Monmouth University, over the recent years, has already begun to integrate excellence and access like few other private institutions in the nation. But in order to become the national leader, we must become both more excellent and more accessible. That’s what our new, five-year strategic plan aims to do—through an intersection of six mutually supportive themes or threads.

In order to become more excellent, we must continue to build a first-class, increasingly prestigious, residential university, successfully completing our evolution from a local junior college to a national doctoral university. We will selectively add and delete programs, both in the classroom and outside of it, to attract students and to offer them a life-transforming experience. We will enhance the living and learning community that is our main campus to make us more attractive. And, we will improve our outcome measures across the board—from recruitment and retention, to graduation and career placement. In so doing, we will continue to enhance our relative position in various third-party rankings.

Then, we will make this prestigious University increasingly accessible to students. We will review our scholarship programs to ensure accessibility, recruit more widely, and raise more money for scholarship support of low-income students and their families. We will also improve the culture to ensure that an increasingly diverse student population can thrive here on campus. In so doing, we will continue to demonstrate through various publicly-reported measures our commitment to access.

As we become both more excellent and more accessible, we will increasingly promote this unique private University on a super-regional—if not national—scale. We will take full advantage of our institutional assets—including our Division I athletics program, our Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music, our Polling Institute, our Center for the Arts, and our Urban Coast Institute—in order to shine a spotlight on our University. We will launch a new and improved marketing and branding effort around this newfound integration. In so doing, we will be recognized as a leader in demonstrating a new paradigm in American higher education—that is, that private institutions can be both highly ranked and highly accessible.