Author: Kenneth Soldink

Engaging the Board in the Campaign

Too often, board involvement in the campaign is limited to what are essentially tactical assignments — making the ask to their contacts, raising certain quantities. What’s missed in these cases are opportunities to engage the board in what board members do best — big-picture thinking, advocacy, and getting key messages out to the community. Jim Langley, founder and president of Langley Innovations, and past vice president of advancement at Georgetown University, offers suggestions for how to approach the board from the outset in a way that will contribute more to the success of your campaign. Starting with a Cognitive Map Langley recommends involving board members early in framing the campaign and the “big ideas” driving it. In an unproductive relationship between the board and the campaign planning committee, board members are shown a gift pyramid, told that the institution has X number of prospects at each level, and then given assignments. “In too many cases,” Langley warns, “we assume that a gift pyramid is enough; we present the pyramid, then march through and orchestrate the ask. If you present the campaign that way to the board, they will assume it is a tactical exercise.” Langley warns that there are two risks in this: […]

State Authorization and Title IV Compliance: Why You Need to Act

The federal government’s attention to the state authorization rule — requiring colleges and universities delivering online education to obtain authorization in states from which they enroll students — has received a lot of attention over the past couple of years. Yet the level of urgency required from postsecondary institutions and the potential liabilities involved have not always been immediately clear to institution leaders. We spoke recently with John Ebersole, president of Excelsior College, and Paul H. Shiffman, executive director of the President’s Forum and assistant vice president for strategic and governmental relations at Excelsior College. Ebersole and Shiffman spoke with us at length about recent developments that affect the enforcement of the state authorization rule. A Quick Review: Recent Developments Most significantly, there have been three recent federal court rulings against the Department of Education, halting federal enforcement of the state authorization rules: the department lost in a lawsuit alleging that the department failed to use the negotiated rule-making process in good faith, the department appealed that decision and lost, and finally, the department lost in an additional suit against the “gainful employment” rule. Finally, last week, the Department of Education issued a statement that it would not enforce the […]

Campaigns: Meaningful Ways to Engage the Board

Too often, board involvement in the campaign is limited to what are essentially tactical assignments — making the ask to their contacts, raising certain quantities. What’s missed in these cases are opportunities to engage the board in what board members do best — big-picture thinking, advocacy, and getting key messages out to the community. Jim Langley, founder and president of Langley Innovations, and past vice president of advancement at Georgetown University, offers suggestions for how to approach the board from the outset in a way that will contribute more to the success of your campaign. Starting with a Cognitive Map Langley recommends involving board members early in framing the campaign and the “big ideas” driving it. In an unproductive relationship between the board and the campaign planning committee, board members are shown a gift pyramid, told that the institution has X number of prospects at each level, and then given assignments. “In too many cases,” Langley warns, “we assume that a gift pyramid is enough; we present the pyramid, then march through and orchestrate the ask. If you present the campaign that way to the board, they will assume it is a tactical exercise.” Langley warns that there are two risks in this: […]

3 Tips for Re-admitting Stop-Outs

This article offers critical tips gleaned from two of the earliest and successful college stop-out re-enrollment programs – the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s 49er ReAdmits and 49er Finishers, and Harper College’s Completion Concierge. It is a must-read if you are thinking of starting your first stop-out program. Looking to boost completion rates, more colleges are reaching out to students who left the institution or “stopped out” due to family, life, and career changes — or due to financial hardship — but who either qualify for a degree or other credential without realizing it, or are within a few courses of completion. In 2010, we interviewed Demaree Michelau, WICHE’s director of policy analysis, for her advice on the key barriers stop-outs face in returning to campus and how institutions can begin to address them. In this new article, we review two highly successful programs — one at a four-year institution and one at a two-year institution — and we have asked those leading the programs to share tips and advice that may be replicable at other institutions. Our two sample programs are the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s 49er ReAdmits and 49er Finishers, and Harper College’s Completion Concierge. […]

Boosting Retention for Ethnic Minority Students: First-Year Seminar for a Minority Cohort

ALSO READ Boosting Retention for Ethnic Minority Students: Laying the Groundwork Boosting Retention for Ethnic Minority Students: Leveraging Peer Leadership Boosting Retention for Ethnic Minority Students: Faculty Buy-in and Involvement For this fourth article in our series on supporting the academic success of underrepresented minority students, we interviewed Derek Moore, an academic success coach with Pulaski Technical College. Besides piloting a highly successful success coach program, Moore has taught the first-year seminar since 2007, both regular sections and targeted first-year seminars developed specifically for cohorts of minority students. In this article, we’ll share Moore’s tips for developing an effective first-year seminar for an African-American, lower-income student cohort. Rethinking the Common Reader “In many cases, the common reader could be used much more intentionally. The selection of it should be driven by the objectives of the first-year seminar.” Derek Moore, Pulaski Technical College Moore notes that while this is often the case in at least a general way, there is additional opportunity to: Focus the common reader on specific student learning outcomes (e.g., decision-making, critical thinking, time management, etc.) Identify a common reader that is relevant for your targeted courses Moore cites the example of one year in which two of […]

Academic Success Coaching: Keys to an Effective Approach

by Sue Ohrablo, Ed.D.

