Securing the future with Foresight 2020
The Regents Foresight 2020 presents a 10-year strategy for improving public higher education. Our faculty, staff and administration have embraced those goals and begun to integrate them with our mission and the Accountability Planning Matrix.
In brief, the Regents goals and Wichita State’s approaches in meeting them are:
• Align preK-12 and higher education in Kansas
WSU, especially through our College of Education, is in involved in dozens of partnerships with local school districts to train teachers, counselors and administrators to improve student readiness for college.
Under a federal grant from the Urban Teacher Preparation Program, the College of Education is working with Wichita Public Schools and The Opportunity Project preschools to advance teacher preparation in an urban setting. The program includes extensive WSU student teacher time in schools.
The WSU Colleges of Engineering and Education are working to prepare students to teach in public school fields where there are special shortages – science, technology and mathematics – and to encourage students to pursue a higher education in those fields and engineering.
• Increase participation in public higher education
We are dedicated to maintaining access to higher education for Kansas’s high school graduates, increasing adult education and professional development opportunities and expanding access to our courses through technology.
We are partnering more with community colleges and looking for ways to adapt to the emerging a la carte approach to a college education.
To support lifelong learning, we are doing more to help adults return to Wichita State to complete degree programs they started, sometimes years ago, before being diverted for family, career or financial reasons. We have created a program, WSU Complete, to provide a support system for returning students and offer them a clear path to finishing their degrees.
• Improve retention and graduation rates
We are making progress on our twin goals of retention – keeping students in school, and persistence – increasing their progress towards graduation. There has been a measureable increase in the percentage of students taking a full course load of 12 hours or more per semester.
We have designed and begun implementation of the Graduation Partnership, linking three key core values of the university: our research mission; the extraordinary quality of our faculty; and our deep commitment to accountability
The WSU Graduation Partnership is a set of coordinated activities designed to dramatically improve the rate at which students move from one academic level to the next (retention), and on to their undergraduate degrees.
A new, more thorough, first year student orientation, more intensive supplemental instruction, and an enhanced, reformatted and expanded introduction to the university course (to be called WSU 101) will be employed in the initial phase of the Partnership. We will install new software that will help spot emerging academic problems early and get students back on track with the help of faculty and advisers.
• Enhance student success
WSU has adopted a Foundations of Excellence program, Honors program, Office of Faculty Development and Student Success, university introduction courses, online graduation progress reports and faculty training, all aimed at achieving these objectives.
We are examining every aspect of our General Education requirements to ensure that we are preparing students to think critically and develop the skills and outlook of lifelong learners. That’s both a requirement to help students succeed in their chosen careers, and to lead lives of fulfillment as citizens.
The application of key pre-requisites for selected General Education courses, more emphasis on attaining fundamental skills early in the college career, and initiatives to learn of student academic interests as soon after admission as possible, are being considered by the university faculty. These enhancements will fully optimize the Partnership to the great benefit of our students.
• Align with the state’s workforce needs
Wichita State’s National Institute for Aviation Research has joined with Wichita Area Technical College in a unique partnership to provide workforce training through the new National Center for Aviation Training. The partnership combines research and training opportunities for students and the aviation industry.
The research partnership model we have developed at Wichita State continues to be an asset to the local and Kansas economy. Although we honor and engage in pure research, for the sake of generating knowledge, Wichita State’s distinctive strength is in research and testing to meet the needs of industry.
The WSU co-op program that places with students with employers; the outreach efforts of campus units such as the Center for Entrepreneurship and Cisco Networking Center; the use of teaching adjuncts with rich professional experience; the research partnerships in aviation and health professions; and advisory boards in professional colleges all keep WSU responsive to workforce needs.
In community service, we continue to link our efforts to preparing students for public sector work in fields as important and diverse as teaching, social work, public finance, community psychology and public health. There is a virtuous cycle in which students get trained, scholars perform research and the university serves the community.
• Ensure state university excellence
We are examining every aspect of our General Education requirements to ensure that we are preparing students to think critically and develop the skills and outlook of lifelong learners. That’s both a requirement to help students succeed in their chosen careers, and to lead lives of fulfillment as citizens.
Through accreditation efforts, recruitment of outstanding undergraduates, mentoring of graduate students, sharing of research findings and many other paths, Wichita State is enhancing its national reputation.