Category: Blog

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 […]

Graduate Enrollment Marketing: Non-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 fourth), 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 fourth of the four questions. Q: What Non-Digital Marketing Strategies Have Been Effective? Sarah Seigle, Academic Impressions. Other aspects of a graduate recruitment marketing strategy that we haven’t yet talked about are print communications and recruitment travel—grad school fairs, on-campus events, etc. What role do non-digital strategies such as these currently play in your own graduate recruitment marketing strategy? How heavily should other schools be utilizing these tactics? Julie Gacnik, Creighton University. While the overall investment in print has declined, and has shifted to digital, print will never go away. As for recruitment travel and events, we […]

Habits of Highly Effective Higher-Ed Professionals

by Steven Riccio, Ed.D., SPHR, PCC

Higher education does a great job educating others, but seldom do we work on ourselves. We don’t take the time to ‘sharpen the saw.’ As a result, colleges and universities are filled with very sharp people who possess rather dull blades. In a classic video vignette entitled “Big Rocks,” from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the late Stephen R. Covey invited an audience member to join him onstage for an experiment. Most know the concept of Big Rocks, but I encourage you to watch this video if you haven’t already. In the experiment, Covey asks the young female executive to fit in all the big rocks he has provided into a bucket that is over half-filled with pebbles. The pebbles depict the day-to-day tasks, emails, meetings, and emergencies that we are all faced with and that fill up our lives. At one point, the participant looks at the rock labeled “Sharpen the Saw,” rolls her eyes, and places it back onto the table. Covey, who never shied away from a teachable moment, picks up the same rock asking the audience, “Who feels they don’t have time to ‘Sharpen the Saw’?” As several hands are raised, Covey then follows with a […]

What You Need to Know Before Pursuing a Center for Innovation

by Daniel Fusch

Transcript of the Interview We interviewed Dr. Stephen Whitehead, the associate provost of innovation at California University of Pennsylvania. A lot of institutions have shared their curiosity with us about how to launch a center for innovation, and we wanted to ask one of the foremost experts what his peers should consider first. Stephen Whitehead will also be discussing this topic in more depth at the upcoming conference “Developing a Center for Innovation on Campus.” A transcript of the interview follows below the video. What do you need to know before pursuing a center for innovation? One of the big things when looking at creating a center for innovation is the feasibility of it. Every college is looking at cost and how they’re spending money. So, if the center can be tied to your strategic plan and be connected with the university’s mission, then it’s easier to go out for funds and justify the feasibility of the program. Also, what are the outcomes you expect from the center? What kinds of institutions should be thinking about this seriously? I think every campus should really be looking at the way they are engaging their communities – whether it’s the campus community or […]

Activity Based Costing: What’s the Return on it?

by Len Brazis, Director of Strategic Planning and Analysis,Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Here at Embry-Riddle, the adoption of Activity Based Costing (ABC) principles has been an evolutionary process that began on one of our residential campuses in the Fall of 2010. That campus had just finished a fiscal year with a negative operating margin of $3.3 million. A new Chancellor was installed and had been charged by the President to cut about 100 positions, eliminate at least 5 unprofitable degree programs, and cut costs operationally wherever he could to turn the campus around.  He tapped me immediately to fly out and provide him with guidance that would enable him to accomplish his charge and return to our President at the time with a strategy to turn the campus around. Understanding that I could never overcome in short order our established accrual-based accounting process, I immediately set out developing a standalone model that was grounded in ABC principles. After three days of nearly around-the-clock work, we had a new model that provided so much clarity for the new Chancellor that he immediately saw flaws in his charge. What resulted was: no program closures, only about 50 positions eliminated, expansion of student services programs […]

What Story Does the Pell Grant Data Tell?

