Category: Uncategorized

How to Encourage Academic Grit and a Growth Mindset in Your Students

More Articles for Faculty:One Easy Way Faculty Can Improve Student SuccessCivility in the Classroom: A Better Approach by Princy Quadros-Mennella, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychology, Director of the Neuroscience Program, Bay Path University and Thomas Mennella, PhD, Associate Professor of Biology Director of the M.S. in Applied Laboratory Science and Operations Program, Bay Path University The Question: How Do We Improve Learning Outcomes for All Students? Even though innovative new pedagogies and educational technologies lead to enhanced student engagement and improvement of the classroom experience, we consistently see the learning outcomes of low-performing students remain largely unaffected (3, 7). Meanwhile, high-achieving students continue to learn effectively in more “traditional” lecture-based formats, despite the relative ineffectiveness of that pedagogy (7). Why can’t we seem to improve learning outcomes for all students? More cynical instructors may believe that “some students get it and others don’t.” However, we reject the notion that some students are not smart enough for college-level work. Although some students do not apply the minimal effort needed for academic success, the vast majority of struggling students work hard and strive to be successful, but often fall short of achieving that success. So why can’t we seem to improve the […]

How State Funding for Higher Ed is Changing: A Close Look

by Jon Boeckenstedt

How are states responding to a leveling off of demand for higher education from high school graduates? Here is a data dashboard to help you take a close look. When Americans talk about our higher education systems, we point with pride to the wide diversity of offerings in the US. There are 7,000 post-secondary options that include colleges and programs offering certificates, or associate’s and bachelor’s degrees in wildly divergent fields such as auto mechanics, cosmetology, accounting, computer science, history, mortuary science, political science, chemistry, and welding. And these are offered at public, private, not-for-profit, and for profit institutions. When we look at this wide array of offerings, it seems that there is some program, somewhere, for almost everyone who wants to pursue additional education after high school. But it is really the public institutions that carry most of the weight when it comes to educating students in the US.  Just over 70% of the 20.3 million students enrolled in 2015, for instance, attended public institutions, and that percentage rises slightly when you consider only degree-granting institutions. Access to high-quality, low-cost public education has been a hallmark of America since the end of WWII, when the GI Bill encouraged large […]

This is How We Need to Rethink the Work of Student Affairs

by Daniel Fusch, Private: Caleb Tegtmeier

The challenges facing our students and our institutions are more complex than in the past, and no single, siloed office can address these challenges adequately. That’s why some institutions have been forming student affairs innovation hubs to bring together a more diverse crew of creative minds from across campus and put them to work on improving the student experience. One of these institutions is Seattle University, and we recently interviewed Seattle U’s vice president for student development, Michele C. Murray, Ph.D., and Seattle U’s assistant vice president for student development, Monica Nixon, Ed.D. Rethinking Our Work Murray and Nixon suggest that the one-stop shop approach to serving specific student demographics (such as transfer students, for instance) has several flaws. When Seattle University set up an office to serve its transfer students, Murray notes, “the great thing was that we had one full-time staff person completely committed to those transfer students. The downside was that the transfer students felt siloed. They weren’t introduced to the fullness of the student experience, and that issue was replicated across multiple student populations.” “Another unintended consequence of the siloed way of using one-stop shop areas to serve specific student demographics — is that the students feel […]

Hiring and Onboarding Diverse Talent: Where are the Gaps?

by Daniel Fusch

Recruiting and retaining diverse faculty and staff talent must be a key priority for colleges and universities. However, hiring diverse and high-performing talent can be challenging due to limited resources, perspective, and commitment. To dig deeper into some of the challenges, we reached out to a panel of three experts: We asked each panelist to discuss the gaps they see in how institutions are hiring and onboarding diverse talent. What are most institutions not thinking about? What should they be thinking about? Here are their answers: Liz Ortiz, DePaul University. The gap that I see is: Why do our intentions not match our results? If I had a room full of search chairs and I asked, “Is diversity important in your searches?” — the answer would be yes. Yet the results we see are often the same hire after hire with little to no diversity in the final selection. Often we hear it is a pipeline problem or a competition problem as qualified candidates are highly sought after and therefore out of reach. However, it could be a systems problem that is recreating the same results over and over again. In my experience, there are several factors that can lead to […]

Operationalizing and Sustaining New Academic Programs

by Melissa Morriss-Olson, Ph.D.

Also in this series: Is it Time to Launch that New Academic Program? The Art and Science of Answering that Question Feasibility Checklist: The Science of Bringing New Academic Programs to Life Financial Modeling for New Academic Programs Sustaining New Academic Programs: 5 Key Factors In my previous articles in this series, I outlined a blueprint for new academic program development and stressed the importance of a balanced approach. Understanding that it is impossible to capture all variables on the front end, the potential viability of a program is difficult to assess until that program is up and running. While having a discipline around new program development ensures that you will anticipate most of the important potential impact issues, maintaining a culture of flexibility and responsiveness once the program is launched is equally critical for the program’s success. As the great American novelist Thomas Berger once wrote, “The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.”  Indeed, cultivating a spirit of ‘question asking’ and ‘wide-eyed vigilance’ as a program is embedded within your organizational culture and context, while not easy, is nevertheless a foundational pre-requisite for long-term viability. Over the past decade, we have successfully implemented […]

7 Ways Academic Leaders Can Cultivate Creativity

by Melissa Morriss-Olson, Ph.D.

