Published on October 3, 2025

Lake Land College recently unveiled a bold new strategic plan, “Education that Fits Your Life,” designed to reshape how students access and experience higher education. The plan lays the groundwork for many new college-wide initiatives that will provide students with crucial personalized support and empower them to balance their academic goals with their busy personal lives by providing more customer-centric schedules and learning options.

The “Education that Fits Your Life” strategic plan is centered on the voices of Lake Land College students, developed through direct feedback received in the spring of 2025 from the College community to address specific student needs. This feedback, coupled with research on national demographic and enrollment trends, led College leaders to identify several areas of opportunity to enhance the student experience and position the College for success into the future. The new strategic plan will prioritize personalized student support, streamlined enrollment processes and increased flexibility to ensure student success is more achievable than ever.

“When you consider higher education from a student lens, the reality is that students have many competing priorities, from jobs to families to personal lives,” Lake Land College President Josh Bullock said. “With our new strategic plan, our goal is to find opportunities to make college accessible to everyone. We want to assure students that no matter what, there is a pathway at Lake Land College to get them to their goals.”

For the first phase of the new strategic plan, college leadership will continue to engage in conversations with employees and the Lake Land student body, gathering feedback to develop a roadmap to achieve the plan’s objectives.

“It’s all about taking the time to understand what students need,” Bullock added. “Maybe that means we need to have more evening classes, or maybe every class we offer needs multiple modality options. These are just ideas, but our mission with this new plan is to be flexible and nimble enough to meet our students’ needs and be available to them when they need us.”

The strategic plan builds upon decades of success in developing programs that meet the needs of the Lake Land community. Years ago, Lake Land was among the earliest trailblazers in distance learning and online class options, and recently, the College has developed innovative class formats, such as Tech 2 Day and Flex Tech, in response to student and employer needs. Additional recent accomplishments include the implementation of evening-only classes and open-entry scheduling in programs such as HVAC as well as a 12-month continuous hybrid format in programs such as nursing and EMS. Recently, the College also became a national leader in co-requisite remediation, an innovative approach to remedial education that provides students with needed support in topics like math and English without slowing them down by enrolling them in non-credit bearing courses.

“I’m proud of the work we’ve done to rethink higher education to support our students’ needs, and I look forward to advancing this vision under the direction of our new strategic plan,” Bullock said. “Moving forward, we will prioritize these initiatives more than ever before, working to expand upon our recent successes and creating new, innovative pathways that will better serve our students, partners and communities for decades to come.”

The development of the new strategic plan is a proactive move by Lake Land College to address national trends regarding higher education. Increasingly, institutions across the nation face declining enrollment and student population, and more and more high school graduates are choosing to forgo higher education altogether in favor of immediately entering the workforce. In response to these national shifts, Lake Land College seeks to position itself as a model for how modern education can thrive in a dynamic academic landscape.

“As we look at national demographic and enrollment trends and witness shifting sentiments toward higher education, it is clear that many students have decided that the price of higher education is simply too high, and that extends far beyond the cost of tuition,” Bullock said. “Time, transportation, family commitments and employment needs are all crucial factors that often conflict with rigid class schedules. With ‘Education that Fits Your Life,’ we’ve considered all these factors and more, and we’re working to rethink what’s possible as we set the standard in accessible education.”

To view the complete Strategic Plan, visit the College’s website at LakeLandCollege.edu/about-us/strategic-plan/.