A Strategic Plan for the Graduate Unit at UNAN-MANAGUA, FAREM-CARAZO

Abstract

Today higher education is facing a number of requirements and demands of both the educational spheres of society itself. Thus, public and private universities are in urgent need to provide quality service under the legal rules of the education system (Albarran Diaz Burgos & Carranza, 2012, p. 10).

Through strategic plans, companies respond to the needs and demands of the competitive environment. UNAN-MANAGUA has its own Institutional Strategic Plan, for its acronym in Spanish (PEI) but the complexity of its organizational structure warrants a constant and depth evaluation in each of its faculties and even more in its dependent areas, as the Graduate Unit case in FAREM-CARAZO, which has presented internal difficulties since its inception. In this study an assessment of key internal and external factors were reflected in matrixes of strategic analysis. Based on the results, the strategies that Graduate Unit has to follow were obtained in order to achieve institutional strategic objectives. These strategies are presented in this article.

External and internal factors resulted from the application of qualitative and quantitative methods, including key informant interviews related to the activities of the graduate unit and document review of surveys this unit makes to its students, also a study of the external environment through a documentary review in sources such as the Central Bank of Nicaragua and other reports that allow information about universities nationwide, informal interviews from other universities and the method of self-reflective observation by the researcher. The analysis of these instruments allowed defining strategies around the axes posed by the Institutional Strategic Plan 2015-2019 in terms of management, teaching, projection and extension and internationalization.