Boosting Retention for Ethnic Minority Students: Laying the Groundwork

Iowa’s three public universities have been in the news recently because of a fresh push from the state’s board of regents to improve the six-year graduation rates for underrepresented minority students. The University of Iowa, Iowa State University, and the University of Northern Iowa are each piloting different initiatives to boost persistence and academic success […]

Boosting Retention for Ethnic Minority Students: Leveraging Peer Leadership

ALSO READ Boosting Retention for Ethnic Minority Students: Laying the Groundwork For this second in a series of articles on supporting the academic success of underrepresented minority students, we interviewed Georgina Dodge, chief diversity officer and associate vice president at the University of Iowa. Dodge shared with us lessons learned and practical tips based on […]

Ensuring Your Developmental Advising is Effective

Due to rising enrollment and budget cuts, academic advisors can find themselves nearly overwhelmed with high student traffic and high student/advisor ratios. Given this situation, how can directors of advising ensure a high quality of developmental advising, and how can they best encourage and support their staff in providing it? We spoke this week with […]

Improving Your Online Writing Center for International Students

As international student enrollment rises at many institutions, it’s going to be increasingly important to provide academic support for a growing population of students who may have diverse levels of fluency with academic writing in English. While there is a long tradition of providing ESL writing labs and other support for these “second language students” […]

Four Experts on the Need for Annual Giving Planning

For most shops, the past several years have been a financial roller coaster for annual giving numbers. As annual giving recovers momentum this year, now is the right time to invest time and energy in planning for the long term. One of the most critical lessons that can be learned from the past few years […]

Strategies to Ensure Implementation

  In This Issue Setting Priorities for Your Division Developing the Action Plan Funding Your Action Plan Strategies to Ensure Implementation Beginnings are critical, and operational plans often lose momentum in their first year of implementation. This “first-year dilemma” emerges when expectations around timeline and phasing haven’t been right-sized. Consider these two scenarios: The student […]

Setting Priorities for Your Division

  In This Issue Setting Priorities for Your Division Developing the Action Plan Funding Your Action Plan Strategies to Ensure Implementation Managing your division with excellence is going to require making very tough decisions. For example, perhaps you recognize the need to add an academic major in response to rising market demand. Yet your faculty […]

Setting and Funding Priorities for Your Division: Making the Tough Decisions

In this Report: As institutions face increasing financial constraints, they frequently ramp up fundraising efforts in order to secure new funds –- rather than asking the tough questions about how to spend existing funds more wisely. Oftentimes, guidance from an institution-wide plan is vague or missing altogether. But because the majority of decisions that impact […]

Funding Your Action Plan

  In This Issue Setting Priorities for Your Division Developing the Action Plan Funding Your Action Plan Strategies to Ensure Implementation Consider this likely scenario. Your division has identified four strategic priorities that are of both high importance and high cost. But the institution is facing budget cuts, and you actually have less funding to […]

Developing the Action Plan

  In This Issue Setting Priorities for Your Division Developing the Action Plan Funding Your Action Plan Strategies to Ensure Implementation Once you have defined the priorities for your division and have set some strategic objectives for the immediate future (e.g., the next three years), how do you turn those objectives into concrete action plans […]