Series: Changing How We Understand the Market<In this series, we analyze current enrollment and demographics data, uncovering stories that challenge how institutions often understand their marketplace—or that shed new light on emerging trends. We want to encourage a deeper look at the implications of today’s marketplace data. We hope that you will share these stories across your institution and use them to start critical conversations to drive not only enrollment strategy but discussions of curricular offerings, student support, and course design. While we’ll highlight findings and stories worthy of closer attention, each article includes an easy-to-use Tableau dashboard that you and your colleagues can use to drill deep in the data yourself. Also in this series: Yield Rates are Declining – Why? Is the International Enrollment Boom a Rising Tide that Lifts All Ships? How Simpson’s Index Can Offer Universities a Different Look at Diversity Why Measuring Diversity Matters Graduate Enrollment and Gender: A Changing Landscape By Jon Boeckenstedt (DePaul University) The Pell Grant, originally passed into law in 1972 as the Basic Education Opportunity Grant (BEOG), is a federal program to provide assistance with tuition and other educational costs of a bachelor’s degree at over 5,000 participating post-secondary institutions. Federal appropriations […]

In Busy Higher Ed, 3 Ways to Foster Our Own Learning

by Mickey Fitch

We work at institutions of higher learning, but are we doing enough to foster our own learning? RELATED RESOURCES:10 Tips for Optimizing the Return on Professional DevelopmentScorecard: How Do Higher-Ed Institutions Leverage Professional Development?Full Report: The State of Professional Development in Higher Education (February 2016) by Mickey Fitch, Academic Impressions As professionals within higher education, our own practice should include ongoing education, development, and growth.  All too often, though, we treat professional development as a seasonal or occasional practice, not a regular practice. Just as we encourage our students to attend class regularly, read textbooks, and apply what they’ve learned, we should bring that same rigor to our own learning process as we develop in our careers. Yet each day, we are bombarded with information. How do we sort through it and prioritize what’s important? How do we know what to pay attention to? How do we make our professional development both more impactful and easier? Here are some practical tips. 1. How to make sure you’re paying attention to the right things: I recommend creating automated daily digests that get delivered straight to your inbox. We know that a world of information is available at our fingertips, but we need easy […]

Retaining Online Students: 3 Expert Perspectives

by Sarah Seigle Peatman, Dr. Kristen Betts, Dr. Mark Parker, Tom Porch

In the wake of recent declines in online program enrollment across many institutions, renewed attention to online student success and retention has become especially critical. We wanted to hear the best current thinking on improving online student retention, so we reached out to a panel of three accomplished experts in this area: You can read our in-depth interview with them below. These three also serve as the faculty for our upcoming workshop, Improving Online Student Retention and Success, where you will have the opportunity to develop a series of action plans to increase online student success at your institution. In this interview, we asked them for: 1. Examples of untapped opportunities Sarah Seigle Peatman, AI. Looking across the landscape of online programs, what do you see as the biggest untapped opportunities for improving online student success? Kristen Betts, Drexel University. One of the biggest untapped opportunities for improving online student success is to get a better institutional understanding around cognitive and non-cognitive factors associated with student retention, completion, and attrition. Research often links cognitive measures (e.g., GPA, rank, achievement tests, etc.) to academic success. However, for non-traditional students, these measures may be more elusive. According the 2016 Learning House Report, the average age […]

How One Institution’s New Approach to Budgeting is Creating a Culture of High Trust

by Daniel Fusch

Recently, AI’s program manager Grace Spivak and our director of research and publications Daniel Fusch had the opportunity to interview Steve Kreidler, the vice president of administration and finance at Metropolitan State University of Denver, a public institution enrolling 20,000 undergraduate students. Several years ago, Metro State underwent a transformational strategic planning process and instituted an advisory budget task force that operates in an entirely new way. To learn more, we invited Steve Kreidler to speak with us about: Here are the key findings from our interview… 1. Bringing Transparency to the Budget Grace Spivak, AI. Can you describe how the new budgeting task force builds trust through transparency? Steve Kreidler. Previously, Metro’s budgeting process involved three people in a room (the president, the VP of administration, and the budget director). And this isn’t unusual; it’s common for universities have a small group huddle over the budget without gathering much input. What that leads to is the complete belief throughout the rest of the campus that deals are being made, some colleagues are getting preferential treatment, and that there is more money available than is being distributed. Today, we have a budget task force that includes a representative from each of the formal […]

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