Strategic Planning

Strategic Planning Committee
Minutes/Notes - Wednesday, October 3
Teague Library

Present: Margaret Hampton, Wes Miller, Paul Ogren, Bob Southard, Doug Bennett, Newell Pledger-Shinn, Monteze Snyder, Rick Foreman, and Sara Penhale

Guests: Nelson Bingham and Jeff Rickey

The meeting began with brief check-ins and discussion of Doug's handouts, followed by a presentation by Jeff Rickey and Nelson. Bingham.

New materials:

• Draft of letter to Alumni, from Doug
• Outline of Approach to Consultation with the Community, from Doug
• Memo from Doug RE Overview of Enrollment and Financial Planning Issues
• Retention Plan for Earlham College prepared by Retention Coordinating Circle
• Repositioning Plan Progress Report
• Update for Board of Trustees on Repositioning Plan

Notes from Discussion

1. Doug's proposal for Consulting with the Community:

• it was noted that we should view our work with committees as being a fully twoway process with ideas and consultation flowing both ways
• we agreed to work towards mixed group sessions (faculty/student/staff/admin) to discuss planning goals possibly through lunch-time discussions. The idea of using a faculty meeting/all student meeting time for this purpose met with little enthusiasm.

2. Doug's letter to alumni was reviewed and changes offered. He agreed to make some changes and send out a new draft.

3. Sara offered some thoughts on the Williams College SP website and there was discussion of ways in which we might proceed with ours. The idea of a web based conversation thread was raised, or an alternate of inviting response and then synthesizing it for an online ideas list similar to that used by Williams. All were encouraged to check out the Williams site.

4. Repositioning Plan Presentation- Nelson and Jeff- Most of the meeting was spent discussing facets of the repositioning plan, data contained in the handouts and related issues in addmissions, recruiting, and retention. Two procedural notes raised by Nelson seemed particularly relevant to our work, these are the importance of maintaining and using good data to analyze the results of planning work and awareness that some planning processes may not bear fruit immediately and an appropriate time lag between implementation and fruition must be concered. In addition the following points stand out as relevant to the work of SPC:

• Our stance towards Merit Aid is different from that of many of our overlap schools and we should continue to review our stance, particularly in comparison with our overlap schools
• A huge overarching goal is that of improving both name recognition and the percieved value of an Earlham education through a variety of means
• Generally we believe that a higher degree of selectivity will result in a higher rate of retention
• We need to start thinking in advance of how the admissions process will be impacted as we approach our targets and the admissions problem changes from getting enough of our desired applicants to choosing from among a surplus
• At the current (unacceptable) rate it would take us 8yrs to reach our target of a 1600-1800 aplicant pool. Though we hope to achieve a much faster rate, it might concievably take 4-5yrs to reach that goal.
• It was suggested that we recruit faculty to join in the effort to raise name recognition, possibly through encouraging public writing or speaking on current events and by encouraging and supporting faculty ideas in a manner much like the effort to increase in house involvement in the marketing effort as part of the repositioning plan.