Category: Uncategorized

Future Support Starts with the Student Experience

Amid the decline of state support for public institutions and a less forgiving fundraising climate (a recent Chronicle of Philanthropy study showed a 12% decline in giving for 2009, the sharpest drop in 50 years), ensuring the future financial health of your institution will require more intentional footwork in establishing a reliable pipeline of invested donors. To develop a stronger donor pipeline, the key is to start earlier. However, institutions attempting to raise giving rates for young alumni are often rebuffed. In a study of the attitudes of young alumni conducted this summer, the Engagement Strategies Group confirmed that the majority of young alumni are reluctant to give due to high tuition costs and a lack of understanding of how institutions of higher education are funded and how institutions do (and don’t) draw on endowment spending to finance their needs. Colleges and universities need to solicit more support from their former students, but what such reports demonstrate is that the best opportunity to create an ambassador for your institution is to cultivate them while they are still students on campus. It is more expensive and much more difficult, if not impossible, for the development office to repair relationships after commencement. […]

Translating a Positive Student Experience into Lifetime Support for your Institution

November 2010. Institutions’ strategic initiatives and plans are increasingly reliant on financial support from alumni and donors, yet most institutions aren’t particularly strategic in their approach to cultivating and sustaining support. Relying solely on your development office to garner this support is both more expensive and less effective than leveraging the efforts of each department that interacts with students during their time on campus. Students will build the capacity to give over time. The more strategic question is, “How do you build propensity to give?” Defining a comprehensive student life cycle and being intentional about every touchpoint a student has before, during, and after their on-campus or online experience puts your institution in the best position for success when you ultimately make the ask. That’s why we’ve taken a whole-campus approach to addressing the issue of building lifetime support for your institution. We’ve asked college presidents and professionals across admissions, student affairs, and advancement for advice on cultivating students as campus stakeholders—at every point in the student life cycle. We hope their advice will be useful to you. Chapter in This Report Read the report

Research Consortiums: What Can Academic Libraries Do Today?

A report from the Association of Research Libraries (pdf) offers four scenarios for predicting the research needs that faculty, students, and other researchers will have in the year 2030, and offers strategic objectives for academic research libraries who will need to build capacity and collections to meet those needs. One of those objectives involves building capacity through consortiums and other cooperative efforts between research libraries: “Collaborative capacities serving groups of research libraries or the full community of research libraries allows for increasing opportunities to develop a strategy for maintaining and sharing open and rich general collections. Opportunities for cross-pollinating research activities and the potential for shared endeavors are also viable strategies.” From The ARL 2030 Scenarios: A User’s Guide to Research Libraries Paul Gandel, professor of information studies at Syracuse University and a thought leader on this issue, points out that research libraries are caught in a Catch-22, in two ways. First, academic libraries need to share resources in order to build capacity, but that sharing has competitive implications. “Most universities have invested in their collections as a competitive advantage,” Gandel notes. “To open up those resources to everyone has political implications, because the institution has made a significant investment […]

Recruiting for the Humanities

With philanthropic monies flowing to the sciences, and sharp declines in the number of students declaring majors in the humanities (8% of US undergraduates in 2007, down from 17% in 1996, according to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences) as students increasingly look for disciplines linked to specific career outcomes, there is a growing sense in higher education that the future of studies in the humanities — though the humanities are nominally core to a liberal arts curriculum — is threatened. “Within the general college-bound public, the understanding of the liberal arts is fuzzy at best and distorted at worst. Despite our best intentions, noblest desires, and most sincere efforts, the higher education community has been unable to educate the public about what the liberal arts represents.”W. Kent Barnds, Augustana College Without underplaying the importance of enrolling and graduating more students in STEM fields, many university presidents have recently begun promoting the humanities in their speeches on campus and abroad, and some — at institutions such as Cornell, Dartmouth, and Harvard — are pledging to boost their efforts to fundraise for their literature and arts disciplines. There is still a critical question to address — how can institutions recruit more students to […]

Retaining and Rewarding High-Performing Faculty

The news is filled with accounts of extended pay freezes and tightened departmental budgets. More than ever, it is crucial to identify creative, meaningful, and low-cost ways to reward and retain high-performing faculty. Mary Coussons-Read, professor of psychology and acting chair of the department of physics at the University of Colorado Denver, reviews low-cost practices that can make a difference. Rethink Performance Rewards “Don’t get so caught up in the trees that you don’t see the forest,” Coussons-Read warns. “The forest is the need to help your faculty feel good about the work they do. There are many trees you can shake besides the salary adjustment tree.” While rewarding performance will rarely be free of cost, you can consider a variety of low-cost and one-time expenses that allow you to appreciate faculty. The difficulty of a salary increase is that it is a permanent addition to the ongoing budget.  There are many options for rewarding performance for which that is not the case. Look for one-time expenses. Beyond salary increases, you can recognize faculty achievements and, at the same time, use those achievements to encourage a high-performing faculty culture by: Making the most of your faculty awards competition Inviting high-performing […]

