The Alumni Relations department and the Alumni Board have re-engaged to rebuild alumni relationships through alumni events and improved communication and engagement. Building and strengthening alumni relationships is paramount to achieving many of the College’s strategic goals and is necessary for many other initiatives to succeed.
Goals Supported
The Retention Initiative pulls together a cross-divisional council to analyze and address the first-year undergraduate student retention rate. This initiative will create retention goals across the institution (i.e. within individual majors, for specific populations, etc.) and will build both holistic and area-specific strategies to meet those goals. This initiative will locate and address key barriers to retention, including financial challenges; academic and curricular barriers; structural deterrents; and broad student concerns and needs. These efforts reflect a commitment to inclusion and belonging, as well as to creating a vibrant community where all students can be high-achieving scholars, creatives, and communicators.
Goals Supported
Through external and internal research involving deep engagement with Emersonians, the Emerson Branding Initiative will allow the College to evaluate Emerson’s position in the marketplace and impact on cultural and prospective student conversations. This initiative will craft an updated expression of the Emerson College brand that authentically represents the College and effectively highlights the unique value of an Emerson education. The process will allow the College to refresh the key messaging and creative expression of the brand, inform all of the College’s communication platforms and materials, and provide clear guidelines and tools for Emersonians as brand ambassadors.
Goals Supported
The Emerson Career Readiness Initiative will gather, assess, review, and analyze current career development programs to improve and expand career initiatives at Emerson. This initiative will document current programs and resources, curate data on each program, and assess its effectiveness (job placement, salary, internships, etc.). It will also benchmark Emerson’s programs against peer institutions. This initiative will develop plans for potential investment, realignment, new programs, program integration, potential staffing, and targets for new comprehensive and coordinated career readiness programs, emphasizing increased alumni involvement and mentoring.
Goals Supported
This initiative involves developing a new comprehensive strategic enrollment plan for Emerson College focused on its mission, fostering growth, and ensuring excellence. It emphasizes strategic recruitment in key markets, utilizing data analytics to enhance enrollment, optimizing financial aid, and strengthening Emerson’s positioning. Key aspects include promoting inclusive access while boosting success through innovative programming, improved partnerships with high schools and communities, and retention strategies for undergraduate and graduate students. The strategic enrollment plan will attract, enroll, and retain an inclusive student population, supporting Emerson’s long-term goals and priorities.
Goals Supported
Emerson College is advancing and elevating the arts and media that serve, support, and enrich our campus and local communities. Through the Division of Media Arts and Ventures (DMAV), we will strengthen, coordinate, and strategically align our constellation of arts and media assets, positioning Emerson as Boston’s preeminent cultural destination and serve as a national model for arts-integrated higher education. DMAV will also explore and develop new opportunities for sustainable revenue generation, ensuring that Emerson’s distinctive creative assets are leveraged to their fullest potential.
Goals Supported
This initiative focuses on how the College fosters communication with and among members of the Emerson community. By developing people, processes, and products to support these efforts, the College will communicate administrative and academic priorities and goals more clearly and foster multidirectional communication with people across our campuses. These efforts will promote organizational alignment and bridge-building, supporting both the elimination of redundancies and the force-multiplication of efforts through shared intelligence. More effective internal communications will empower community members to feel engaged with and champion the Emerson College brand.
Goals Supported
This initiative will evolve the College’s institutional research capacity to holistically track the student journey from admissions to job placement to drive opportunities that improve yield, retention, engagement, and outcomes. It will also assess performance against the strategic plan by measuring outcomes of strategic initiatives, identifying risks or new opportunities based on trends, and performing continuous peer benchmarking and environment scanning to perform mid-term adjustments to the plan. This initiative will perform targeted market analysis to identify opportunities and workforce needs to inform the launch of new programs and identify strategic partners in industry for institutional leaders to pursue. Finally, the goal is to build a team that will serve as the central hub for ongoing analysis of program effectiveness and institutional efficiency, lead accreditation processes and compliance reporting, and reduce the administrative burden of departments College-wide.
Goals Supported
Emerson’s Queer Media and Arts Center brings together faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community partners focused on research, creativity, service, and teaching in queer arts and media as part of Extraordinary Emerson 2030. The Center supports interdisciplinary research, curricular innovation, and creative practice that critically examine culture and representation. As a collaborative space for scholars and artists across disciplines, the Center will coordinate research opportunities, support graduate and undergraduate researchers, advance fundraising, and serve as a thought leader for the broader creative industries.
Goals Supported