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Students began classes for the semester on Monday. Hours later, ������� President Doug Hicks ’90 launched an ambitious, strategic plan for the coming years. Students, faculty, staff and alumni collaborated in the research and ideas over the past year. Under the plan, the college aspires to help the community and world around it build discourse amid division, navigate rapid technological change and help solve the biggest problems that confront us.  

“Our mission is leadership and service,” Hicks said. “We are educating for it, preparing students to pursue it, contributing to it and clarifying what it is in an ever-more complex world. Through our students, our graduates and our commitments as an institution, we fulfill that mission with the goal of improving the lives of our neighbors next door and around the globe.” 

The college’s plan includes, among other steps: 

• A new Institute for Public Good to cultivate students as effective, ethical leaders and citizens. 
• A greater presence in Charlotte as part of increased collaboration with both the Town of ������� and the Charlotte metro area. 
• Developing Beaver Dam plantation, homestead of the ������� family, as a site for the study of institutional and local history and descendant outreach — part of increased study of the college’s history around race and reconciliation.
• Increasing funding to support �������’s rare financial aid approach of: admitting without looking at what the applicant can pay, covering the bills beyond the family’s calculated contribution, and doing so without putting loans in financial aid packages. 
• Building a “learning for life” program that helps students shape careers and commitments, and connect what they are learning in the classroom with where they see themselves contributing in the world. 

In its first 187 years, the college has adapted and remained critically relevant as society and the economy around it transformed. 

“We are embarking on a strategic plan that will help guide us into the next decade,” Hicks said. “The thoughtful priorities within it will strengthen the ������� experience and enable the college to thrive in a sometimes strained and chaotic atmosphere.”