Faculty-led career readiness and mentoring that is integrated across the entire student experience is Beloit’s point of differentiation in the marketplace. Our plan includes four major – and interconnected – capabilities to deliver an enhanced student experience leading to increased enrollment and retention:

1. Advising and mentoring
2. Career readiness and career pathways
3. Student life opportunities
4. Targeted student experience efforts

Key programs that contribute to career readiness and identifying career pathways include Career Works, Career Channels, CELEB, and Impact Beloit. Through Impact Beloit, students will build practical professional skills to increase their career readiness and discover career pathways tied to their professional passions.

As a result of Impact Beloit, more students will get internships during college and secure good jobs after graduation. Impact Beloit will expand newer capabilities, such as the Executive in Residence Program and launch skill-building instruction through Credentials and Certificates.

Beloit delivers exceptional advising and mentoring beginning with the Advanced Mentoring Program, which begins before first-year students arrive on campus and extends through their second year. Continued faculty advising from the point when students declare a major through graduation (and often beyond) ensures personal, high-touch advising.

Students have exceptional opportunities to be involved in the life of the college. They participate in important decision-making structures. For example, students are voting members of Academic Senate, control the Activity Fee spending, and are full members of most faculty search committees and nearly all senior staff searches.

Students are nurtured and supported, given the tools and framework to bring their interests to life. Students translate these experiences into greater success through mentorship by faculty and staff who encourage them to reflect on the skills they are developing and how their experiences fit into a career trajectory.

Critical to the success of a positive learning experience is a positive learning environment, for all. While Beloit College has long been committed to the ideals of equity and inclusion, we have recently put significant time, energy, and financial resources into becoming an anti-racist institution. Through our Becoming Better plan, we are working for serious, lasting, institutional change. The college’s Becoming Better plan has goals to increase the number of domestic Black students; improve the quality of their experience; and increase representation among faculty, staff, and the Board of Trustees. Teams across the college, led by Senior Staff, have been actively working to achieve these goals.

The college also is developing and/or executing plans to improve the student experience of two additional student populations:

• Student-athletes: Student-athletes represent a third of the student body and are a critical component of the college’s admissions strategy – recruited athletes have higher yield. To choose to attend and stay at Beloit, student-athletes need to feel that they are 1) getting better at their sport 2) valued for doing their sport and 3) going to be successful after college. The college will continue to refine plans to ensure these three criteria are met for student-athletes from recruiting through graduation.
• International students: The college focuses on creating a sense of home and community on campus that allows international students to thrive. The college will build on newly implemented structures to ensure international students are able to capitalize on the global reach of the Beloit alumni network.

Through Beloit’s integrated learning outcomes, the college has pragmatically and purposefully integrated openness to a diversity of thought and multiplicity of perspectives into all aspects of the student experience. A key outcome of a liberal arts education is knowing how to think creatively, communicate, collaborate, and be intellectually agile (what Beloit College calls integrated learning outcomes, or ILOs) across multiple disciplines and perspectives. Beloit College embraces these learning outcomes for their intrinsic value and also for contributing to students’ career readiness: surveys of employers indicate that problem solving, communication, collaboration, and intellectual agility are desired attributes for entry level employees, and for long-term job success. But unlike other colleges, Beloit is taking an innovative approach to integrating these learning outcomes into all aspects of the student experience.

Admissions Strategies

The college has succeeded over the past few years in recruiting and retaining students who are strong academically, have a high affinity for Beloit, and recognize the value of a Beloit education. This plan builds on those successes. Key elements include:

• Increasing the size of the applicant pool by developing new domestic and international markets.
• Increasing the applicant pool’s connections to the college through early outreach and recruitment of students (beginning in 10th grade) and by strengthening relationships with school-based counselors and independent consultants.
• Aligning staffing, priorities, operations, and our customer relationship management system to build a data-informed, relationship-driven approach to recruitment.
• Hosting more students for campus visits and building a best-in-class campus visit program.
• Collaborating with Athletics at both the strategic and operational levels to support consistent success recruiting athletes.
• Training and directly engaging faculty and staff across campus in recruitment.
• Leveraging the capacity and connections of our alumni at both the recruitment and yield stages.

Marketing Strategies

Beloit has a compelling story to tell that can connect with prospective students, energize our faculty, staff, and alumni, and position us as an industry leader. Current college leadership in Communications and Marketing (C&M), Enrollment, Advancement, and Academic Affairs are collaborating to increase the college’s visibility and secure its reputation as student-centered and innovative through a combination of paid, earned, and owned media, as well as professional associations and higher education conferences.

Specific tactics have included the following:

• A distinct value proposition that feeds into the content strategy for prospective students and families.
• New editorial and visual positioning, which guides communications, marketing, and recruitment, and a new website.
• Targeted communications flows for students that foster relationship-building, induce trackable interest signaling, and leverage the capabilities of our CRM systems.
• A parent outreach and engagement strategy, including dedicated communications flows and a parent portal.
• Digital marketing, including Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Strategic Enrollment Management (SEM), retargeting, conquesting campaigns, and social media advertising.

We will be able to launch new initiatives and enhance recent innovations by continuing and accelerating major changes to our operations. These major operational changes have laid the groundwork for future success:

• A Provost and VP for Enrollment who were hired with the specific charge to collaborate on positioning the college, and the integration of Academic and Student Affairs
• The integration of C&M with Enrollment, and the alignment of C&M’s priorities with institutional goals
• New investments in Career Channels, Career Works, Enrollment, Advancement, and C&M
• Faculty restructuring that reallocated available teaching lines to high priority areas, and provided course releases for advising and mentoring and career readiness priorities
• Extensive realignment of departmental curricula to meet student demand
• Major restructuring of the college’s debt, endowment, and bonds

These approaches continue, with the college leaning into opportunities for strategic reallocation. This year, Beloit’s leadership has a continuous focus on capability prioritization:

1. Applying rigorously defined processes for redeploying positions to highest priority upon vacancies.
   • For faculty, allocating new positions in line with marketplace demands – those which will yield higher enrollment while allowing for increased career-readiness into the curriculum.
   • For staff, prioritizing new positions for Enrollment, Career Works, Impact Beloit, Student Life (retention), and Advancement roles.
2. Reallocating faculty time — one of the college’s most valuable resources — to enhance advising and mentoring of students to advance their career readiness.

The college’s five-year financial model requires that we complete the Be All In campaign.

To complete the fundraising objectives over the next two years, the college is focusing on executing a significant alumni-led, peer-to-peer effort during the 2022-23 academic year. Along with other regular fundraising, this is intended to close the Be All In campaign.

Beyond the next two years and the completion of the current campaign, moving from achieving an ongoing balanced budget to an even healthier financial position where we can resource key priorities more fully will, of course, require that we secure those additional resources.

Doing so will allow us to prioritize the following:

• Increase the facilities budget with an emphasis on improving residential buildings.
• Increase faculty and staff pay with a goal of a multi-year plan to return us to being near the median of the ACM.
• Ensure that key programs such as Impact Beloit and AMP have sufficient resources to be successful.

The timing of the alumni-led peer-to-peer effort and the wrapping up of the Be All In campaign is synced up with the transition in college leadership. Next steps and strategic priorities will be confirmed over the coming summer and in the new President’s first year.