2013-14 Operating & Capital Budget Plan - Cornell University ...

Strategic PlanningSince its founding, Cornell University has engaged in the cycle of informed self-examinationand self-improvement. At times this process has been ad hoc, but Cornell has made substantialstrides in systematizing the collection and reporting of data relating to the delivery ofits mission.Strategic Planning36To further support the culture of assessment at theuniversity, the office of Institutional Research &Planning (IRP) has developed the Strategic Metricsdashboard, http://irp.dpb.cornell.edu/strategic-metrics.This dashboard tracks Cornell’s progress on the objectivesin the five areas of the Strategic Plan, CornellUniversity at its Sesquicentennial:• Faculty Excellence• Educational Excellence• Excellence in Scholarship• Excellence in Public Engagement• Staff ExcellenceThe Strategic Metrics dashboard features one pagefor each of these five areas, with figures or tablesthat provide targeted, essential performance indicatorsrelevant to university objectives in each area.For example, in the area of Faculty Excellence, theStrategic Metrics dashboard features indicators relevantto faculty renewal (such as faculty aging andfaculty hiring) and faculty salary.As acknowledged within the Strategic Plan itself, “itis exceedingly difficult to develop fully adequatemeasures of progress toward greater excellence in aresearch university, [and] no particular metrics orqualitative indicators will be sufficient.” At the sametime, it is also the case that “some sets or combinationsof [measures] will be significantly better fortracking progress than others or than having none.”The Strategic Metrics dashboard should not be understoodas a comprehensive evaluation of progresson the Strategic Plan’s objectives, but it does providea set of quantitative indicators that are important tokey objectives. Supplemented with other quantitativedata as well as qualitative measures at the university-and unit-level, this dashboard providescritical context for annual discussions of progress onthe Strategic Plan. The next page provides severalexamples of figures contained in the dashboard.In addition to these five focal areas, two additionalpages track indicators of central importance. First,the Core Metrics page includes subsections on Headcounts,Endowment & Gifts, Tuition & Financial Aid,and Selected Rankings. Second, the Diversity pagedisplays the university’s Diversity Dashboard, a concisepresentation of the demographic composition ofundergraduate students, graduate and professionalstudents, faculty, other academic employees, andnonacademic staff.