Mt. Hood Community College Strategic Plan

The public two-year community college was at a crossroads. Mt. Hood Community College (MHCC) serves one of the most racially and socio-economic diverse districts of all the 17 community college districts in Oregon. It was experiencing several internal and external pressures that, if left unaddressed, could impede progress and be a barrier to closing the achievement gap for historically underrepresented students.

With new leadership and administration, the College needed to update its Strategic Plan to guide them for the next five years. The strategic planning process included a robust engagement strategy with the college community, business partners, K-12 school districts, and business partners. The engagement strategy itself was intentional and focused on making new community connections and building bridges between committed long-term staff and faculty, student support services, and the surrounding community the college serves.

Working groups, made up of a cross section of employees and students, drafted objectives and actions in five different goal areas—which would become the body of the Strategic Plan. Each goal area includes outcome-based performance indicators, developed with the MHCC Office of Assessment and Institutional Effectiveness, Analytics and Institutional Research.