Strategic Plan

Engaged Liberal Learning:
 The Plan for Skidmore College, 2005-2015
 

Strategic Renewal: Reframing Our Priorities at the Midpoint of the Strategic Plan
How can the College enhance the already considerable value – across all the many dimensions of that term – of a Skidmore degree for all of our graduates?
 
That’s the essential question that President Philip A. Glotzbach asked in a series of on- and off-campus ‘town hall’ meetings held during the 2009-10 academic year. The result is this 13-page document issued by President Glotzbach in mid-May, 2010.
 
Strategic Renewal “reaffirms the basic elements of our mission as a student-centered liberal arts college,” President Glotzbach writes. “It draws our attention to those characteristics that differentiate us from competitor institutions.  And most importantly, it provides a heuristic framework to guide our strategic choices going forward – the actions we will take to continue implementing the Strategic Plan’s four major goals.”

 
Read Strategic Renewal.
Mission Statement

The principal mission of Skidmore College is the education of predominantly full-time undergraduates, a diverse population of talented students who are eager to engage actively in the learning process. The college seeks to prepare liberally educated graduates to continue their quest for knowledge and to make the choices required of informed, responsible citizens. Skidmore faculty and staff create a challenging yet supportive environment that cultivates students' intellectual and personal excellence, encouraging them to expand their expectations of themselves while they enrich their academic understanding.

In keeping with the college's founding principle of linking theoretical with applied learning, the Skidmore curriculum balances a commitment to the liberal arts and sciences with preparation for professions, careers, and community leadership. Education in the classroom, laboratory, and studio is enhanced by co-curricular and field experience opportunities of broad scope. Underpinning the entire enterprise are faculty members' scholarly and creative interests, which inform their teaching and contribute, in the largest sense, to the advancement of learning.

The college also embraces its responsibility as an educational and cultural resource for alumni and for a host of nontraditional student populations, and for providing educational leadership in the Capital District and beyond.


Executive Summary

Colleges and universities tend to focus either on their past or on their future. While Skidmore honors, takes pride in, and builds upon the legacy of its past, we are accustomed to thinking in the future tense: about our hopes for our students...(more  of the Executive Summary)