Strategic Plan 2025-2028
GateWay Community College (GWCC) engages in continuous strategic planning to enhance quality and ensure long-term success. Its vision is to educate and innovate to prepare tomorrow’s workforce, guided by a mission that provides accessible learning opportunities for all community members. As a College of Well-Being, GWCC promotes five core values: Character, Care, Connection, Contribution, and Career. The first strategic priority emphasizes community engagement, student success, and post-completion outcomes through partnerships, academic planning, and enrollment initiatives. The second focuses on maintaining leadership in workforce development by aligning programs with labor market needs and integrating emerging technologies. The third ensures responsible stewardship of resources through process improvement, operational discipline, and employee well-being. The fourth aims to produce graduates who are critical thinkers, problem solvers, and civically engaged individuals who embody compassion and care for humanity.
Strategic Priorities
GateWay Community College will be unwavering in our commitment to our community and to student learning, access, success, and post-completion impacts.
- Provide value-added opportunities for the community and community partners that enhance student learning and community impact like HUG, SaPHE, St. Mary’s food distribution, and our partnership with First Place Transition Academy.
- Demonstrate quality student learning through student learning outcomes assessment, as outlined in our GateWay Academic Plan, focused on robust, cyclical learning outcomes assessment processes that drive evidence-based improvements to curriculum, pedagogy, student supports, and academic operations.
- Realize our Strategic Enrollment Management, Marketing, and GateWay Academic Plan goals focused on advancing student access, success, and post-completion outcomes designed to improve enrollment efforts and persistence, graduation, and transfer rates while closing opportunity gaps for underserved groups across all modalities.
- Accomplish Aspen Unlocking Opportunity program goals designed to ensure the following post-completion impacts: 1) Establish a family sustaining wage for program offerings, 2) Increase the number of students in high-value programs that lead directly to a well-paid job or to transfer and a bachelor’s degree, and 3) Decrease the number of students in lower-value pathways that are unlikely to prepare them for good jobs or further education at the bachelor’s level.
GateWay Community College will be the preferred leader in workforce development through our in-demand and innovative mix of programs leading to the workforce or transfer.
- Remain a preferred leader in industry alignment and seamless transfer by expanding apprenticeships, prior learning assessment, and workforce programs that directly respond to regional labor-market demand through our unique credit, clock-hour, and non-credit platforms that are leveraged to deliver short-term, industry-aligned education for upskilling and reskilling.
- Ensure emerging technologies, like AI, are thoughtfully and ethically integrated into instruction, assessment, and student supports in order to mirror contemporary workplace tools and enhance quality.
- Achieve GWCC’s Workforce Strategies Council and Aspen Unlocking Opportunity program goals of ensuring programmatic offerings are in-demand, stackable, and connected to high-value opportunities or transfer pathways.
- Implement non-credit training that leads to an industry or workplace recognized credential and supporting the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Maricopa County through training and hands-on prototyping and fabrication facilitated by the Phoenix Forge and the Center for Entrepreneurial Innovation.
GateWay Community College will be effective stewards of resources through mission and operational discipline.
- Achieve our HLC Quality Initiative goals focused on developing and sustaining operational and mission discipline through process analysis, documentation, and continuous improvement.
- Achieve the goals of our Annual Review process designed to ensure departments define their purpose, reflect on their performance, and establish priorities for the coming year that align to the College’s Institutional Plans, Strategic Priorities, and our Mission.
- Accomplish Administrative Services Plan goals designed to ensure GWCC is an effective steward of resources.
- Integrate College of Well-being and Professional Development and Training goals in order to ensure a culture of well-being, employee growth, continuous learning, and professional excellence assuring GWCC remains a great place to work. When employees thrive, students thrive.
GateWay Community College will produce students and graduates who are critical thinkers, problem solvers, and civically engaged members of their communities who have care and compassion for humanity.
- Through intentional professional development, faculty in all disciplines are equipped to infuse critical thinking, problem-solving, and civic engagement across the curriculum.
- Ensure students experience a robust general education that instills critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and civic engagement through exposure, instruction, and practice and demonstrate attainment of these skills through student learning outcomes assessment.
- Provide a breadth and depth of activities like guest speakers, related campus-wide events, and experiential and service learning offerings designed to reinforce critical thinking, problem solving, and civic engagement.
- Fully realize our College of Well-being Goals and 5C’s of well-being: Character, Care, Connection, Contribution, and Career.