Thunderstorms, some heavy during the morning hours, then skies turning partly cloudy during the afternoon. High around 85F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 100%. 1 to 2 inches of rain expected..
Tonight
A few clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 68F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph.
K-State has announced its big new plan, what I’ll call 30-by-30. They’re calling it Next-Gen, which is lame, but I presume they’ll win and I’ll have to call it that, too. Not yet.
The guts of it is the goal of an enrollment of 30,000 students by 2030. That’s a bump upward of 11,000 students, or a 55 percent increase. It’d be an enormous accomplishment, and I think we in Manhattan should be completely on board. There’s nothing more important than enrollment growth to our college town. It’s absolutely the right priority.
I’ll have more to say about this later, because we’ll be talking about this plan for the next decade, and we’ll be talking about the subject generally forever. I would say, just as a starter, that the university needs to be very clear about definitions and expectations – exactly how many human beings does it expect to be here in Manhattan, taking classes, and how many will be remote students, taking College Algebra on a laptop in their basement in, say, Overland Park?
But before we nit-pick, let me write the epitaph for the last big plan. That one, K-State 2025, is now kaput. The goal was to make K-State a top 50 public research university by 2025. From the beginning, that seemed aspirational at best, unrealistic at worst, and completely mushy under any circumstance. How was that going to be measured? The standard moved around, and even if it didn’t, nobody paid any attention. It’s not like the college football polls; the AP doesn’t crank out a Top 50 public research university list every Monday in the fall.
It was Kirk Schulz’s big initiative, and he deserves credit for creating a campus-wide – and community-wide – discussion about long-term goals and visions. Just the process itself was helpful. On the other hand, anybody paying attention from the outset would say: Well, that’s just silly.
It’s not that K-State can’t be great – anybody paying attention knows that it can – but the mushiness of the measurement made that goal meaningless. Might as well have said the goal is to nail all the dining-hall jello to the wall.
I mean, assuming you were the dean of agriculture or the woman in charge of facilities, you go to the office, sit down at the desk, pour yourself a cup of coffee, and…what? Try to find a spreadsheet at some institute to determine how your contribution could be measured?
It worked, in terms of getting everybody talking about aspirations. It failed, in the sense that it ran out of gas pretty fast, and nobody has any idea if we were anywhere close to achieving the goal.
By contrast, 30,000 students is a very concrete, measurable goal, and it gets everybody focused on enrollment as a priority. Pretty simple.
Now, of course, comes the hard part. To grow that much means adding more than 1,500 students per year, which means more than 4 additional students per day. Not impossible, but whatever work and money has gone into student recruitment to this point, basically it has to be half-again more effective. So…sit down, maybe get a double-shot in that coffee, and get to work.
