Category: Blog

The Best and Worst Annual Fund Strategies

by Jim M. Langley

YOUR ANNUAL FUND THIS YEARFollow Jim Langley’s advice on what makes for the best and worst annual fund strategies to ensure this is a successful year for your annual giving operation. The 2 Worst Annual Fund Strategies Using the annual fund to balance the annual operating budget.Donors give much, much more in the name of philanthropy than they do for charitable purposes.  Charity calls people to meet an urgent need; philanthropy is a means by which people can create a better society.  If you cast your annual fund as a way of meeting urgent need, you raise unsettling questions in the minds of philanthropic investors: Failing to adjust your annual fund solicitations to loyal donors’ giving patterns.The vast majority of regular annual donors make their contributions in December. Yet, every year, they are subjected to repeated requests to give starting at the beginning of the year. This drumbeat of requests raises questions in the minds of many loyal donors about how much money is being spent to raise money. It also makes them feel that the school’s fundraising has become impersonal and machine-like. Loyalty should be prized and reinforced with personalized communications.  If donors have given two years or more on essentially […]

How MIT Plans to Develop Scalable, Differentiated Instruction

by Lisa Cook

Here’s how MIT and several partners are developing a Fly-by-Wire system to provide high-quality, differentiated instruction at scale and to better equip graduates to enter the workforce. SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION SERIES The US Department of Education has awarded multi-million dollar “First in the World” grants to 18 colleges and universities that are innovating to solve critical challenges with access, recruitment, retention, and student success. At AI, we have interviewed each of the recipients to learn more about the projects these institutions are pursuing, how their approaches are unique, and what other colleges and universities can learn from these new efforts. This was the second year of the First in the World grants. You can read our interviews with the 24 institutions that received 2014 grants here. MIT, partnering with edX and Arapahoe and Quinsigamond Community Colleges, is developing a Fly-by-Wire system to provide high-quality, differentiated instruction at scale and to better equip graduates entering the workforce with skills valued by employers and industry. Funded by a $2.9 million FIPSE First in the World grant, the Fly-by-Wire system is a digitally-enabled, differentiated blended-instruction intervention that is both scalable and cost-effective enough to meet the needs of learners at a range of institutions. […]

How Spelman College Will Use Metacognitive Awareness to Improve Academic Performance

by Lisa Cook

Metacognitive awareness (“thinking about thinking”) is a crucial skill to help students persist and succeed, and here’s how Spelman College hopes to help them master that skill. SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION SERIES The US Department of Education has awarded multi-million dollar “First in the World” grants to 18 colleges and universities that are innovating to solve critical challenges with access, recruitment, retention, and student success. At AI, we have interviewed each of the recipients to learn more about the projects these institutions are pursuing, how their approaches are unique, and what other colleges and universities can learn from these new efforts. This was the second year of the First in the World grants. You can read our interviews with the 24 institutions that received 2014 grants here. Metacognition, or “thinking about thinking,” is a crucial skill to help students persist and succeed, but a Spelman College psychology professor noticed that her junior and senior students hadn’t yet mastered that skill. In response, assistant professor of psychology Jimmeka Guillory started using metacognitive instruction in her class and immediately noticed a difference. Students demonstrated improvement in their awareness and academic performance, and importantly, more students started coming to seek help during her office hours. […]

The Transformational Small College President

by Marcel J. Dumestre, Ed.D.

The recent Sweet Briar crisis highlighted the difficulties that at-risk institutions face in ensuring their basic survival. Not only has the feasibility of a women’s college been questioned, but also the viability of small colleges in general. Often, colleges respond to difficulties with incremental improvements and enhancements — short-term remedies that tend not to address the fundamental issues; stories about substantive change are harder to find. What are proven ways for a president to lead an at-risk institution back to long-term, sustainable financial health? Answers were to be found at a recent Academic Impressions conference, “Foundations for Innovation at Small Institutions.” (You can read the paper that sparked this conference here.) The conference featured presidents of relatively small institutions who have led quite amazing turnarounds. I will share some of their stories — and insights that can be gleaned from them — below. A Diagnosis: What Makes the Small College Turnaround Difficult? Yet these turnarounds tend to be the exception rather than the rule. Why are so many at-risk institutions slow to react to their situation? The answer is that there is a clash of worldviews within the university, all competing for influence over the institution’s direction: It would be […]

Managing an Aging Higher-Ed Workforce

by Lisa Cook, Academic Impressions As more faculty, administration, and staff approach retirement age, institutions must be ready to address the challenges that accompany an aging workforce. Most have already addressed financial planning, but many still struggle with other aging workforce concerns such as mental health issues, budgeting for an increase in disability accommodation requests, and how institutions can create possibilities for retirement that allow employees to exit gracefully. We talked to Susan Wheeler, University Counsel at James Madison University, to learn what institutions should be considering. Wheeler advises institutions to: Develop procedures to help support faculty suffering from mental health issues, and to define next steps if an intervention is not successful. Budget for increased employee ADA accommodations. Shape retirement or emeritus status plans to allow employees to maintain a relationship with the institution, thereby creating more possibilities for retirement. 1. What Can Institutions Do When Aging Employees Have Mental Health Issues? Although mental health issues affect both young and old, institutions might find themselves confronting one of the following scenarios as their employees grow older: A faculty member whose students begin reporting that she is falling asleep in class while guest lecturers lead the discussion, missing appointments, and beginning […]

