Students walk on the campus of Marietta College. The college is undergoing many changes, including a new strategic plan, Marietta Forward, and searching for a new president. (Photo By Michelle Dillon)

MARIETTA — Marietta College announced in October 2023 that it was getting rid of 10 programs, but that is just the start of the changes coming to the school in the years ahead.

The effort to make changes at MC started in 2022, when the school brought in AGB Consulting to help create a strategic plan. Out of that came 27 initiatives. There were too many to tackle at once, so the school narrowed it down to five important initiatives, according to MC Vice President of Communication and Brand Management Tom Perry.

The Board of Trustees approved a strategic plan, called Marietta Forward, in October 2023, according to a copy of the strategic plan on MC’s website.

“Our strategic plan, our mission, has to be focused on the students. We’ve talked about being a student ready college,” Perry said. “Student-ready college truly means, from the way we’re looking at it, (that) we’re providing the resources, we are doing what we can to meet students where they are and help elevate them to another place.”

Perry said it used to be colleges saying students should be college ready. There is now a shift to being a student-ready college, where schools are meeting students where they are when they come to college and helping them learn the skills they need or develop the things they need to be successful in college.

“You see the old movies where it’d be like ‘Look to your left, look to your right, one of you is not going to be here at the end.’ That can’t be the way college functions anymore, and it should not be the way we function,” Perry said. “We have to look at everybody as being individuals and they have specific talents and sometimes they might have specific needs that we can help them with.”

One of the first things the school did as part of the strategic plan was discontinue the Asian studies, environmental engineering, ESL and linguistics, global leadership studies, land and energy management, music education, music therapy, Spanish and vocal performance undergraduate programs and the athletic training graduate program in October 2023.

“We are constantly reviewing our programs,” Perry said.

On Jan. 30, MC released details of the strategic plan, Marietta Forward.

“Marietta Forward responds to the changing environment within higher education,” MC President Margaret Drugovich said in a media release. “The plan includes significant expansion of critical support services that will help to ensure the success of every Marietta College student. Our new and enhanced program offerings will better serve the needs of both traditional and non-traditional students.”

The plan is made up of five strategic initiatives and contains a long list of efforts and projects related to those initiatives. The strategic initiatives are: fully implement student-ready college initiatives; strengthen current academic programs; develop new education programs focused on non-traditional student education and workforce development; identify and launch new academic programs; and create a campus culture of support for individual leadership, inclusion and belonging, accordion to a copy of the plan on MC’s website.

As part of Marietta Forward, MC will address recommendations listed in the Student Ready College Quality Initiative, which were approved by the Higher Learning Commission as part of the school’s reaccreditation cycle, the plan said.

According to the plan, the recommendations include increasing staff at the Academic Resource Center, hiring a full-time position in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion to support student engagement and hiring a diversity recruiter position in Admissions to support efforts to recruit more diverse populations. The diversity recruiter position had previously been a position at the college but had lost its funding.

According to Marietta Forward, MC also plans on implementing campus-wide customer service training that will include creating and publishing how-to guides for procedures in one online location, providing a resource directory to families, designating a single office as the Help Desk location to send students uncertain of where to go and providing and requiring training to be held regularly for students and employees for DEI topics/issues that includes multiple layers of diversity beyond race and ethnicity.

MC plans to review each academic program every four years and will identify and track direct and indirect costs of programs and expects to save approximately $1.55 million by the end of FY 2026 through program elimination, the plan said.

As part of Marietta Forward, MC will develop programming and curricular innovations at the McDonough Center for Leadership and Business and finalize the leadership structure of the center by March 1, the plan said.

MC will implement non-degree workforce development programs by offering regional executive education and workforce development programs by July 2025 and will create a new division, the Marietta College Division of Executive Education and Workforce Development, which they will launch in May 2024, to administer these new workforce development programs, according to the plan.

MC will offer new, in-demand areas of study and will use market-demand research and feasibility studies to decide which programs to add, including possible programs in Communication, Graphic Design, Musical Theater, Data Science, Justice Studies and Health Administration, the plan said.

The plan said to be able to provide a more welcoming, inclusive environment for students and employees from all backgrounds and cultures, the college plans over the life of Marietta Forward on increasing its diversity similar to the diversity of the college-going population in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Indiana, Kentucky and Michigan; increasing the diversity of its employee community; increasing retention of both diverse students and employees; and increasing the number and proportion of students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups.

According to the strategic plan, Marietta Forward is projected to cost $17,722,849 for fiscal years 2024-2028 and if projected revenue and savings brought about by the plan are included, $4,666,738.The funding for the strategic plan will come from new funding sources such as grants and philanthropic gifts, new program revenues and also through the redistribution of current resources, according to a strategic plan overview.

According to Perry, besides working on all the plans included in Marietta Forward, MC is currently conducting a presidential search. Drugovich, the interim president, was only appointed to a one-year term and it ends June 30. MC is currently reviewing the people who applied for the position and hopes to start doing interviews in March or April, with plans to announce the new president by mid-spring.

MC will be implementing staffing changes in the future as well. The school announced in a media release Feb. 9 it will eliminate 36 currently employed faculty and staff roles over the next three years, due to a need to establish a more sustainable financial base for future operations.Thirteen vacant roles will not be filled either.

According to Perry, of the 36 positions being cut, 22 are full or part-time faculty positions and 14 are administrative positions. No tenured faculty are included in the cuts. A majority of the 14 administrative positions will be eliminated as of March 1. Some of the faculty being eliminated will complete their contract requirements this academic year and the rest will complete their instructional responsibilities during the 2024-25 academic year.

Michelle Dillon can be reached at mdillon@newsandsentinel.com