NMC Board Approves New Three-Year Strategic Plan

Northwestern Michigan College (NMC) officially has a new strategic plan.

At their regular December meeting on Monday evening, the NMC Board of Trustees voted unanimously to approve the college’s new 2026-2029 strategic plan. The document establishes three core strategies to orient NMC’s direction and decision-making throughout that three-year period, as well as four “strategic drivers” to serve as guiding principles. Each strategy also has 4-5 specific objectives tied to it.

Jason Slade, NMC’s vice president for strategic initiatives, led the strategic planning process. He has repeated throughout the plan’s development that some 80 percent of the document is a carryover from NMC Next, the college’s 2022-25 strategic plan. NMC Next included five strategic categories: future-focused education; student engagement and success; diversity, equity, and inclusion; community partnerships and engagement, and institutional distinction and sustainability. The new plan condenses and streamlines those elements into just three strategies, outlined below:

1. Future-Focused Education: This section of the plan calls for NMC to “equip learners for a rapidly changing world through purposeful academic pathways, durable skills, and technology literacy.” Specific objectives include strengthening outcomes through “responsible and effective use” of artificial intelligence; expanding “experiential and work-based learning” opportunities; bolstering NMC programs “that attract students from beyond northwest Michigan” – such as the Great Lakes Maritime Academy or the aviation program; and offering better support to at-risk students or “courses with high D/F/W rates.”

2. Enrollment and Student Success: This strategy focuses on growing NMC’s enrollment and graduation rates “by removing barriers and ensuring every learner experiences the coordinated support needed to persist and achieve their goals.” Objectives focus on coordination and integration across student services, academic program, public relations, marketing and communications, advising, and “key local audiences” – including high school and adult learners – “to ease the enrollment and success pathways” at the college. This section of the plan also pushes to “expand flexible learning options and clarify stackable pathways so every student, especially adult, rural, and part-time learners, can advance toward employment or further education.”

3. Vibrant College Community: Here, the college hopes to “improve the places, systems, and supports that shape life at NMC, making it easier for students and employees to connect, succeed, and take pride in their work and learning.” Granular objectives touch upon elements of NMC’s recently-adopted campus master plan, including moving forward with the buildout of a new student services hub at NMC’s Osterlin Building and new student housing. Other priorities include renewing campus by “addressing aging facilities” and “enhancing landscaping and gathering areas,” creating new opportunities for students to engage with one another, modernizing NMC’s “core operational systems,” and strengthening the college's reputation as an employer by “implementing improvements to staffing, workload, and compensation systems.”

Beyond the specific strategies and objectives, the plan is also underlined by a quartet of “strategic drivers”: living our brand, community partnerships, stewardship and sustainability, and people first.

While the 2026-2029 strategic plan is now officially approved, Slade told commissioners that it could still evolve, particularly as the college moves through the “preliminary phase” of implementation. That phase will run from January to June of next year.

“So, we’ll be diving into those objectives [and] continue to refine those, with the goal of coming back to the board of trustees in springtime and going strategy by strategy, objective by objective, as we look at: What are our baseline metrics? Where do we want to go? Why is this the direction we should be going as we pull that data?”

Year one of the three-year plan is slated to start officially on July 1, to coincide with the start of NMC’s new fiscal year.

NMC Board Chair Laura Oblinger said the plan has her feeling “quite enthused about what we’re going to accomplish in these next few years,” praising in particular the fact that “it remains a very living document” and that Slade has “left room in this plan for us to bring in new innovative ideas as they arise.”

The plan, as approved, can be found on pages 4-7 of last night’s NMC board packet.