This article continues a series focused on Creating an Innovative Institutional Mindset. More articles will follow. The previous article in this series is: Creative thinking skills are more important than ever if we are to deal with the vast and complex array of challenges facing many colleges and universities. In my last article I discussed the difficulty of creating and nurturing innovation within an academic organization. In my experience, the forces for preserving the status quo are especially powerful within academic organizations and are institutionalized in ways that make change very difficult.  Moreover, those who are well positioned and authorized by role and formal authority to lead change are often weighed down with workloads and responsibilities that can kill the creative impulse. Perhaps it is no wonder that, according to a national study, the average tenure of a chief academic officer or provost is only 4.7 years, compared to the significantly longer 8.5 average tenure of all college presidents. According to this same study, the top frustrations for chief academic officers include lack of resources, difficulty cultivating leadership in others, curmudgeonly faculty, campus infighting, and unresponsive campus governance structures. Only 31% of respondents view ‘leading change and fostering innovation’ as job priorities; […]

4 Things STEAM Could Achieve on Your Campus

by Jill Sible

Ask any ten academic professionals, “What is STEAM?” and you are likely to get ten different answers. Yet, intuitively, they would agree that STEAM is important and probably have incorporated at least one STEAM facility into their master planning. (Broadly speaking, STEAM represents the productive intersection of STEM with the arts and humanities.  Other definitions for STEAM are equally valid – one size does not fit all.) I do believe that any plan to bring STEAM programming and facilities to a campus will benefit tremendously from a step back to consider the ‘why’: To prime your thinking, I offer four possible outcomes for a STEAM program at your college and university and some examples of how these outcomes are pursued at my own institution, Virginia Tech. 1. Promoting inter- and trans-disciplinarity Collaborations among scientists, engineers, artists, and scholars of the humanities bring a much larger toolkit of skills, techniques, and strategies to address complex problems. For example, at Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT) housed within the Moss Arts Center, current projects include a collaboration between educators, civil engineers and visual artists to develop 3D technology to automatically measure and map cracks on highway bridges to more […]

What New Student Affairs Directors Need to Know

by Karen M. Whitney, EdD, Jeremy Podany

The job of directing a unit in student affairs is complex and challenging. Here is some advice from experts who have been there. New student affairs directors have the opportunity to see a direct impact on the lives of students and the success of the institution, but often face an array of common challenges upon entering their new position, including: Taking on the directorship is a complex and challenging transition. That’s why we’re offering a Bootcamp for New Student Affairs Directors this July, co-facilitated by Karen Whitney, president of Clarion University and a past student affairs leader, and Jeremy Podany, executive director of corporate services and career education at Colorado State University. We wanted to ask these two experts what skills gaps they are seeing in new student affairs directors and what critical pieces of advice they would offer to those preparing to lead a department in student affairs. This is what they told us: What is one knowledge or skills gap you see often in new SA directors? Karen Whitney. Often new SA directors make the mistake of only focusing on inputs rather than on results. It is understandable to get caught in simply looking at and defending the good hard work that […]

Overcoming Barriers to Student Affairs/Academic Affairs Partnerships: 4 Examples

by Elizabeth Ross Hubbell, Daniel Fusch

In our 2016 article “Improving Student Success Can’t Be a One-Office Effort,” Paul Marthers at SUNY spoke of the power of leveraging strategic partnerships across traditionally divided functional areas: “Whole-campus efforts tend to have higher visibility and the power to motivate collective buy-in and effort. Student success became everyone’s job, because just about everyone who works on a college campus is involved in some part of the student lifecycle.” Developing strategic partnerships between student affairs and academic departments on your campus isn’t easy work, but it can be critical to improving students’ experience and success. That’s why we’re offering an intensive learn-and-work training this summer focused on the structural and cultural aspects of developing a successful partnership. In advance of that workshop, though, we wanted to collect powerful examples of how experts at different institutions have overcome common but significant hurdles to establishing and strengthening these partnerships. Here are the examples our expert panel want to share with you: Examples: How Each Panelist Overcame Hurdles to Successful SA/AA Partnerships Christopher Romano, Vice President for Enrollment Management and Student Affairs, Ramapo College. Higher education is known for its siloed approach to serving students. However, one way that Ramapo College of New Jersey has […]

Graduate Enrollment Marketing: Unpacking the Biggest Challenges

by Daniel Fusch

Marketing graduate degree programs is both an art and a science, and we wanted to take a deep look at who is doing this well — and how they’re doing it. To that end, we assembled an expert panel including Julie Gacnik (Creighton University), Marcus Hanscom (Roger Williams University), and Eric Nissen (University of Colorado, Colorado Springs), among others. In this series of four articles (you’re reading the first), we will ask this panel four questions to help you better understand the changing landscape of graduate enrollment marketing: We invite you to use these brief articles to start critical conversations on your campus. Additionally, you can explore graduate student recruitment tactics in depth with these same experts at the upcoming Graduate Enrollment Management conference. We hope to see you there! Here are our panelists’ answers to the first of the four questions. Q: What challenges are institutions facing in digital marketing? Sarah Seigle Peatman, Academic Impressions. In today’s day and age, digital marketing is critically important to any graduate recruitment marketing strategy—but with such an array of audiences to target and tactics available to use, it’s not always easy to get it right. What, in your eyes, are some of the newest/most […]