Officials unveiled the first phase of the University’s strategic framework Tuesday, outlining three initial priorities as they explore new funding options before doling out money to costly initiatives amid GW’s ongoing budget deficit.
University President Ellen Granberg and Interim Provost John Lach in an email to the community Tuesday launched GW’s strategic framework, including a website that details the two overarching principles of GW’s new roadmap — increasing student success and growing GW’s research enterprise — and announcing three working groups to oversee implementation. The announcement calls on community members to engage and contribute to the strategic framework’s implementation over the next several years as it launches amid officials’ hesitance to fund certain initiatives as the University faces a straining budget deficit.
The framework, which marks the GW’s first strategic blueprint for the University’s direction since 2020, outlines three key priorities and 12 goals GW plans to accomplish in the next five to seven years, which officials will implement in a phased approach to ensure “clear progress” and adaptability over time, according to its website. The website states that adopting a framework — rather than a plan, as GW did under former University President Thomas LeBlanc — outlines overarching priorities instead of specific steps to maintain flexibility amid constant change, a distinction it says is especially important given the uncertainty of today’s rapidly evolving higher education landscape.
“GW is poised to build on its foundation of excellence to achieve distinction of the highest order as we equip every student for success, push forward the frontiers of knowledge and discovery and expand our impact far beyond campus walls,” Granberg said in the release.
In an interview with The Hatchet, Granberg and Lach detailed officials’ work over the past year to develop the framework and officials’ current focus as they seek to increase revenue to fund certain initiatives.
To achieve what officials dubbed “Raising Higher: OneGW’s Path to Preeminence,” Granberg said the framework also has three overarching priorities, including generating scholarship with impact, preparing students to be strong and resilient leaders and strengthening the University’s foundation for excellence. Officials under each priority on the website detailed between three and six goals they would use to help achieve each goal, including meeting the full demonstrated financial need of residential undergraduate students and supporting graduate and professional programs through enhancing curriculum.
Granberg said the framework’s research goals ensure the University has a “real-world impact” by giving faculty the opportunity for their research to expand beyond publishing papers, like working with the Smithsonian or Congress. She added the goal pushes GW toward a more interdisciplinary approach to research because the world’s “really big problems” aren’t single-discipline issues.
“Think about climate change. That’s not a chemistry problem, it’s not an engineering problem, it’s not a communications problem,” Granberg said. “It’s putting all those together that you find the solution.”
Granberg said the framework’s second priority — preparing students to be strong and resilient leaders — involves student success, including the “ambitious goal” of trying to meet the full demonstrated need for all residential undergraduate students. She said officials will accomplish this goal by “fundraising hard” for more scholarships, which is part of the reason why it will take the University the length of the framework’s full implementation to achieve.
She said GW needs to grow the endowment to continuously supply financial aid to students in order to sustain the long-term goal. GW’s endowment stood at $2.8 billion at the end of fiscal year 2025, which increased by roughly $100 million in the last quarter.
Granberg pointed to Boston University’s 2019 decision to begin meeting the full demonstrated financial need of all domestic undergraduate students starting with the class entering in fall 2020. BU pledged in 2019 to meet 100 percent of need-based financial aid for incoming students starting in 2020, an announcement that came months after the university closed FY2019 with a $2.2 billion endowment.
“This is going to take time, but if we don’t put the stake in the ground, we won’t reach it,” Granberg said.
Granberg said the framework’s last priority of operational excellence will aim to create an underlying foundation of resources to help students graduate at higher rates, ensure they have better experiences while attending the University and pave a clear path for students and staff to conduct more impactful research.
She said there’s “an enormous amount” the University can do to make a big difference with the resources the institution already has rather than funding new initiatives, which is the focus of the first phase of the framework’s implementation.
Granberg said last month at a Faculty Senate meeting she wanted to hold off on funding “fancy initiatives” for the framework until the University’s budget stabilizes, but officials will focus on the three initiatives they determined are most essential to the community and that can be built on without significant financial investment.
She said officials will review proposals for using the additional funding once it becomes available and decide which initiatives get funded by determining whether they work to achieve the framework’s two main goals of improving student success and expanding research. Granberg also said officials are looking at how they can more efficiently make use of their current resources to generate more revenue while also looking for new opportunities for funding, like through philanthropy, instead of having to “heavily” increase student tuition.
“That’s part of how we’re going to start because what I don’t want to do right now is to take an existing budget situation where we are under constraint and start investing in new things,” Granberg said. “That would not make sense to do right now.”
Lach said the University has been working on implementing the framework prior to Tuesday’s official launch through projects like campus beautification, the development of a new budget model to support the framework’s priorities and the effort to create a new campus master plan in support of the plan.
He said officials launched three working groups to implement three major ideas officials heard from community members the “loudest” over the past year, including enhancing GW’s interdisciplinary research ecosystem, better leveraging D.C. experiences as part of student learning and improving academic and career advising.
“In each of these working groups, their very first deliverable is to be coming up with a plan for how we’re going to engage with the community, which, of course, includes students and alumni and community members,” Lach said.
He said officials will implement the strategic framework in a phased approach and will identify subsequent working groups to ultimately pursue the framework’s two goals of increasing student success and growing GW’s research enterprise. The framework’s website states the next phase of its implementation will be announced within 18 to 24 months and expand on its foundation of introducing projects and initiatives after identifying additional funding.
“The work has just begun, really, and we want to ask the entire community to embrace this framework as our own and look for those opportunities to provide ideas and to engage and to help drive forward on this path to preeminence,” Lach said.
Granberg said she’s learned from previous strategic plans she’s worked on in her career that a plan should not be “hatched quietly” as the community should evaluate the ideas officials come up with and officials should listen and allow their thinking to be changed. She added officials initially planned to focus only on student success and research, but added the priority to build on the University’s underlying foundation for excellence after receiving community feedback.
The University has lacked a strategic plan since 2020 when officials dubbed LeBlanc’s plan to cut undergraduate enrollment by 20 percent while increasing STEM majors by 30 percent “obsolete” due to the COVID-19 pandemic, after critics of the plan said it lacked community input.
Granberg announced the strategic framework planning process in February 2024. Since then, officials have held a series of discussions with students, faculty, staff and alumni to inform the framework and charged two committees to identify opportunities to include in it and assess their impact and feasibility to implement.
Officials in April released a draft framework for feedback from the community before the Board of Trustees adopted the final strategic framework during their June retreat with no amendments.
“That was very intentional, because we wanted to learn, but we also wanted to give the community an opportunity to build its own ownership,” Granberg said. “And so the idea is to continue that spirit as we move into them.”
Tyler Iglesias contributed reporting.