Key Strategies for Retaining Men

This week, the Washington Post highlighted the efforts many smaller colleges are making to add football programs as a strategy to recruit more men — one of several strategies colleges are currently employing to enroll more men (other efforts include adding academic majors that commonly appeal to men). However, recruitment is only the first part of the solution — colleges also need to address the growing gender gap in student retention. We interviewed W. Kent Barnds, vice president for enrollment, communication, and planning at Augustana College, who recently facilitated an Academic Impressions workshop on the issue, to learn more about where colleges have opportunities to engage male underclassmen. Barnds directs attention to the research collected in Why Boys Fail by Richard Whitmire and Teaching the Male Brain by Abigail Norfleet James, and then offers the following tips for applying the findings to practical strategies an institution can undertake to improve retention of men. Engage Men with Career-Oriented Experiences “Take a step back. Adding sports to attract young men is a good step, but beyond that, are you asking the critical questions to learn if your academic environment and your academic support environment will help you keep them?” W. Kent Barnds, […]

Piloting Mobile Learning

The Urgency of Going Mobile Several recent reports have highlighted a rising rate of adoption for mobile devices: Gartner, this week, released a projection that tablet devices such as Apple’s iPad will see more than 19 million units sold worldwide this year, most of them in the US; Gartner also anticipates that this figure will grow to more than 200 million units in 2014 In September, International Data Corp. (IDC) upgraded its forecast for sales of smartphones, suggesting that the end of 2010 would see a 55.4% increase since 2009 In short, though most universities in the US are only in the earliest stages of implementing mobile marketing initiatives, and though few universities are actively piloting mobile learning, there is growing urgency in the need to do so. “In a short period of time, much of what you do will need to be available on mobile devices. Don’t think of this as just an experiment to try. The majority of your students, even your returning adult students, are using mobile devices to manage a large part of their communication and to access information. So your most critical educational activities and resources need to be delivered on mobile devices.” Lynne O’Brien, […]

Identify Inefficiencies on the Academic Side of the House

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE Advance with a Defined Sense of Purpose Identify Inefficiencies on the Academic Side of the House Prioritize Academic and Administrative Units Plan for Resource Allocation in Ways That Build Trust The vast majority of an institution’s resources are expended on instructionally related and academic support activities. Institutions looking to identify inefficiencies and reallocate resources toward key investments are likely to find the most opportunities to increase efficiency by revisiting their academic programs and units. Lucie Lapovsky, president of Lapovsky Consulting and past president of Mercy College, offers advice on where to look to begin freeing up resources and using existing resources more efficiently. “Many leaders haven’t given enough attention to cutting costs on the academic side of the house.” Lucie Lapovsky, Lapovsky Consulting Audit Your Curriculum Lapovsky recommends asking some hard questions, using your mission or strategic vision as a guide to help you identify what is core and what isn’t: Do you have unnecessary duplication in courses within your own curriculum? Are there opportunities to share resources with neighboring institutions? Do you have many courses that are consistently under-enrolled? “Where do you share curriculum with other schools in your vicinity or with schools you could […]

Plan for Resource Allocation in Ways That Build Trust

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE Advance with a Defined Sense of Purpose Identify Inefficiencies on the Academic Side of the House Prioritize Academic and Administrative Units Plan for Resource Allocation in Ways That Build Trust Almost all colleges and universities have already started making cuts, many of which are targeted rather than across-the-board. Yet many institutions have not established inclusive and transparent processes for making and implementing these decisions. Recent faculty outcry against program prioritization at such institutions as Miami University and the University of Toronto has demonstrated that trust can be a resource as critical to steward as dollars. Even if your institution identifies the right programs or units to restructure or downsize, you may lose more than you gain for your institution’s future if the decision-making process is one that damages the trust and morale in your organization. When planning major changes to resource allocation across your institution, it’s critical to approach the effort with a commitment to inviting broad participation and to soliciting input from a wide cross-section of stakeholders both internal and external to your institution. This broad participation is critical to your success in building trust and maintaining transparency as you develop your institution’s plan for prioritization […]

Prioritize Academic and Administrative Units

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE Advance with a Defined Sense of Purpose Identify Inefficiencies on the Academic Side of the House Prioritize Academic and Administrative Units Plan for Resource Allocation in Ways That Build Trust It’s vital to recognize that the single greatest source of financial resources will not come from tuition increases, state or federal funding, or alumni support, but rather from the reallocation of your existing resources. Institutions of all sizes, types, and selectivity are currently investing in academic and administrative programs that are not critical to their mission or their market position, and that in fact drain their financial resources and limit their ability to generate more resources. “Strategic plans have become purely additive. … These plans tend to assume several things: (1) the status quo as a given, with all current programs composing the baseline, (2) all programs, goals, and objectives are to be “maintained” or “enhanced,” but rarely diminished or eliminated, (3) if resources are mentioned at all, they are to be enhanced by hiking tuition, increasing enrollment, securing more appropriations or grants, or raising more money, or all of these, and (4) all planning goals are equal in weight and importance and thus lack priority. […]