribute to society.

Meanwhile, each of us should model the expectations we have of our graduates, i.e. from working effectively and productively as individuals and as part of a multi-disciplinary team, to being life-long learners and whole-institution thinkers, and campus citizens, sharing a common purpose – the success of our students.

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Do we continue to commit ourselves to project based learning – the emerging definition of “learn by doing”?

We must ensure that we remain leaders and innovators in higher education pedagogy, this must be part of Cal Poly being the best. Learn-By-Doing is a core part of a Cal Poly education and a well-known part of our identity differentiating us from other institutions. LBD provides our students hands-on active learning beyond and complementing their work in the classroom and their co-curricular activities.

Like all aspects of our pedagogy, we must continue to improve and enhance LBD to intentionally mobilize higher levels of learning. Project-based learning (PBL) can be classified as a mode of LBD; and capstone projects are an example of PBL. But LBD, PBL, and capstone experiences are opportunities for a deeper, richer education to develop the whole-system thinker, comprehensive polytechnic graduate for the future. We should explore introducing these integrative experiences early in a student’s time with us, perhaps as a foundational part of all our curricula.

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Are we committed to transparency of process, sustainability of operations as an element of whole-system thinking, and innovation as a necessary element of continuous improvement?

Transparency must be a fundamental Cal Poly value together with open communication, accountability, evidence-based decision-making, and continuous improvement. All of these will assist us in our strategy of restoring economic viability. This past year we have been working hard to improve access and sharing of institutional data and in easy-to-understand formats; we have also been working on improving internal communications particularly in these difficult times of budget uncertainty.

Meanwhile, Cal Poly is a leader in sustainability of operations with a well-developed process and a record of progress to continuously improve our performance. We also have expertise in sustainability as an academic and research field. Indeed, fully-developed, sustainability can embody whole-system thinking.

We need to be innovative and creative as we seek continuous improvement and renewal in our programs and in our operations. Cal Poly also has opportunity to contribute to the field of innovation, another potentially integrative theme we have expertise in and should develop further.

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Do we accept that the arc of history for Cal Poly implies a continuing growth of our graduate student proportion?

Yes. Although approximately 10% of Cal Poly degrees are at the master’s level, overall both graduate enrollment and its proportion have been declining slightly during the past decade; currently it is at about 5% of the total enrollment. Increasing our graduate proportion would yield many benefits.

For many of our majors, a baccalaureate degree is considered only an “entry-level” degree and increasingly a graduate degree is considered the first “professional” degree. Indeed, several employers have moved to hiring only at the advanced degree level.

A greater proportion of graduate students would increase the heterogeneity of the campus population, increasing the presence of national and international students and enhancing the education of all. Graduate students also serve as academic role models for our undergraduates. A deeper graduate education presence would help us further develop our research and would certainly enhance our national and international reputation. It would also support faculty in becoming teacher-scholars.

We would have to identify strategic opportunities for growth in areas where we have strength and reputation, and can build on our existing infrastructure. Note that we do have some competitive advantage of having made only a limited investment in graduate programs so far and thus we have the opportunity to be selective, creative and agile.

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Do we accept the premise that resources determine size?  (Does not necessarily limit growth, but focuses on how growth might be achieved rather than just hoping for state money.)

As part of our strategy to restore economic viability, we need to decouple our institutional size from the state allocation as much as is feasible. For example, the Cal Poly Plan and the College-Based Fee recognize our unique and different mission and higher cost and quality of the education we provide. We need to carefully steward and manage all our resources, continually look for ways to streamline our activities without sacrificing Cal Poly quality.

We also need to explore expanding non-state revenue sources, again without sacrificing quality. Examples include out-of-state and international students as an increasing proportion of our students, licensing intellectual property; increased grants income and continuously growing philanthropy.

We should build on our core strengths and competitive advantages wherever possible, have a sound business plan and monitor returns on such investments.

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Do we endorse a definition for productivity of the University as the best possible graduate per unit of resources expended?

This expresses the value that Cal Poly has always provided. We know our graduates are among the best – we must maintain and continue to improve their quality. We must look toward ensuring more of our students reach graduation, by facilitating progress to degree, improving year-by-year retention, as always without compromising our standards. This provides value to each individual and all students while also improving our performance and efficiency.

Cal Poly has a long history of being the best; we must never take that position for granted, we must earn it every year, and every year we must do better, even in these the most difficult economic times.

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For more information on Carnegie, also see http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/classifications/index.asp