A Plan to Build an Open Source Tool to Assess Student Skills and Predict Success

by Lisa Cook

SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION SERIES The US Department of Education has awarded multi-million dollar “First in the World” grants to 18 colleges and universities that are innovating to solve critical challenges with access, recruitment, retention, and student success. At AI, we have interviewed each of the recipients to learn more about the projects these institutions are pursuing, how their approaches are unique, and what other colleges and universities can learn from these new efforts. This was the second year of the First in the World grants. You can read our interviews with the 24 institutions that received 2014 grants here. Higher education for most students begins with proctored high-stakes placement exams that may not be the best approach, according to Jason Bryer, director of research and project evaluation at Excelsior College.  Proctored exams can be intimidating, especially at open-enrollment institutions where more than half of students are directed into non-credit remediation courses at an estimated cost of $4 billion per year. Excelsior College hopes to improve students’ early college experiences by developing an open-source assessment tool to measure student skills in academic and non-academic areas. They will use the $1.9 million First in the World grant to address the problem of placement […]

What Starbucks Can Teach You about Equipping Your Staff as Ambassadors for Your Institution

by Tim Ponisciak (University of Notre Dame) Many annual giving departments have an employee program, or at the very least an annual employee appeal. While some schools are quite successful and have a high percentage of alumni making a gift, most struggle with convincing staff to contribute to their employer. But is this the best way to engage university employees in annual giving? Treating Employees as Ambassadors, Not Just Prospects Employees of a school can be the most important ambassadors of their institution. Often, staff are the first people that an alum or donor speaks to when they get to campus. They are the ones that solve problems for alumni when they call the campus. And some employees are the long-time connections to campus for alumni, regardless of what development officer they have been assigned to. Does your school have a brand ambassador program, guidelines, or annual training for staff? Many companies that place a strong emphasis on customer service know that this starts by making sure that their employees, whether they be administration or front line, are completely bought in to their company’s mission. There are lessons here that we can adapt from the corporate sector. Case Study: Starbucks […]

Math and the Liberal Arts: How the University System of Maryland Will Create New Math Pathways for Social Sciences and Liberal Arts Students

by Lisa Cook

SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION SERIES The US Department of Education has awarded multi-million dollar “First in the World” grants to 18 colleges and universities that are innovating to solve critical challenges with access, recruitment, retention, and student success. At AI, we have interviewed each of the recipients to learn more about the projects these institutions are pursuing, how their approaches are unique, and what other colleges and universities can learn from these new efforts. This was the second year of the First in the World grants. You can read our interviews with the 24 institutions that received 2014 grants here. Both developmental and college-level math courses can often be a stumbling block for liberal arts and social sciences majors, who wonder if they’ll ever use college algebra in their future careers. While many institutions provide supplemental support for these students, officials at the University System of Maryland want to try a different approach. They plan to pilot new math pathways that are more relevant to the quantitative skills needed in arts and humanities disciplines. They will use their $2.98 million First in the World grant to introduce a new statistics curriculum that will provide more real-world applications than traditional remedial algebra courses […]

4 Things Academic Deans Can Do to Connect Majors and Minors with Careers

by Stanton Green

In my previous article with AI (“4 Things Academic Deans Can Do to Help Students Succeed After Graduation,” in August 2015), I offered advice on how academic deans and career professionals can collaborate to improve student career mentoring. In this follow-up article, I would like to offer four curricular strategies that can immediately improve student career prospects, by connecting more clearly what a student studies and what they aspire to do after college. Four strategies to make this happen: 1. Work directly with admissions to break the myth that specific majors lead to specific jobs. I have often found myself speaking to groups of prospective students and their parents immediately after an admissions director has literally drawn lines between specific majors and particular jobs. “If you want to be an A you should consider majoring in X,” s/he would exclaim, much to my chagrin. Parents especially like this equation, while students who are often not sure of what ‘they want to be’ usually find it uncomfortable. My subsequent presentation forcefully (and politely) breaks this myth by focusing on three simple notions: WHAT TO DO: Develop a small team that includes an academic dean, an admissions director and a career services director […]

Bossier Parish Community College: Improving Developmental Education with MOOCs, Mobile Apps, and Asynchronous Learning

SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION SERIES The US Department of Education has awarded multi-million dollar “First in the World” grants to 18 colleges and universities that are innovating to solve critical challenges with access, recruitment, retention, and student success. At AI, we have interviewed each of the recipients to learn more about the projects these institutions are pursuing, how their approaches are unique, and what other colleges and universities can learn from these new efforts. This was the second year of the First in the World grants. You can read our interviews with the 24 institutions that received 2014 grants here. by Lisa Cook, Academic Impressions Developmental education courses have a notoriously high drop/fail/withdraw rate; in our 2013 paper Why Rethinking Developmental Education is a Priority, we profiled several institutions that had reworked their dev-ed curriculum in innovative ways. Now, Bossier Parish Community College is working on a new approach: using analytics-based mobile applications embedded in developmental courses to improve student success. BPCC’s app will serve two purposes: Students will have easy access to support for their classes, anytime, anywhere. The app will also provide analytics data so BPCC can isolate and track which efforts are working to improve student engagement and persistence. BPCC […]