Connecticut College has completed a long look at its strengths and its shortfalls and formulated a strategic plan to establish "the premier liberal arts career program in the country."

That is only one objective under a triad of priorities and a multitude of goals in "Building on Strength: A New Plan for Connecticut College." However, it strikes us as the underlying point of the whole exercise of redefining the college's mission for 21st-century students. At the same time the New London institution is unscrolling a new curriculum, neatly named "Connections." Each student will pursue answers to an evolving, personalized question that should lower the number of bachelor of arts recipients asking, on Commencement Day, "What am I going to do with this major?"

There was a time when liberal arts colleges eschewed pre-professional courses in favor of concentrating on purely intellectual and artistic topics. Connecticut College got past that stance decades ago with such programs as the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology, which links creative work with scholarship. Now, the college clearly wants to lure students who might otherwise go to pre-professional STEM programs in universities that produce internships, employment offers, and post-graduate credits.

Its new curriculum will offer a liberal arts/professional option framed as becoming a "creative, adaptive thinker" prepped for a working career. Topical pathways, to be taken along with traditional majors, include such subjects as "Global Capitalism" and "Entrepreneurship." "Social Justice and Sustainability," for example, might prepare a science major to structure a career combining botany and alleviation of hunger. Some programs will offer certificates in areas of expertise.

The college is betting that the plan's stated focus on academic distinction, student experience, and "a diverse, just and sustainable community" will appeal to current and prospective faculty, staff and students and to alumni, whose loyalty to the liberal arts model is priceless but not static.

Priceless value is good; priceless cost is self-defeating. The irony has been that liberal arts education has been pricing itself out of range for students who need practical readiness for work or will have to pay for post-graduate specialty study to get jobs. Like other Northeastern liberal arts colleges with enrollments of under 2,000 students, Connecticut College is heart-stoppingly expensive for most families ($67,440 this year, not counting books, supplies and travel to campus).

The strategic plan acknowledges that the college's relatively small endowment has consequently had to contribute more to financial aid and less to facilities improvement. A strong endowment and updated facilities factor into the rankings of colleges by independent scoring systems. As the introduction to the plan delicately phrases it, Conn's "status as a top liberal arts college...has been increasingly difficult to detect in national rankings over the last 10 years." A multi-million dollar capital campaign is in the works.

Higher rankings attract applicants, and while the pool of high-school aged students in the Northeast has been shrinking, the plan is to attract more diverse students — and faculty and staff. They will find a campus that has historically aspired to being comfortable with diversity but not fully achieved it. The demographics of diversity have more categories than ever: gender, non-traditional learners, races and ethnicities, physical and mental special needs. Disparity in political viewpoints, domestic and international, makes for diversity, too. The plan pledges to address these.

The strengths on which the plan expects to build include Conn's history of global and interdisciplinary programs, faculty excellence and location on the Northeast Corridor. While it hails ease of access to New York and Boston, the plan includes welcome local objectives such as extending educational partnerships with New London and bolstering campus connections to the adjacent Lyman Allyn Art Museum.

A plan is, of course, just a plan. It can't be measured until it produces results. By graduation day for the Class of 2020, students should be able to say whether it has worked for them, and the admissions and fundraising offices will have concrete evidence of its appeal off campus.

Meanwhile, Connecticut College gets a good grade for leading its students by example: Ask questions, make a plan, get to work.

The Day editorial board meets with political, business and community leaders to formulate editorial viewpoints. It is composed of President and Publisher Timothy Dwyer, Executive Editor Izaskun E. Larraneta, Owen Poole, copy editor, and Lisa McGinley, retired deputy managing editor. The board operates independently from The Day newsroom.