University Objectives and Metrics

Metric 1: Miami will achieve a six-year graduation rate of 85% and a four-year graduation rate of 75%.

Strategies:

• Implement a virtual and physical one-stop enrollment center.
• Develop and create a First-Year-Experience course for all entering students. Develop additional targeted curricular interventions beyond the first year to enhance student success (e.g., summer preparatory and career development curricula, sophomore experience).
• Ensure that the vision of “By Students, For Students” is met at Armstrong Student Center by meeting the varying needs of all Miami students.
• Offer clear information to students about learning expectations, resources, and curricular pathways to graduation.
  • Develop and implement a comprehensive training program for all academic advisors.
  • Leverage data gained from new tools (e.g., Institutional Analytics, u.Direct) to develop targeted interventions for students who are less likely to graduate.
• Create strategic partnerships across Student and Academic Affairs units to improve advising as well as academic, socio-emotional, and financial support for students.
• Offer effective and culturally sensitive mental health and other support services available to all full-time students on a timely basis and regardless of location of study.
• Identify and revise policies, procedures, and governance processes that impede student success.
• Expand and improve opportunities for high-ability students (e.g., departmental honors programs, University Honors Program, Academic Scholars Program).
• Increase financial aid and merit scholarships through scholarship-matching programs and reallocation of funds.

Challenges & Opportunities:

• Obtaining reliable disaggregated data to track student success (including students who are undecided, change majors, stop, or drop out)
• Creating a sense of urgency about retention, and educating all units across the University that retention must be a shared commitment
• Enacting interventions and strategies at all phases of the undergraduate career
• Prioritizing the competing and increasing demands on faculty and staff
• Balancing net tuition revenue with expectations for academic quality and diversity with a base enrolling class of 3,600
• Allocating the appropriate resources to achieve this goal, particularly in a time of fiscal challenge and immediately after completing a capital campaign.

Metric 2: Within one year after graduation, 90% of graduates (excluding those enrolled in graduate or professional school) will be employed.

Strategies:

• Create a comprehensive, data-driven career services plan to proactively improve retention and completion rates and alumni engagement levels and strengthen the University’s value proposition to parents, students, and employers.
• Develop better tracking of alumni employment.
• Develop new, or improve existing, departmental external advisory boards to increase internships, networking opportunities, and career mentoring for students and to strengthen partnerships with potential employers.
• Seek out internship and recruitment opportunities with corporate partners and vendors that are not currently hiring Miami graduates.
• Embed career development and client-based, authentic projects into appropriate portions of the curriculum.
• Fueled by partnerships between Academic Affairs and Career Services, develop major-specific career development programs and interventions.

Challenges & Opportunities:

• Obtaining reliable employment data
• Forging partnerships across academic departments, Career Services, and University Advancement
• Understanding and predicting the impact of the local, regional, and national economy.

Metric 3: Upon graduation, 80% of students who apply to graduate or professional school will receive at least one offer of admission.

Strategies:

• Advance writing and research outcomes in liberal education and the major, and assess progress.
• Expand Miami’s 3+1 and 4+1 bachelor’s-master’s degree opportunities.
• Enhance programming for students to prepare for graduate and professional school.

Challenges & Opportunities:

• Maintaining support for the research activities of faculty and students given that significant involvement in research is critical for admission to some graduate programs
• Preparing students for graduate and professional school as graduate programs are being eliminated or under threat of elimination and external funds for research are declining.

Metric 4: Continue to increase the quality and impact of scholarship or creative performance.

Strategies:

• Enforce workload norms consistently across all divisions and departments to enable research-active faculty adequate time for scholarship
• Develop mentorship programs for all ranks of faculty.
• Increase support for faculty research (e.g., start-up packages, summer research support, leave and travel support, library liaisons).
• Revise the new faculty orientation program to emphasize faculty and student research, experiential learning, and other University priorities.
• Raise funds to support faculty through the faculty-endowment-match program and the scholarship-match program.

Challenges & Opportunities:

• Declining external support and funding, including library resources, and research infrastructure
• Addressing the high number of University initiatives that may distract faculty from research activities
• Advancing research despite the declining number of tenure-eligible and tenured faculty who have research responsibilities and the increasing number of lecturers and clinical/professionally licensed faculty who focus solely on teaching.

Metric 5: Upon graduation, all Miami students will have participated in a research (40%) or a similar experiential learning activity (100%), e.g., fieldwork, field or clinical placement, service-learning, public or private sector engagement, performances, and other applied learning activities.

