Priority 2:     To enhance access to a wide range of educational programs throughout our service region.

I. Recruitment and Retention

• Develop a recruitment and retention plan: 
  By the end of the spring 2001 semester each department, in collaboration with the dean, should prepare a recruitment and retention plan explicitly outlining its five-year goals for enrollment and retention, and the strategies it is using or intends to implement to achieve these goals. Plans will include a section for general enrollment and retention and for minority enrollment and retention.
  
  
• Support Admissions: 
  Maintain mutually supportive relationships with the Office of Admissions. Organize and support recruitment visits and activities at regional high schools and community colleges.
  
  
• Increase scholarships: 
  Seek to establish endowed and other scholarships that can be effectively used to promote recruitment and retention.

II. Advising

• Support the college advising center:
  Continue to support and expand the activities of the college advising center, which is an integral and active part of the college. Beginning with the response to prospective students regarding programs and curricula within the college, to the culmination of an admitted student declaring a major, the advising center has become an indispensable part of recruiting, admitting, retaining and graduating students.
  
  
• Support faculty advising:
  Support a campus-wide advising system based on faculty advising. Support the development of good faculty advisers through biennial advising workshops organized with the leadership of the college advising center. Institute and conduct an annual college-wide assessment of advising. Support the purchase and installation of a modern computerized student information system that can be accessed, used and queried by all faculty members.

III. Curriculum

• Support the graduate programs:
  Continue to provide the master of natural science graduate program (biology, chemistry, geosciences, mathematics and science education) and seek additional resources (both internal and external) to support this program, including the addition of graduate-level faculty. Where feasible, increase the number of options for the MNS degree (computer sciences, environmental science, physics).
  
  
• Support the undergraduate programs:
  Continue to be responsive to the needs of the region, state and nation by constant revision of existing undergraduate programs and the creation of new programs.