Chancellor Jennifer Sobanet has established four focused priorities from the 2030 strategic plan.
Former chancellor Venkat Reddy worked with departments across campus to create the 2030 plan in 2020, shortly before COVID-19. When Sobanet became chancellor in 2024, she said that community members asked her to narrow the vision.
“Change is happening so much faster in higher education, and these types of 10-year plans are really good for long term visioning … but the way we get there, we need to be more agile than a 10-year plan allows for,” Sobanet said. “The speed of change is speeding up.”
Sobanet’s four priorities are sustainable strategic growth, organizational excellence, a culture of care and the research mission. Her and her team are in the process of determining UCCS’ “differentiator,” or the thing that makes the university unique.
Sustainable Strategic Growth
Sobanet defined sustainability as programming or revenue streams that are either self-funding or bringing funding into the university to fund other programs.
The second half of the priority focuses on responding to requests from the community. “Strategic is about really being smart about where we grow because of what our students are asking us for and what our community is asking us for and then how we translate that into the academic programming or co-curricular programming or internships,” Sobanet said.
As a part of the priority of sustainable strategic growth, the university is looking to build a hotel and conference center on campus in the next few years. This project would provide housing and gathering spaces for large events held on campus, academic programming opportunities like a hotel management degree and student employment and internship opportunities, according to Sobanet.
The university is looking to partner with a developer for this project who will pay for the construction and operation of the hotel and pay rent to the university for the land the building will sit on.
“Much of the future of higher ed is partnerships and bringing private sector dollars onto the campus to make investments that won’t use our tuition dollars or our state dollars,” Sobanet said.
Another partnership the university has made is with School District 11 to create a charter high school called the Colorado Springs School of Technology that will run out of the cybersecurity building.
According to its website, the Colorado Springs School of Technology will focus on technology, space, cybersecurity, entrepreneurship and leadership — all in an environment that promotes ethics and virtuous character. The school is enrolling 100 ninth grade students for its inaugural year beginning in August.
The charter school would encourage its students to take concurrent enrollment classes.
“What we want from that partnership is that more students in our local school districts will see themselves here at UCCS and see that college is for them, and coming to a research university is for them and that they can have their dreams come true here,” Sobanet said.
Culture of Care
Sobanet said this goal focuses on taking care of one another as human beings and focusing on the well-being of faculty, staff and students. As a part of this goal, Sobanet said the university is committed to serving all the communities of Colorado.
According to the November email, the university is focused on becoming a Hispanic-Serving Institution as a part of this goal.
Organizational Excellence
Sobanet defined organizational excellence as making it easier to do business as a university, “Whether that’s continuous improvement in our processes for how our students interact with all student-facing services or how our faculty and staff interact with our faculty and staff-facing services.”
This goal also includes mindful budget planning, according to an email Sobanet sent to faculty and staff in November.
“Together, we will confront our financial challenges with accurate data and honesty to address our short and medium-term budget shortfalls with an eye toward developing a balanced budget for 2025-2026 and into the future,” Sobanet said in the email.
Research Mission
UCCS is an R2 research university. Sobanet said that the university will continue to prioritize research despite the uncertainty surrounding federal research funding.
“We feel like that’s one of the things that makes us super special and why people come to this university,” she said.
Differentiator
The university is in the process of collecting data to find a “differentiator.”
“The landscape of higher education gets more complex and more competitive every day, and what we want to do is figure out what are those special things that are unique about us … that big differentiator that shows how special we are. And I think that will attract students, and it will attract faculty and staff who want to be a part of that vision,” Sobanet said.
The university began the process of collecting data to find a differentiator in September with a summit of around 125 people across the university according to Sobanet.
“[We had] faculty from all of our colleges, staff from our colleges and our divisions, the leaders of the university, we had the leaders of our various centers and institutes. It was a real cross-section of people,” Sobanet said.
At the summit, a facilitator helped attendees brainstorm what makes the university special from an internal and external lens.
In addition to the summit, each of the vice chancellors created focus groups to get more qualitative data.
There was a plan to have more focus groups across the university this semester, but Sobanet decided to pause data collection for this semester. “We knew that we were facing some changes in the federal administration that would probably take some time for us to manage,” she said.
Sobanet said that she hopes to be able to compile and publish the results of the data collection by the end of the Fall 2025 semester.
Students can learn more about the 2030 Strategic Plan on the strategic plan website.