Student in lab looking at a petri dish

Pillar 4 Progress New Paths for Our Brilliant Future

Under “New Paths for Our Brilliant Future,” our 2016 strategic plan committed to:

  • Developing a sustainable financial plan.
  • Making fundraising a central feature of our academic planning and leadership culture.
  • Bolstering and positioning staff to more effectively support the academic mission.
  • Expanding, building, and maintaining an excellent physical infrastructure.
  • Ensuring a high-quality, ubiquitous, secure, and robust information technology infrastructure.

We stand behind these goals and have made significant progress. The University of California recently reached a five-year compact agreement with the State of California and a new cohort-based tuition model began in fall 2022, providing a greater level of predictability for campus planning efforts. Since 2016, we have launched 15 new professional programs to meet employer demand for highly educated, diverse talent with master’s degrees in fields including Data Science, Human-Computer Interaction and Design, and Innovation and Entrepreneurship. During that same period, campus research funding has increased from $395 million to more than $590 million in contracts and grants. Our Brilliant Future Campaign, the most ambitious fundraising effort in school history, has reached over 63,000 engaged alumni and raised over $1.5 billion.

The vision and generosity of UC Irvine leaders and philanthropists has allowed for vital campus expansion, including construction of the innovative Anteater Learning Pavilion, Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Building, and several housing projects to benefit both undergraduate and graduate students. The new UC Irvine Medical Center – Irvine will include a 144-bed acute care hospital with an emergency department, ambulatory surgery center, National Cancer Institute-designated Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, and outpatient Joe C. Wen and Family Center for Advanced Care.

Over the past seven years, we have reorganized our Human Resources operations into a partnership model. A central team, with expertise in workforce planning, organizational effectiveness, talent management, total rewards, HR technology and data, policy and compliance, and workforce relations, now collaborates with HR Business Partners in academic and administrative units to provide enterprise-wide strategic planning and support.

Since the release of the strategic plan, we have made significant investments in our technology infrastructure. These investments include strengthening the resilience of our campus systems, developing collaborative strategies for institutional use and partnership around data, and creating an enterprise function to drive the strategic use of technology and data in support of the institutional mission.

We stand behind these goals.