“Your company’s organizational memory might be holding it back,” business professor Vijay Govindarajan and retired management consultant Srikanth Srinivas cautioned in Harvard Business Review this week, offering advice that spans the for-profit and non-profit sectors. According to Govindarajan and Srinivas, Organizational memory – the way we have always done things – can include “obsolete policies […]
One of the most insidious, documented effects of the traditional pipeline of developmental courses on an incoming student is the fatigue of taking multiple non-credit courses (or, in some cases, being required to retake a non-credit course repeatedly). Tristan Denley, provost at Austin Peay State University, calls this course sequence the “slow death.” Your goal […]
Reports over the past several years from the Lumina Foundation, Complete College America, and other policy and research groups have documented the high cost of developmental education, measured not only in dollars spent but in student attrition rates. In fact, “Core Principles for Transforming Remedial Education,” a recent joint statement and meta-analysis provided by the […]
Institutions that have made real strides in improving retention and academic success rates for academically underprepared students have focused not only on revisiting their policies around academic placement but also on revamping their developmental education curriculum. Let’s take a close look at two successful—though quite different—models: The Assisted Learning Approach Dispensing with the traditional developmental sequence […]
According to the Open Doors report on international education, international student enrollment has increased every year for the past 60 years. With this trend expected to continue, and international students becoming an increasingly important constituent group, it’s critical for institutions to take a more holistic view at how they’re meeting these students’ needs now and […]
Student suicide has received renewed attention both in the US and Canada, not only because of the increased number of suicides by college students (with research studies indicating that as many as 1.5% of college students may actually attempt suicide, while many others will give suicide serious consideration at some point during their years on […]
Drawing on current research on high-performing leadership teams both within and outside of higher education, Pat Sanaghan, president of The Sanaghan Group and author of Collaborative Leadership in Action (2011) and the forthcoming book, How to Actually Build an Exceptional Team (2013), has identified 10 differentiators of exceptional teams, 10 qualities that enable teams to rise […]
As the higher ed marketplace becomes increasingly competitive, it has become more critical than ever to be able to measure the impact of your marketing efforts on brand perception — critical, but not always easy. In a recent interview with Academic Impressions, Bob Sevier, senior vice president of strategy for Stamats Inc., shared with us […]
In a survey of professionals of higher education a few months ago, Academic Impressions found that: If asked to give their institution a letter grade for customer service, most professionals would assign a “C” or lower. There is a growing awareness among managers in higher education that customer service entails more than presenting students or […]
The University of the Virgin Islands (an HBCU with campuses on St. Thomas and St. Croix US Virgin Islands) saw their alumni giving rate increase from 13% to 42% in the past year during the institution’s “50 for 50 Campaign” celebrating UVI’s 50th anniversary. What is especially noteworthy about this jump in giving rate is […]
