What is a Higher Education strategy?
Higher Education encompasses high schools, colleges, universities, and other educational institutions. Subsequently, a Higher Education strategy focuses on strengthening the relationship such institutions have with their funding parties i.e. government bodies or endowments. The strategy involves the relationship with their 'users' i.e. students and staff too.
What's included in this Higher Education strategy template?
- 4x Higher Education Focus Areas
- 12x Higher Education Objectives
- 13x Higher Education Projects
- 19x Higher Education KPIs
Who is this Higher Education strategy template for?
This higher educational strategy template can be useful for all institutional organizations i.e. colleges, universities using it for a university strategic plan, private universities, high schools, advanced vocational training, and public universities.
How is this Higher Education strategy template relevant to your organization?
A Higher Education strategy template is important to implement for any such institution as it helps shape and create the culture that the company is working towards and ultimately achieve its vision and mission statement. Having such a strategy in place determines the current strengths of the institution and how they can mitigate risks.
1. Define clear examples of your focus areas
Focus areas can be viewed as the foundation pillars in working towards your strategy. They are useful in expanding your vision statement and actually creating some structure to work towards achieving your goals. To clearly come up with higher education focus areas it is important to understand the core values of your organization and the culture you are trying to create.
For example, in a university, focus areas could be finance, enrolment, research, and future opportunities. These focus areas will usually revolve around what the organization is trying to achieve and why they believe it to be an important area to prioritize.
2. Think about the objectives that could fall under that focus area
A strategic objective usually has to be specific and measurable. They are performance goals that are set to increase productivity and reflect some form of big picture direction for your organization.
An example objective that could fall under the focus area of finance: Grow funds to propel institutions' core learning activities.
Setting such objectives propels the business forward with a sense of direction and gives businesses something to direct energy and effort into accomplishing their education strategic plan. The example objective would usually be time-specific too as a targeted outcome. to work towards.
3. Set yourself measurable targets (KPIs) to tackle the objective
A KPI is a key performance indicator that is measurable and evaluates the success rate of an organization in relation to the task at hand. With reference to the Higher Education strategy template, Higher Education KPIs have to clearly track performance to create the next set of action steps.
A few examples of some higher education KPIs are:
- Increase student attendance rate to 97%
- An annual increase in the number of prospective employers joining networking programs
- Increase the first year to third-year retention rates to 90%
The above Higher Education KPIs can be used to understand how an institution, program, and department is progressing toward its goals. Such measured targets can help bring about needed change to an organization and identify what is successful and what isn't working.
4. Implement related projects to achieve the Higher Education KPIs
With regards to achieving said KPIs, it is important to have a few projects which can assist your organization in actually reaching the target. The use of projects within this higher education strategy plays an important role in assessing the success rate of KPIs and are literal ways of accomplishing the target at hand.
Higher Education project examples:
- Establish a quantitative and qualitative data report on underlying reasons for student retention
- Training seminars to research, citation, and sourcing as part of the curriculum
5. Utilize Cascade tools to track and visualize performance
Under Cascade, the creation of dashboards and snapshots are available. More specifically, the use of dashboards enables organizations to visualize the set of projects and KPIs in a table or graph format.
Visual tools like this make it easier to map out the success rate of targets and measure the progress on given goals during a given period. The Cascade team recommends the use of this tool when creating your Higher Education Strategy template as it can be used to track performance and create comparisons between your organization and competitors. Having a set goal that can be visualized is also a good way to have something to work towards and can boost team morale and team performance.