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Updating Process

Updating Process

As the university looks ahead, the Strategic Plan Update Project provides an opportunity to reflect on achievements, address challenges, and align priorities with the evolving higher education landscape. The update process combined careful analysis and broad campus engagement, including:

This comprehensive approach ensures the revised plan remains dynamic, evidence-informed, and centered on UC Merced’s mission to advance knowledge, foster student success, and strengthen its connection to the San Joaquin Valley community.

Introduction and Context

Background: Creation of the Strategic Plan and Where We Are Now

UC Merced launched its first comprehensive strategic planning effort in 2020 to create a 10-year roadmap for the campus through 2031. The plan engaged faculty, staff, students, alumni, community members, trustees, and governance bodies. Finalized in 2021, the plan articulated goals to achieve Carnegie R1 designation, advancing student success, and cultivating a culture of respect and dignity. Following its adoption, strategic planning teams were formed to guide the direction of several objectives, with their work shared through the campus Budget Call process. With many of the original goals now accomplished, UC Merced has reached a natural midpoint in the 10-year plan. This update provides an opportunity to celebrate progress while setting new aspirations to carry the university forward through the second half of the strategic plan. Since the plan’s launch, the university has achieved transformative milestones—including R1 designation, prestigious awards such as the ACE Institutional Transformation Award, and notable improvements in national rankings. These accomplishments, paired with shifts in the higher education landscape, underscore the importance of updating our plan at this time to ensure continued momentum.

Strengths and Opportunities for Improvement in the 2021-2031 Strategic Plan

UC Merced's first comprehensive strategic plan guided remarkable progress in the last five years. Today, several challenges emerged that highlight the need to update the plan.

  • Static measures for outcomes in an environment characterized by change: UC Merced operates, like all institutions of higher education, in an environment characterized by significant policy and financial volatility, and is affected by changes in our external and internal environment. This necessitates adjustments to our approach, recalibration of targets and measures using nimble measurement approaches and targets that adjust as the external environment shifts.
  • Lack of alignment in measures and objectives: Some performance measures do not directly reflect the objectives they were meant to track.
  • Legacy data: The original plan had to rely on data from as early as 2018, which no longer reflect the university’s advancement nor its external environment. For instance, research and development expenditures were recorded at $45M, but have since grown to $77M, necessitating adjustments in how we set and accomplish goals.
  • Targets requiring adjustment: Several targets were set under prior assumptions about growth and demographics. For example, enrollment goals now require adjustment to reflect current realities in the higher education landscape and changing demographics of the State of California.
  • Measures pending development: Several metrics were left “to be developed” in the original plan, but have not been defined, creating gaps in accountability and limiting the ability to fully track progress.

 

Campus Feedback

For our strategic plan update to account for campus stakeholders’ and leadership perspectives, we solicited broad input and insights: More than 100 campus stakeholders shared their perspectives through a web-based survey and individual consultations with the update team. The survey also asked respondents to identify which strategic plan objectives should continue to be treated as high priorities (results below). In total, 66 staff members participated, 31 faculty members, along with nine individuals who did not indicate their campus stakeholder identity.

 

Campus stakeholders further responded to the question “What updates, if any, should be made to UC Merced’s strategic plan for the mid-plan recalibration?” Stakeholders recommended:

  • Enrollment and Student Success: Focus on mission and community-aligned enrollment and adjust enrollment targets to reflect national and regional demographic trends (e.g., significant projected demographic declines for the State of California between 2025 and 2032); focus on quality student experience, campus vibrancy, career preparation.
  • Research and Academic Programs: Continue and sustain a focus on world-class research and maintain a balance between STEM expansion and support for the arts, humanities, and the library; pursue program growth aligned with Central Valley workforce needs, particularly in medical and education fields. Continue to deliver university education grounded in the liberal arts.
  • Community Engagement: Strengthen UC Merced’s identity as a distinctive UC campus, emphasizing access, first-generation student success, research excellence, and UC Merced’s deep connection and commitment to the San Joaquin Valley and its people.
  • Faculty and Staff: Demonstrate appreciation for faculty contributions and set clear performance expectations; ensure staff are included in strategic priorities alongside students and faculty.
  • Fiscal Sustainability and Implementation: Ensure measures and targets include elements of fiscal sustainability; develop clear implementation plans with accountability, incentives, and measurable outcomes.
  • Equity and Inclusion: Responses reflected mixed perspectives—some called for deeper integration of equity, justice, inclusion, and excellence (EJIE) principles, while others suggested recalibrating or de-emphasizing EJIE.

Stakeholder Consultations

Consultations were conducted with all Cabinet and Deans Council members and a graduate student representative from Graduate Student Association (GSA). During these meetings, we reviewed progress on the strategic plan, including updated internal and external scorecard measures, and asked for suggestions for additional measures. Members of the Senate were invited, along with other campus stakeholders, to participate through the survey and through direct meetings with the Strategic Plan Update Team. These discussions informed the current set of measures included in the plan.

Reaffirmation of Broad Strategic Plan Goals: Revision to Include Explicit Commitment to Community Engagement

Overall, UC Merced’s commitment to the three goals outlined in the 2021-31 Strategic Plan is unabated. Leadership and campus stakeholder consultations reaffirmed commitment to Goals 1 (Engage Our World and Region through Discovery and the Advancement of Knowledge) and 2 (Develop Future Scholars and Leaders), while suggesting a stronger expression of UC Merced’s commitment to community engagement in Goal 3. The proposed revised Goal 3 is: Cultivate a Culture of Dignity and Respect for Our Community (replacing: Cultivate a Culture of Dignity and Respect for All). Objectives, which are defined as facets of the overarching three goals, were revised to reflect current and emerging external and internal realities and data, while staying true to the original strategic plan.