Given voluminous research on the impact of individualized attention on at-risk students’ academic performance and persistence, more institutions are innovating new ways to leverage both peer mentors and professional academic success coaches. To learn more about the second approach (which has not yet been as widely adopted), we reached out to Derek Moore, a key player in the success coach program at Pulaski Technical College. Pulaski has success coaches on seven campuses, and the coaches report to the institution’s dean of enrollment. The program has seen some success, and Moore shared with us some of its key features. Smaller colleges especially, as well as institutions serving nontraditional student populations, may want to take note. Much of the program’s features are replicable, and it is possible to start on a small scale — with just a few coaches and a brief questionnaire to serve as a needs assessment — and then build up over time. Here is one model for providing effective academic success coaching. The Triage Approach Moore outlined for us the thinking behind Pulaski Technical College’s academic success coach program. The program takes a “triage” approach, offering three levels of coaching: The case management approach involves the coach partnering […]

Getting Buy-in for Addressing Deferred Maintenance

Earlier this month, we surveyed the institutions planning to attend an Academic Impressions webcast on rethinking and prioritizing physical campus improvements. We asked questions about their balance of new capital projects and replacement and renewal, how they were handling issues with limited space capacity, and their level of commitment to addressing the deferred maintenance backlog. Of the facilities managers surveyed, 75 percent noted that addressing the deferred maintenance backlog was either a “high” or “highest” priority for the next 12 months. What’s interesting is that when we asked facilities managers the same question at the end of January this year, the percentage who assigned a high priority to deferred maintenance was 68 percent. While in the past the deferred maintenance backlog has been a perennially neglected issue, it is now rising steadily in its importance to an institution’s planning around physical campus improvements. EXPLORE THE FINDINGS For the findings from the January – February 2012 deferred maintenance survey, read our recent article “Benchmarking Deferred Maintenance.” In response to these findings, we asked Kambiz Khalili, the assistant vice chancellor for student affairs and the executive director of housing and dining services at the University of Colorado Boulder; Dan King, the assistant […]

International Student Success: The Missing Piece

At a recent Academic Impressions webcast on internationalizing the college campus, we surveyed 53 North American institutions of higher education to learn about their efforts and their most significant challenges in integrating international students into campus life. In other surveys over the past few years, international students themselves have cited this integration and acculturation as both key to their success as students — and largely missing from their college experience. (For more information, read our April 2011 article “Supporting International Student Success.”) When we asked colleges about their efforts to assist in student success and integration, the results were revealing: Three-quarters of those institutions surveyed indicated that they had put in place orientation programming specifically for international students, as well as providing writing center resources and staff trained to assist learners for whom English is a second language. However, very few institutions offered other forms of support with integration into the campus community. Only one-third offered their students (whether international or domestic) training and development in intercultural competencies. Fewer institutions offered any coaching on intercultural competencies to faculty and staff. Darla Deardorff, the executive director of the Association of International Education Administrators (AIEA), a research scholar in education at Duke […]

Predicting Student Success: When SAT and GPA Are Not Enough

Historical efforts by admissions officers and enrollment managers to assess a student’s potential for high academic performance and academic persistence have focused on cognitive potential, measured most frequently by past academic performance (high school GPA) and standardized test scores (SAT, ACT). Yet there is a growing awareness among enrollment managers (driven and confirmed by the research of recent years) that these two measures, taken by themselves, offer limited predictive accuracy. “Scores and high school GPA only account for about 20 percent of the variability we see in student outcomes. Some students with a respectable GPA and high scores underperform academically in college and drop out, while other students who appear academically under-prepared then proceed to perform highly. This means that some of the students you are losing are in good academic standing. They don’t appear to be “at-risk students.” To ensure that programming to improve student success is effective, we need better predictors of student success.”Paul Gore, University of Utah To learn more, we turned to Paul Gore, who serves as the student success special projects coordinator at the University of Utah in addition to his roles as professor, training director for graduate counseling programs, and director of institutional research. […]

Missed Opportunities in First-Year Seminars

Jennifer Latino, the director of first-year experience at Campbell University, recently shared with us three ways to help peer educators succeed; in a follow-up interview, she spoke with us to identify some frequently missed opportunities in the design and execution of first-year seminars. Latino highlighted the need to: Review your own institution’s student data, rather than relying on trends or on practices from peer institutions Invite parents’ participation in the first-year student experience in meaningful ways Involve faculty more directly in the first-year seminar Keep the Focus on the Unique Needs of Your Current Students “It’s easy to get too comfortable with the first-year seminar,” Latino warns. “Often, when I’m speaking with representatives of institutions that have had seminars in place for 10 or 15 years, the missed opportunity is that institutions continue to focus on the same learning outcomes they identified years ago, without pausing to check if those outcomes still respond to the needs of their current students. It’s also a risk to attend too closely to what your peer institutions are doing — without checking that against the needs of your own student body.” Take a look at what your seminar spends the most time on — […]