Fort Worth, Texas/Six Campuses
Following a 14-month institution-wide planning effort in collaboration with BOKA Powell, Tarrant County College District is implementing recommendations to support student learning and success in the 21st century. More than 1,100 students, faculty, staff, administrators and community members provided input and feedback throughout the development of the plan.
New learning environments foster engagement and improve learning outcomes, recommendations for flexible use of existing space reduces the need for new construction to accommodate growth, and new learning models both shift the need for physical space to cyberspace and afford students an opportunity to learn at their own pace. Centralizing student support services on each campus reduces stress on students seeking registry, advisement and financial functions, and a master plan for each of the District’s six campuses pulls recommendations for all physical changes together and describe how campuses grow and adapt over time.
TCC faces a prodigious headcount growth scenario: the doubling of duplicated headcount in a decade. While confronting this growth challenge, the District is focused on increasing student success through an emphasis on enrolling students of diverse backgrounds, improving the relevance of students’ skills in the workforce, fostering faculty-student and student-student engagement, ensuring accessibility and affordability, and improving student academic achievement as reflected in objective metrics.
This “DREAM” approach forms the basis of a planning model that will enable the College to mitigate institutional biases and political influences in decision making. A physical location on each campus, the Innovation Forum, provides a place and a process through the Urgency Model and Return on Student Investment (ROSI) model to develop, evaluate, prioritize and implement new academic programs, initiatives and facilities improvements. TCC is charting a new path in higher education planning and more effectively deploying scarce financial, physical and personnel resources by employing this strategic methodology.
