Category: Blog

Higher Education: Your Life May Depend Upon It

by Heather E. McGowan

also by Robert E. Johnson, Ph.D. (Learn more in the recorded webcast: The Future of Work and the Academy) Higher education and the coveted bachelor’s degree was once the essential launch pad to economic stability. Now, it seems it is something more. In to a new report published by Brookings, “Mortality and morbidity in the 21st century,” Princeton professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton explore the patterns and trends that have led to a decline in the life expectancy of middle-aged white people without college degrees since the late 1990s. Spoiler alert: education is the key distinction, and differences in life expectancy do not appear due simply to an economic division. In this paper, we will take a look at the changing landscape of work and what this means for higher education. We’ll look particularly at manufacturing. Note: All segments of our economy are in some form of disruption. Manufacturing is an obvious and easy industry to use as an example as the devastation can be seen and understood. Rising automation and machine intelligence will creep into and replace the knowledge workers with the same voracity with which the physical workers have been supplanted: How We Got Here We lost a […]

Academic Impressions on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA)

Higher education is the mechanism that makes the American Dream possible–participation and graduation from college is the key to changing an individual’s and family’s life trajectory. And higher education–and our country as a whole–is made better by our ability to accept, welcome, and engage with our swiftly diversifying population. As such, we at Academic Impressions have been deeply disappointed by the decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (or DACA). DACA has offered an opportunity to young people who have lived in the United States for most of their lives to engage with the American notion that hard work and dedication are the keys to creating a better life for yourself. DREAMers in turn have used that opportunity to further their educations, join the armed forces, and start businesses. Their actions have benefited their communities and our country as a whole. To toss those futures aside not only violates these American ideals but it rips families apart, damages communities and economies. We along with other numerous higher education associations and organizations, encourage Congress to take swift action to secure the status of DREAMers before the 6-month time period ends. Roughly 800,000 young people placed their futures in […]

How Activity Based Costing Analysis Can Be Used To Test-Drive Future Scenarios

ARTICLES ON ACTIVITY-BASED COSTING This is a companion piece to our earlier article Activity Based Costing: What’s the Return On It? You can also hear more from William Massy at the upcoming conference “Academic Resourcing Models for Evidence-Based Decision-Making.” by William F. Massy, Professor Emeritus and former Vice President for Business and Finance, Stanford University Activity-Based Costing for individual courses (“Course-based ABC”) is emerging as the best way to understand the cost and revenue structures of colleges and universities. In this article, I want to extend this idea to cover prediction as well as understanding—specifically, how the model can be used to evaluate future scenarios. Examples of Scenario Planning that Can Benefit from Course-Based ABC Universities regularly encounter challenges that this kind of scenario planning can help address. Here are just a few, derived from my own experience over the years: Respond to externally driven declines in student enrollment—for example, due to government immigration policies or new competitors. Evaluate proposals for adding new programs or expanding, contracting, or eliminating old ones. Moreover, there is a good case for including capacity and margin analysis as a routine part of Program Review. Cope with significant funding cuts, e.g. in government appropriations or […]

What College Leaders Need to Know About Responding Rapidly to a Crisis

by Sarah Seigle Peatman

How do you manage a crisis in a world that expects instant response and immediate communication? Colleges and universities all too often face a series of challenges in responding actively and speedily to a crisis or emergency on or affecting the campus, but they needn’t reinvent the wheel: there are proven models developed in the government and military sectors that can be applied to the higher ed context. To help senior leaders in higher education improve their crisis preparedness, we’ve assembled and interviewed a panel of experts, including Dr. Connie Book, provost and dean at The Citadel; Major General Jim Boozer, US Army (Ret.); and Colonel Cardon Crawford, US Army (Ret.) and Director of Government and Community Affairs at The Citadel. Resources: You can read an interview with this panel in this earlier article. And here — in this article — you can listen to a brief audio interview with Colonel Cardon Crawford about the need for “emergent crisis management,” and how emergency crisis management differs from the crisis communications planning of the past. A transcript of the interview follows. You can also meet Colonel Cardon Crawford and Major General Jim Boozer in person for an in-depth training at the […]

Habits of Highly Effective Higher-Ed Professionals, Part 2: Finding Your Purpose

by Steve Riccio, EdD, SPHR, PCC

Recently, I published the article “Habits of Highly Effective Higher-Ed Professionals,” talking about how (and why) higher-ed professionals need to take Stephen R. Covey’s advice about “sharpening the saw” to life. That article stressed the importance of professional development to our careers and our effectiveness. Now I want to take a step further and discuss another habit of highly effective higher-ed professionals: creating a purpose statement to provide your career and life with lasting fulfillment. It sounds simple, but often is anything but. I’ll talk about:  1. Why You Need to Pursue Purpose, Not Happiness Recently, I was having lunch with a friend and former colleague. We were reminiscing about the “good ol’ days” when we worked together as consultants. It had been years since we had met for a meaningful conversation. I found that as I explained the journey that had taken me from full-time consultant/part-time professor to full-time professor/part-time consultant, I realized that I had never been “myself” in front of him…until this moment. Whether in a team meeting or a golf outing with a client, I had always felt that I had to be someone who I really wasn’t. I hadn’t been happy with who I was. I had spent the […]

How to Engage International Alumni Effectively

by Kathy Edersheim, President of Impactrics Markets are global, education is global, and so alumni relations should be global, too. There are three good reasons to pay special attention to “international alumni” – those graduates who have returned home from studying abroad or who are working outside their home country: They are likely to be innovators and connectors. After all, they took the initiative to travel overseas either for education or for work opportunities. Anecdotally, it seems that alumni farther away from campus are often the ones most intent on staying connected to the institution and to other alumni. For alumni based far from home or even far from their school, the alumni community provides a ready-made social group that has shared values and, possibly, provides helpful connections. A robust alumni network with engaging programs can create a very appreciative alum with a strong bond back to the school. Alumni can serve the institution in a number of capacities, wherever they are located. While many institutions are thinking about engaging their international alumni, not all are doing it effectively and efficiently. Here is some advice for successful international alumni relations: Define Your Scope First, determine the impact and the types […]

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 […]

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 […]