Four Tips for Managing the Brand Launch

June 9, 2011. Competition for visibility continues to pressure institutions of higher education to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. In order to stay competitive, maintain enrollment levels, and meet advancement goals, your institution needs a unique brand strategy that carefully defines who you are in the minds of stakeholders. Often, though, marketing professionals and institutional leaders […]

Deepening Your Talent Bench: Horizontal Career Ladders

Historically, the pathway to the presidency in higher education has been through traditional academic ranks — tenured faculty or department chairs becoming a dean, and then later a provost. But as Academic Impressions president Amit Mrig notes, “the competencies required to ascend the academic hierarchy don’t necessarily match those required to lead increasingly complex organizations […]

Report: Developing Leaders in Higher Education

June 2011. Nearly one-half of higher-ed administrators gave their institution a C, D, or F letter grade when assessing their campus’s commitment to their development as a leader. Higher ed institutions are facing impending waves of retirement at all levels of the institution and across all sectors of our industry. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, […]

Building an In-House Leadership Development Program

Once you have clarity on the leadership skill sets your institution is seeking — and a commitment to look beyond the “usual suspects” when identifying future leaders — the next challenges involve offering meaningful opportunities for your institution’s “stylistic invisibles” to become visible and providing an intentional and deliberate process for developing your high-potentials as future leaders. There […]

Rethinking Higher Education’s Leadership Crisis

America’s higher education enterprise is facing multiple challenges — increasing demands from students and government; changing demographics; structural fiscal challenges; and technologies that are disrupting how information and education is delivered. Not to mention an aging workforce and an uneven track record for developing leaders. Without investing in identifying and developing the right talent at […]

Identifying Leadership Potential in Your Staff

Once you have identified the skills that are essential in tomorrow’s higher ed leaders, you will need ways to identify the staff within your institution who demonstrate those skills — these are the people whose leadership development you want to invest in, and whom you want to entrust with greater responsibilities and opportunities to contribute meaningfully […]

Meeting Adaptive Challenges: The New Leadership Skill Set

  NOTE: For an updated and much deeper look at new leadership skills in higher education, based on years of intensive research, read this complimentary paper from Academic Impressions and Pat Sanaghan. To define the leadership skill set needed to meet adaptive challenges, we turned to Larry Goldstein, president of Campus Strategies LLC, and Pat […]

Locally Sourced Foods on Campus: Thinking Outside the Box

June 2, 2011. The University of Winnipeg has been praised in the media lately for a dramatic turnaround in the quality and profitability of their food services operation; Macleans’ 2009 University Rankings had taken the university to task for poor food and poor service, and the institution’s dining operation was seeing attrition in its student customers. In […]

Planning Online Programs: Making Sure There’s a Market

As they look to improve student access and increase degree completion rates, more institutions are considering launching or scaling up existing online initiatives. At Academic Impressions, we’re responding to the trend with a series of articles interviewing leading experts on planning online programs, and by offering an upcoming conference that leverages collaborative information sharing and […]

Four Tips for Increasing First-Gen Student Yield

A new report from the Pell Institute (pdf link) suggests that without more students from low-income and working-class families earning bachelor’s degrees, the United States will be unable to meet the Obama administration’s college-completion goal. As demand for college education rises among lower-income families amid a troubled economy, and as the pressure mounts on completion […]