Michigan State University President Reflects on 2021, Looks Ahead to 2022

<p>“It's an exciting time of the year,” says <a href="https://president.msu.edu">President Stanley</a>. “These commencement days are my favorite days. It's just such a joyous occasion as these students reach the finish line and celebrate with their families and friends. I never tire of it. It's always exciting.”</p><p>As an eventful 2021 draws to a close, Stanley reflects with pride on student success initiatives and three strategic plans published this year.</p><p>“Student success is one of the pillars of our <a href="https://strategicplan.msu.edu">strategic plan</a>. And for the seventh year in a row, we raised our graduation rates and that's difficult to do. My hat's off to the people who work on student success and to the students and their resilience. Even in these tough times, we're seeing a continuation of this wonderful trend. And to get the graduation rate up to over 82 percent is a huge change from years ago. It speaks to the idea that what we want to do is have every student who comes to Michigan State University leave with a Michigan State University degree. And how you make that possible and the work it takes to do that is significant, but that's our goal and we're putting it on us, not on students, but on us. If we accept you to Michigan State University, we feel it's our role to help you graduate and see you through that degree.</p><p>“Commencement represents the culmination of that. I'm also just really proud that we had as close to a normal semester as we could. It's been a challenging semester. There have been a couple of incidents that everyone knows about that have been tragic and troubling. Yet, at the same time, we brought 16,000 students back to living on campus. We conducted our classes in person as we said we would do with, of course, a mix of hybrid and online. And to successfully accomplish that, again, speaks to me to the resiliency of students and the innovation and skill of our faculty and staff to make it all work.</p><p>“And three new strategic plans address relationship v