New Mexico State University Board of Regents recently approved the 2025 Strategic plan that was spearheaded by NMSU administration.

The plan, focused on growing enrollment, research, outreach and economic development, is now available for student, faculty and community input.

President John Floros said the plan allows for all units of NMSU to contribute to its success.

“The bottom line is when you look at something that stands right now as a draft, it’s a fairly high level plan and flexible enough to be adopted by all the units underneath us,” Floros said. “Each college, each support unit can look at it and say okay, how can I contribute towards that plan.”

The plan, which has been in the process since the administration’s arrival, will be open to public comment and revision until May.

“For months now, we’ve had several groups working on that strategic plan. And we’re at the point now where we have a fairly good first draft. A first draft that the regents looked at and they gave us a thumbs up,” Floros explained. “Now we can go out to the faculty, the staff, students, we can go to specific academic units, colleges, support units, we can go to people outside of the university stakeholders, people that support us and look at athletics, so on and so forth. So over the next 2-3 months we will be collecting a lot of that feedback, a lot of ideas, if we’re missing something, are we putting something that we shouldn’t.”

Carrying a weight of four goals, 18 objectives and 125 ‘action points,’ the vision for 2025 seems anything but simple. Yet, Floros noted, it is organized into much straightforward concepts.

“So we have basically four major goals. One has to do with students and student success, particularly since we are a hispanic serving institution and minority serving institution how do we help students move upward as they get through our programs,” Floros said. “Social mobility is a very important aspect. Social mobility with minorities, with first generation students, but every student should get what they need to move forward.”

Floros said that student success is the big picture, and the other three goals are designed to feed into that in an interconnected way.

“The second part of that has to do with us being a public research university. It connects directly to the first one. If we manage to improve our research enterprise, to grow our research enterprise, and our creative enterprise, we can attract better faculty,” Floros said.

With a stronger faculty, Floros said he believes that graduate and undergraduate programs will reap the benefits of attending a public research university where hands-on experience comes in abundance.

“That’s the one thing that public research universities have to offer that smaller universities don’t have. It’s this hands on experience that you get in laboratory, in an external field, in a studio, whatever the case might be,” Floros explained.

Floros believes the third leg of the land grant mission will create a stronger community beyond the NMSU campus.

“We take all the knowledge that we create in our labs in our studios green houses whatever, take it out to people who can use it.” Floros said. “If we help cities and regions improve economically, having  trickle down effect for research, education, teaching and ultimately student success.

Finally, Floros explained that the fourth focus of the strategic plan will hone in on NMSU’s internal system.

“[The plan is to] build a better university, take care of our own. Take care of our faculty, our staff, our students, from compensation to morale, to improve facilities really all sorts of things to become a better university,” Floros said. 

Though the plan is tentative and subject to change, Floros believes that it will allow NMSU to be a strong competitor among top universities.

“When you put it all together, improve student success, improve research and creativity, improve outreach and economic development, and really improve the university-build a robust university, all of that makes for a flexible, ordered strategic plan.”