Over the next six months Cal State LA will be working with faculty, staff, and students to build a new student oriented plan that “reveals the institution’s highest and most important priorities,” putting Cal State LA students in the marketplace and a plan that the campus community can be proud to call its own.
The process was kicked off during Cal State LA President Berencea Johnson Eanes’ speech at the Convocation ceremony where she “challenged” Cal State LA “to a strategic planning process” that is built on affordability, student success, resilience, and partnerships.
The University Strategic Plan is one out of four that are currently being developed by Cal State LA over the next several months to further the mission of the campus. These other plans include the Facilities Master Plan, the Academic Master Plan and Strategic Enrollment Management Plan.
The strategic planning framework will be completed over the next six months and will be developed and presented to Eanes by Mar. 1, 2026, according to Timothy Mottet, the facilitator for the strategic planning process, and a consultant with the American Association of State Colleges.
The plan will be presented to the campus community after administrators determine the best way to implement those goals, and how to complete each individual objective of the project.
As a part of this strategic planning process which happens in six year increments, Cal State LA will work to redefine its mission, vision, and values over the next several months with listening sessions, and other feedback opportunities for students. The University Times attended one of the listening sessions on Sept. 16 which had been announced in a campuswide email earlier this month.
“I’ve had two wonderful days here,” Mottet said after the final listening session on Sept. 16.
“And I’ve met a lot of highly engaged people with a lot of ideas and I’m feeling pretty pumped.”
The event on Sept. 16, had a total of 12 attendees which included one student and approximately six or seven faculty and staff. The remaining attendees were administrators and those facilitating the event.
“Your participation this past week in engagement sessions marked a powerful start to our shared work,” a campus-wide email said. “We are grateful for the reflections, questions, and aspirations brought to the conversation. This is a process of planning. Yet, beyond that, we are seeking to hear each other as we move steadfastly with conviction.”
The effort to do a new plan at Cal State LA comes after the CSU released their own plan earlier in September that laid the groundwork for their vision for the next six years.
“This will be Cal State LA’s own strategic plan, but it’ll be important that our plan aligns and maps some of the priorities as reflected in the CSU master plan,” Mottet said. “You should not see a one-to-one alignment, but there should be a pattern that we’re moving in a similar direction.”
As Cal State LA moves forward beyond the first day of listening sessions amid this renewed strategic planning effort with its thousands of stakeholders, it is closely aligning its efforts with the final strategic plan that determines systemwide student success goals and milestones for the next three and six years.
In the CSU process over the last year the planning for the strategic plan involved systemwide stakeholders, which included faculty and students from each campus, 27 listening sessions, town halls, Board of Trustees (BOT) retreats, and later the finalization of this plan. The final part of the process consisted of building an implementation timeline and getting final approvals from the systemwide BOT earlier this month.
This systemwide plan “offers a guiding framework for alignment across campus-level plans while allowing universities to address their unique needs of the communities they serve.” And “defines the CSU’s overarching vision – providing clarity and ensuring that all constituents and stakeholders understand the CSU’s identity, values and strategic priorities, as well as how we intend to advance those priorities.”
The strategic plan was last updated in September 2016 when Cal State LA launched their campus wide version of Graduation Initiative 202. Which further refined the efforts by the entire CSU system to bolster enrollment, increase graduation rates, eliminate equity gaps in degree completion, and to meet California’s workforce needs, according to the CSU Graduation Initiative 2025 website.
This was the second Graduation Initiative effort after the CSU officially began this work in 2009, according to a timeline of the Graduation Initiative.
Over the course of the program the CSU has spent over $400 million on the program, according to a November 2024 CalMatters report; however for this year there’s $20 million budgeted across the 22 CSUs for the continuation of student access and these graduation initiatives in their 2025-2026 campus funding plan. It is unclear how much funding Cal State LA has available to continue these efforts and future plans.
Following the completion of the Graduation Initiative 2025 this year and the beginnings of a new six year effort, the CSU will hold a two-day online Symposium on Oct. 15-16 that “celebrates our remarkable efforts to uplift student success across the system.”
Students can continue to be a part of the strategic planning process, as Cal State LA will have a new website that will have additional information about this process. Mottet said that students and faculty will be updated when opportunities for their input arise, including surveys in October, and additional in-person sessions for on-campus groups, which will happen in early November.
