Sustainable Operations

Goal E: Sustainable Operations

Maximize our operational portfolio

In its nearly fifty-year history, UHD has undergone many changes including the steady growth of its student population, which now numbers over 15,000, making it Houston’s second largest university. To address this growth, the physical plant has been expanded with significant renovations and the recent addition of two new buildings—the Marilyn Davies College of Business and the College of Sciences and Technology—and a Student Wellness & Success Center currently under construction. All of this is to the good, yet it would be a sign of complacency to declare that this is adequate going forward.

The university is primed for bolder action to serve its student population ever better. Serving students begins with recruiting, enrolling, retaining, and graduating them, which is why a strategic enrollment management plan is crucial to implementing “A New Paradigm” and increasing student success.

This plan sees us laying a foundation in the next five years for what UHD might become by 2042. Included in this foundation is continuing to be good stewards of the university’s human, physical, and fiscal resources. This will require careful planning and implementation to

• Increase revenue, especially from diversified sources.
• Leverage technology to keep up with changing conditions in research, instruction, and operational functions.
• Increase enrollment and enrollment revenues.
• Incentivize administrative collaboration, coordination, and communication to create more efficient and effective operations.
• Address university renovations in coordination with deferred maintenance.
• Spur grant applications to promote grants in research and creative activities areas.

If operations are to become sustainable, we will need to address how we work, how we make use of resources, and how the universities will respond to climate change in a city already challenged by that change.