News

Involving Off-Campus Constituencies When Planning Public/Private Partnerships

Successful P3 partnerships engage off-campus constituencies both early and deliberately. Here is advice from Dale McGirr on how. Increasing demands for capital expansion combined with a continued weak economy make partnerships with private entities an attractive option for financing new campus facilities. These partnerships are often fraught with complexity — and not only because of […]

Practical Approaches to Information Literacy for the First-Year Student

As research on gaps in college preparedness continues to emerge, fueling debates in both academic and public forums, most postsecondary institutions have taken some measures to assist undergraduates in developing a higher degree of information and digital literacy, and to prepare students better for conducting academic research. To learn where you can see the highest […]

Occupy Colleges and Student Walkouts: Takeaways for Media Relations Professionals

This article looks back at lessons learned from the Occupy Wall Street movement. Many adjunct and part-time faculty, students at institutions across the US have been organized walkout days in support of the movement. Because of the public nature of the movement and the extent to which social media have been used to organize student […]

Doing Service Learning Right

At many institutions, service learning programs are pursued in an ad hoc manner. Here’s how to realize the full potential of a service learning initiative. Service learning programs have proliferated on college and university campuses over the past decade, leading in the best cases to measurable gains in student learning and engagement; yet at many […]

Speechwriting for Your Institution’s Leaders: Why Speeches Fail

It’s likely that at some point we have all seen a convocation, state-of-the-university, or other speech by an institutional leader fall flat — even when the subject matter of the speech was not itself intrinsically dull. Yet it has rarely been more important for presidents and cabinet members to be able to speak compellingly and directly […]

Building Affinity and Planting the Seeds for Giving

Because adult students represent a growing demographic and one largely untapped in terms of the donor pipeline, advancement shops with a long-term view need to act now to begin planning how to move alumni who were adult students into the pipeline. For advice on how to start, we turned to Don Fellows, president and CEO […]

Offering a More Flexible Curriculum

Your efforts to both attract and retain the growing population of adult students have to begin at the curricular level. No amount of investment in marketing or student support will make up for a curriculum and an academic calendar that does not meet adult learner needs. When asked about key influencing factors on college choice for […]

The Changing Student Demographic: What You Need to Rethink

Increasingly, academic leaders are becoming aware that the traditional, 18-year-old high school graduate enrolling as a freshman at a four-year institution is a shrinking demographic. According to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES): Three -fourths of today’s college students are nontraditional 49 percent are enrolled part-time 38 percent work full-time 27 percent have […]

Report: Optimizing Your Campus and Curriculum for Adult Students

In this report: Most college and university administrators know the story of how demographics are shifting in this country. They don’t need the latest data from NCES — they see it every day on their campuses. Nontraditional students now make up a significant majority of college enrollment. But many institutions, especially regionally-focused public and private […]

Recruiting and Admitting Adult Students

Because enrollment policies and practices have long been tailored to traditional-aged students (especially at four-year institutions), efforts to recruit and enroll adults offer special challenges. To learn more about key actions at each stage of the admissions funnel that can have an impact on the enrollment of adult students, we reached out to adult-recruiting veteran Mike Barzacchini, […]