Category: Blog

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 […]

7 Ways Academic Leaders Can Cultivate Creativity

by Melissa Morriss-Olson, Ph.D.

This article continues a series focused on Creating an Innovative Institutional Mindset. More articles will follow. The previous article in this series is: Creative thinking skills are more important than ever if we are to deal with the vast and complex array of challenges facing many colleges and universities. In my last article I discussed the difficulty of creating and nurturing innovation within an academic organization. In my experience, the forces for preserving the status quo are especially powerful within academic organizations and are institutionalized in ways that make change very difficult.  Moreover, those who are well positioned and authorized by role and formal authority to lead change are often weighed down with workloads and responsibilities that can kill the creative impulse. Perhaps it is no wonder that, according to a national study, the average tenure of a chief academic officer or provost is only 4.7 years, compared to the significantly longer 8.5 average tenure of all college presidents. According to this same study, the top frustrations for chief academic officers include lack of resources, difficulty cultivating leadership in others, curmudgeonly faculty, campus infighting, and unresponsive campus governance structures. Only 31% of respondents view ‘leading change and fostering innovation’ as job priorities; […]

4 Things STEAM Could Achieve on Your Campus

by Jill Sible

Ask any ten academic professionals, “What is STEAM?” and you are likely to get ten different answers. Yet, intuitively, they would agree that STEAM is important and probably have incorporated at least one STEAM facility into their master planning. (Broadly speaking, STEAM represents the productive intersection of STEM with the arts and humanities.  Other definitions for STEAM are equally valid – one size does not fit all.) I do believe that any plan to bring STEAM programming and facilities to a campus will benefit tremendously from a step back to consider the ‘why’: To prime your thinking, I offer four possible outcomes for a STEAM program at your college and university and some examples of how these outcomes are pursued at my own institution, Virginia Tech. 1. Promoting inter- and trans-disciplinarity Collaborations among scientists, engineers, artists, and scholars of the humanities bring a much larger toolkit of skills, techniques, and strategies to address complex problems. For example, at Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT) housed within the Moss Arts Center, current projects include a collaboration between educators, civil engineers and visual artists to develop 3D technology to automatically measure and map cracks on highway bridges to more […]

What New Student Affairs Directors Need to Know

by Karen M. Whitney, EdD, Jeremy Podany

The job of directing a unit in student affairs is complex and challenging. Here is some advice from experts who have been there. New student affairs directors have the opportunity to see a direct impact on the lives of students and the success of the institution, but often face an array of common challenges upon entering their new position, including: Taking on the directorship is a complex and challenging transition. That’s why we’re offering a Bootcamp for New Student Affairs Directors this July, co-facilitated by Karen Whitney, president of Clarion University and a past student affairs leader, and Jeremy Podany, executive director of corporate services and career education at Colorado State University. We wanted to ask these two experts what skills gaps they are seeing in new student affairs directors and what critical pieces of advice they would offer to those preparing to lead a department in student affairs. This is what they told us: What is one knowledge or skills gap you see often in new SA directors? Karen Whitney. Often new SA directors make the mistake of only focusing on inputs rather than on results. It is understandable to get caught in simply looking at and defending the good hard work that […]

Overcoming Barriers to Student Affairs/Academic Affairs Partnerships: 4 Examples

by Elizabeth Ross Hubbell, Daniel Fusch

In our 2016 article “Improving Student Success Can’t Be a One-Office Effort,” Paul Marthers at SUNY spoke of the power of leveraging strategic partnerships across traditionally divided functional areas: “Whole-campus efforts tend to have higher visibility and the power to motivate collective buy-in and effort. Student success became everyone’s job, because just about everyone who works on a college campus is involved in some part of the student lifecycle.” Developing strategic partnerships between student affairs and academic departments on your campus isn’t easy work, but it can be critical to improving students’ experience and success. That’s why we’re offering an intensive learn-and-work training this summer focused on the structural and cultural aspects of developing a successful partnership. In advance of that workshop, though, we wanted to collect powerful examples of how experts at different institutions have overcome common but significant hurdles to establishing and strengthening these partnerships. Here are the examples our expert panel want to share with you: Examples: How Each Panelist Overcame Hurdles to Successful SA/AA Partnerships Christopher Romano, Vice President for Enrollment Management and Student Affairs, Ramapo College. Higher education is known for its siloed approach to serving students. However, one way that Ramapo College of New Jersey has […]

