ISU President David Cook announces “moonshot” goals for future of university

Iowa State University President David Cook outlined his “moonshot” plans for the land grant university’s future Thursday during the ceremony officially installing him as its leader.

Cook, who started his tenure as president in March after Wendy Wintersteen’s retirement, told a crowd of government officials and Iowa State University students, staff, faculty and alumni that he’s traveled around Iowa to listen as he considers how to bring ISU’s spirit of belief in education, science, service and putting knowledge into practice forward.

What he learned, he said, is that ISU has both momentum and opportunity to build on its current strength within the pillars of its strategic plan, and Cook said he’s now thinking even bigger — and encouraged the audience to do the same.

The university president announced that by 2032, “we will elevate Iowa State to become a top 20 public land grant university with an annual economic impact of $8 billion.” According to a January study by Lightcast for the Iowa Board of Regents, ISU’s current economic impact is $6 billion and supports one out of every 36 jobs in Iowa.

“This moonshot provides an ambitious vision and a way to measure our progress along the way between now and 2032, but it is not the end goal. The moonshot is not the end goal,” Cook said. “It really represents something even greater. It represents how we fulfill our land grant promise to the next and the new generation.”

Four priorities have been identified by the university to focus on to meet this moonshot goal, Cook said, each with their own benchmarks to meet by 2032. They include investing in the university’s future, growing enrollment, driving Iowa’s growth as a state and “pioneering the future, one innovation at a time.”

Cook said ISU has the goals of generating $200 million in net new annual revenue and becoming a top-20 public land grant university, grow its student population to 34,000, grow the economic impact of university alumni by $900 million and increase opportunities for graduates to stay in the state, and raise annual research expenditures to $750 million and become a top-10 research university among non-medical institutions.

“Investing in our future will require us to think differently about resources across this institution, generating new sources of revenue in ways we’ve never thought of before, aligning our resources with our priorities, which is difficult, hard, important work,” Cook said. “Making thoughtful choices about what we do more of, that might be the easy part — and what we must stop doing, that can be the hard part, and engaging our donors whose generosity has a transformational impact on our institution.”

The university has already started work in these areas, Cook said, from reviewing its budgeting process and identifying cost-savings across campus to creating a sponsorship committee, strengthening relationships with community colleges and other partners and supporting research and outreach relating to the issues Iowans face. Cook said the institution is also capable of reaching for its goals with the people and programs established on campus.

Investing in faculty, staff and the university’s athletics department; aligning university programs with workforce needs; increasing the number of students without debt from 47% to 60%; expanding entrepreneurship and commercialization and utilizing AI across campus to become a national leader in its ethical use are all steps in achieving these goals, Cook said.

Iowa Board of Regents President Robert Cramer and Lieutenant Governor Chris Cournoyer praised Cook for his actions taken in his previous role at North Dakota State University and now at ISU.

Higher education is facing challenges of enrollment pressure, questioning of the affordability and worth of a college degree and rapidly evolving technologies and workforces, Cornouyer said, which generate hard-to-answer questions of institutions. While the answers will be difficult to find, she said Cook is the right person to ask them.

“President Cook has been clear-eyed about what the years ahead require. He has said that Iowa State must be willing to think differently, that the way universities do things now is not the way successful universities will do things two and even five years from now,” Cournoyer said. “That’s not a warning. It’s a call to action, and it’s exactly the kind of honest, forward-looking leadership that the state of Iowa needs from our flagship land grant institution.”