At [School Name], our mission is to provide a quality education and career skills for our students through professional training, in a community of learning.
Does that sound familiar? It should. In fact, it is a statement made up of only the top 40 most used words in a college mission statement. It is not the exact statement of any one institution, but it may describe the mission of most institutions. A mission statement is meant to help guide an organization. In times of conflict or confusion, the mission statement exists as a means of letting all employees know what it is that the organization focuses on and ultimately, provides, as a means of providing direction.
Ultimately, for institutions of higher education, the mission is basically the same no matter the institution, “provide a quality education for students”. This is/should be the goal for every educational institution. The difficulty becomes how institution X accomplishes this differently than institution Y, something that is more suited in a position statement, but tends to find its way into the mission as well as a defining factor.
Using data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics, we analyzed the words used in mission statements of 1,940 institutions across the United States. This includes all institutions regardless of sector, specialty, or category that directly provided the institution’s mission statement. Those that included a link to a website that contained the institution’s mission statement were not included in this analysis.
There is no specific rules for a mission statement, other than the fact that it should be clear and drive your organization’s purpose. This is seen in the significant range of statements used within higher education. From the short statements by the Greater Johnstown Career and Technology Center of “Ensure Student Success” and the Pontotoc Technology Center of “Training to Succeed” to the 300-word statement provided by the Mariano Moreno Culinary Institute. The final mission statement is ultimately at the discretion of former or current leadership.
As for the words that are most often utilized by higher education institutions, words like “students”, “education”, “skills”, “career”, and “learning” make the most sense to be leverage most often as they tend to make up the basic structure of what an institution is or strives to be. Other words like “Cosmetology”, “Beauty”, and “Technical” are heavily used and represent a more specialized portion of the higher education landscape. Additionally, 86.6% of institutions analyzed included at least a portion of the institution’s name within the mission statement, making this technique particularly popular (although “we” was also used 999 times). The top 40 words used at these institutions both including articles like “and”, “the”, and “to” as well as without articles are shown in tables 1 and 2 below.
Table 1: Top 40 words used in mission statements of institutions of higher education
Table 2: Top 40 words (non-articles) used in mission statements of institutions of higher education
With the goal of remaining competitive in mind and trying to scoop out a unique niche in the market place, a unique mission could be the place to start in creating the guiding principles needed to create that niche. Interestingly, only 35 of the 1,940 institutions use the word “unique” within their mission statement. Although, it is likely that many more utilize this word as part of their marketing strategies. As for those that are truly unique, there are over 2,900 words, acronyms, or hyphenated phrases that are used exactly once (although many of these are related to an institution’s Name). A hand-picked selection of these words is shown in table 3.
Table 3: Select words used only once across mission statements of institutions of higher education
This is not to say that the usage of unique words will lead to the creation of a truly unique entity. In fact, it is likely that even those among the bottom 40 in this list are important to many institutions across the United States. The importance of the development of a mission statement remains the same no matter what words are used: embrace what you are meant to do and your individual approach, whether you are a fast-paced, equity-driven, world-renowned, active learning institution or an educational learning community.
Interested in how often the words of your mission statement are used at other institutions, utilize the dropdown in the search tool below. If you can not find your selected word, it is truly unique!
As for Evolve Market Research, our mission is to provide our clients with customized information and tools that will create a better understanding of market interests and plans for future development. If you are interested in learning how we can help your understanding of market interests, please email info@evolvemarketresearch.com.
Primary data sources: National Center for Education Statistics, IPEDS Data Center
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