Strategies:

• Market and leverage the opportunities afforded by Miami’s many centers and resources to enhance experiential learning and research.
• Embed experiential learning, including research skills and client-based or research-oriented projects, into the curriculum where appropriate.
• Increase support and incentives for undergraduate research, experiential learning, and discovery-oriented curricula.
• Showcase student research publicly.
• Create cutting-edge facilities to promote learning and research.

Challenges & Opportunities:

• Advancing the faculty-intensive work of undergraduate research and experiential learning during a time of diminished faculty resources
• Maintaining the needed infrastructure for research, service learning, and other experiential forms of education (e.g., transportation, summer funding, research leaves, and grants).
• Identifying meaningful community engagement opportunities in a small town and rural setting.

Metric 6: 75% of Miami students will complete an internship before they graduate.

Strategies:

• Create a database or tracking mechanism for internships.
• Provide incentives for students to complete internships, such as creating a zero-credit course option for internships, awarding liberal education credit or (where appropriate) credit for internships in the major, and developing internship-oriented minors.
• Expand networking opportunities with government and private, public, and not-for-profit businesses.
• Improve partnerships among Career Services, Alumni Affairs, Institutional Relations, and academic departments to increase internship opportunities.
• Leverage “in house” internships in Miami offices, programs, libraries, museums, departments, and other units.
• Increase funding to support unpaid internships.

Challenges & Opportunities:

• Collecting data from disparate and unique internship experiences and assessing their impact
• Garnering financial and staff support needed to help students find and make the most of their internship experiences.
• Assisting faculty in disciplines that do not typically promote internships identify meaningful internships and support students in their placements and experiences.

Metric 7: 95% of Miami students will have two or more co-curricular experiences before they graduate.

Strategies:

• Create a set of best practices for honor societies and academic clubs, and provide support and incentives for departments and programs to develop or expand meaningful co-curricular activities.
• Develop a model fraternity and sorority community focused on membership development, innovative programming, recruitment and retention, and chapter success.
• Analyze current opportunities and use findings to improve participation rates in events, lectures, and other programs and ensure that adequate co-curricular opportunities exist for diverse populations of students. Reallocate resources to promote opportunities that promote deep learning.
• Create a University co-curricular calendar to coordinate scheduling, promote collaboration among units, and reduce redundancies. 
• Provide incentives for teaching-oriented faculty to advise student organizations.

Challenges & Opportunities:

• Enhancing communication and partnerships among departments, offices, and programs in Student Affairs and Academic Affairs
• Recruiting and training faculty and staff volunteers (during a period of high expectations and many initiatives) to serve as advisers to student organizations.

Metric 8: 20% of our students will graduate with multiple degrees, majors, or co-majors, and 5% will graduate with a combination bachelor and master's degree.

Strategies:

• Streamline and revise curricular requirements and offerings in liberal education and the majors to enhance greater flexibility.
• Increase the number of co-majors and combination bachelor’s-master’s programs.
• Expand target recruitment and marketing efforts for combination bachelor’s-master’s degree programs.
• Develop articulation agreements for dual bachelor’s-master’s degrees with appropriate universities and colleges.
• Explore the possibility of conditional admission of high-ability high school students into dual bachelor’s-master’s degree programs.

Challenges & Opportunities:

• Promoting double majors and master’s degrees among students pursuing majors that have highly structured and heavy curricular requirements or among non-traditional working students on the regional campuses
• Examining the viability of small graduate programs.

Metric 9: 60% of degree programs can be completed in three years or less through curriculum revision and by using different pedagogical approaches and modes of delivery.

Strategies:

• Create a set of guidelines for three-year degree programs, and identify appropriate programs that can be completed reasonably in three years.
• Simplify curricular requirements, and eliminate required courses that are infrequently offered to enhance time to degree.

Challenges & Opportunities:

• Offering additional three-year degree programs while maintaining Miami's high quality academic experience.

Metric 10: Increase the online and hybrid credit hours to 10% of the total credit hours.

Strategies:

• Develop new online or hybrid certificate programs.
• Identify the most commonly transferred courses, and develop similar online courses at Miami to capture lost credit hours.
• Develop a curricular plan for progressing targeted courses from a traditional to a hybrid or online format.
• Increase appropriate online course offerings that span the Oxford and regional campuses.
• Develop and increase faculty development opportunities in e-learning.

Challenges & Opportunities:

• Providing the instructional design support, information technology services and hardware, and faculty development to meet this metric
• Securing students for online programs given Miami’s comparatively high tuition cost and reputation for residential learning.