Graduate Enrollment Marketing: Unpacking the Biggest Challenges

by Daniel Fusch

Marketing graduate degree programs is both an art and a science, and we wanted to take a deep look at who is doing this well — and how they’re doing it. To that end, we assembled an expert panel including Julie Gacnik (Creighton University), Marcus Hanscom (Roger Williams University), and Eric Nissen (University of Colorado, Colorado Springs), among others. In this series of four articles (you’re reading the first), we will ask this panel four questions to help you better understand the changing landscape of graduate enrollment marketing: We invite you to use these brief articles to start critical conversations on your campus. Additionally, you can explore graduate student recruitment tactics in depth with these same experts at the upcoming Graduate Enrollment Management conference. We hope to see you there! Here are our panelists’ answers to the first of the four questions. Q: What challenges are institutions facing in digital marketing? Sarah Seigle Peatman, Academic Impressions. In today’s day and age, digital marketing is critically important to any graduate recruitment marketing strategy—but with such an array of audiences to target and tactics available to use, it’s not always easy to get it right. What, in your eyes, are some of the newest/most […]

Graduate Enrollment Marketing: Keys to a Strong, Integrated Website

by Daniel Fusch

Marketing graduate degree programs is both an art and a science, and we wanted to take a deep look at who is doing this well — and how they’re doing it. In this series of four articles (you’re reading the second), we ask an expert panel four questions to explore the changing landscape of graduate enrollment marketing: We invite you to use these brief articles to start critical conversations on your campus. Additionally, you can explore graduate student recruitment tactics in depth with these same experts at the upcoming Graduate Enrollment Management conference. We hope to see you there! Here are our panelists’ answers to the second of the four questions. Q: How do you keep the website strong and integrated into your digital marketing plan? Sarah Seigle, Academic Impressions. In many ways, the school or program website is the “hub” of a digital marketing strategy. What are 2-3 practices that you currently employ at your institution for ensuring that your website is strong and effectively tied into other aspects of your digital marketing plan? Marcus Hanscom, Roger Williams University. Many institutions are making a critical mistake in their digital marketing efforts: they’re directing clicks to a generic page on their websites. I […]

Looking at Student “Grit” and Resilience – from Recruitment to Retention

by Paul Marthers

Series: Managing the Student LifecycleThis new series convenes expert perspectives on student success and predictive analytics. We hope to empower enrollment managers, student affairs professionals, deans, and faculty to think deeper about their student data, predictors of success, and managing the student lifecycle holistically from recruitment to retention to completion.Earlier in this series:Improving Student Success Can’t Be a One-Office EffortDeveloping a Metrics-Driven Culture within Student AffairsIt’s Not Just About the First and Second Year of College We need to be thinking about the non-cognitive factors in student success from the very beginning, from the admissions cycle on. In higher education, there is growing recognition that scholastic achievement is the result of more than just talent and cognitive ability. Studies have shown that the non-cognitive skill we call effort also plays a critical role. MacArthur Fellow and University of Pennsylvania Professor Angela Lee Duckworth has found through her research that effort is highly influenced by a psychological characteristic she calls “grit.” Grit, according to Duckworth, is the ability to persevere in the face of difficulty. Duckworth’s research has sparked an explosion of articles, studies, and even courses (including one at the Harvard Graduate School of Education) that explore how non-cognitive factors like […]

One Stop: How One Institution Transitioned to a High-Performing Student Services Model

by Melissa Padfield, Norma Rodenburg

Photo by the University of Alberta. The Student Connect centre. The Challenge Run-around, duplication of services, confusion for students, inconsistency of service delivery–these are just some of the challenges that come about as a result of the complex bureaucracies in higher education. As student services professionals, we all do our best to support our students, but there comes a time when a fundamental change, and a reimagining of how we do things, is required to address these issues. Like many large institutions, at the University of Alberta we operate in a decentralized environment. We support approximately 40,000 students across three main campuses in our province; we have 180 staff and 80 student volunteers in the Office of the Registrar (RO); and in the 2015/2016 academic year, we had a total of 104,252 interactions across all three channels (phone, email, and in-person). This volume has presented us with a challenge; our old, decentralized model was not enough to ensure we could help students access key services easily. In 2010, the RO at the University of Alberta began a journey to redesign what front line student service would look like. At the time the RO supported seven service points for students. Something […]

Graduate Enrollment Marketing: Digital Tactics That Work

by Daniel Fusch

Marketing graduate degree programs is both an art and a science, and we wanted to take a deep look at who is doing this well — and how they’re doing it. In this series of four articles (you’re reading the third), we ask an expert panel four questions to explore the changing landscape of graduate enrollment marketing: We invite you to use these brief articles to start critical conversations on your campus. Additionally, you can explore graduate student recruitment tactics in depth with these same experts at the upcoming Graduate Enrollment Management conference. We hope to see you there! Here are our panelists’ answers to the third of the four questions. Q. What Other Digital Marketing Tactics Have Worked? Sarah Seigle, Academic Impressions. In addition to your website, what are 1-2 other digital marketing strategies or tactics that you have implemented at your institution to help in graduate student recruitment? What tactics are you most proud of? What tactics have been most impactful? Julie Gacnik, Creighton University. The addition of a central CRM was most impactful in our overall operation. Prior to joining the University of St. Thomas, everything was collected on sticky notes and shadow databases on employees’ desktops, a risky means of […]