Category: Blog

Addressing Student Mental Health Issues – On a Budget

by Anne E. Lundquist I was very interested in the article by Kristen Domonell that appeared in University Business on March 19.  In this article, she emphasized that, in an era of increasing numbers of students with significant psychological disabilities and serious mental issues, colleges and universities are being forced to “do more with less” because of the escalating financial pressures occurring on many campuses at the same time. Domonell outlined strategies that some counseling centers are employing to address these issues and concerns. Data from the 2012 National Counseling Center Directors (NCCD) Survey confirms this pressure to meet demand: 92% of the respondents report that the number of students seeking help at their centers has been increasing in recent years. 88% of directors state that the increased demand for services, along with the increase in clients with more serious psychological problems, has posed staffing problems for them. Yet I think it is important to emphasize that many institutions are in a position to build on other resources that they already have in place in other areas of their operations to help to accomplish these same goals, to serve the best interests of all students. You don’t always need to […]

Naming Opportunities: Don’t Miss Them

Those shops that are best able to leverage naming opportunities to secure gifts and to steward long-term relationships with donors will be those that have thought ahead. Even as more institutions look to launch new campaigns — often increasingly ambitious ones in terms of their dollar goals — donors are increasingly interested in attaching their names to philanthropic projects representative of their values. Those shops that are best able to leverage these opportunities to secure gifts and to steward long-term relationships with donors will be those that have thought ahead — those that have an intentional plan in place for how opportunities for naming gifts will be identified and managed. Over the past two years, we have interviewed Vincent Duckworth, partner at ViTreo and one of the leading experts on naming opportunities in higher education, frequently on this subject. Here are some of the highlights from the advice he has shared with us. Creating a Naming Opportunities Plan To move from a reactive to a proactive approach to opportunities for soliciting naming or renaming gifts, Duckworth recommends assembling a specific and well-defined naming opportunities plan to be shared internally. “You don’t have to put this out in the New York […]

Are Outdated Policies Holding You Back?

“Your company’s organizational memory might be holding it back,” business professor Vijay Govindarajan and retired management consultant Srikanth Srinivas cautioned in Harvard Business Review this week, offering advice that spans the for-profit and non-profit sectors. According to Govindarajan and Srinivas, Organizational memory – the way we have always done things – can include “obsolete policies and practices, outdated assumptions and mind-sets, and underperforming products and services. This organizational memory creates biases that get embedded in planning processes, performance evaluation systems, organizational structures and human resource policies. This becomes a big burden when non-linear shifts occur.” What policies and practices, perhaps unexamined for 20 years, are holding your institution back? As the pace of change accelerates and the challenges your institution faces becoming increasingly complex, an even more critical question might be: How do you encourage leaders throughout your institution to question long-held assumptions? Without letting go of the strengths of your institution’s hard-won and extensive experience (after all, a college’s “organizational memory,” unlike a dot-com’s, is measured in decades or even centuries), it’s time to ensure that your planning and budgeting processes as well as your systems for hiring, training, and evaluation are welcoming of disruptive and innovative questions and […]

Placing Students in Gateway Courses: A More Informed Approach

One of the most insidious, documented effects of the traditional pipeline of developmental courses on an incoming student is the fatigue of taking multiple non-credit courses (or, in some cases, being required to retake a non-credit course repeatedly). Tristan Denley, provost at Austin Peay State University, calls this course sequence the “slow death.” Your goal should be to move developmental students as quickly as possible into credit-bearing courses that count toward their academic degree or certificate. This shortens the time to graduation; it also builds a student’s confidence and their sense of momentum toward their academic goals, increasing the likelihood that they will persist and succeed. As you reconsider the sequence and design of your developmental education programming, also reconsider your approach to placement. Does the standard policy of placing students, on the basis of their high school transcripts, in specific levels of developmental coursework serve the student and your institution well—or are there more nuanced, effective approaches to placement? Fast-Track Placement Valencia College has revisited their placement criteria as a key part of their strategy to accelerate the progress of academically underprepared students. Reviewing standardized test scores for incoming students, Valencia identifies the top 25% of those students who […]

Reassessing the Costs and Benefits of Developmental Education

Reports over the past several years from the Lumina Foundation, Complete College America, and other policy and research groups have documented the high cost of developmental education, measured not only in dollars spent but in student attrition rates. In fact, “Core Principles for Transforming Remedial Education,” a recent joint statement and meta-analysis provided by the Charles A. Dana Center, Complete College America, the Education Commission of the States, and Jobs for the Future, reported that: Half of all undergraduates (and 70% of students enrolled at community colleges) take at least one remedial course. Only about one quarter of community college students who take a remedial course graduate within eight years. On average, less than half of students in remedial reading courses complete the remedial sequence, and only one third of students in remedial math courses complete that remedial sequence. The Cost of Providing Developmental Courses Not only do developmental courses fail badly at their purpose—that of remediating gaps in student learning so that academically underprepared students can register for first-year courses with a higher degree of successfully completing them—developmental courses also drain considerable institutional resources. Given that half of all entering students are placed in at least one developmental course, […]

A Fresh Look at the Developmental Ed Curriculum

Institutions that have made real strides in improving retention and academic success rates for academically underprepared students have focused not only on revisiting their policies around academic placement but also on revamping their developmental education curriculum. Let’s take a close look at two successful—though quite different—models: The Assisted Learning Approach Dispensing with the traditional developmental sequence altogether, Austin Peay State University places its academically underprepared students immediately into the regular first-year courses—but adds two corequisite, non-credit hours of Structured Learning Assistance (SLA) funded by a $75 lab fee. “When a student arrives with ACT scores indicating they are not college-ready, a low math ACT or a low reading/writing score, we enroll them in a credit-bearing course the moment they walk on campus. We don’t hold them back and lock them into the slow death of a pipeline of non-credit developmental courses. Instead, we move them into their first year and assist them in those courses.”Tristan Denley, Austin Peay State University Austin Peay’s “Structured Learning Assistance” (SLA) workshops have been so successful that the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) included Austin Peay’s linked workshop model as one of their six recommended models for redesigning developmental courses. SLA workshops are provided to […]

Special Edition: Making a Difference with International Students – The Resources You Need

According to the Open Doors report on international education, international student enrollment has increased every year for the past 60 years. With this trend expected to continue, and international students becoming an increasingly important constituent group, it’s critical for institutions to take a more holistic view at how they’re meeting these students’ needs now and in the future. To help you learn from some of the most effective approaches to serving international students, Academic Impressions offers this series of  resources: A Whole-Campus Approach This report offers practical considerations for optimizing the international student lifecycle: Beyond recruitment efforts, institutions need to think broadly about integration into the campus community and the academic curriculum to ensure international students persist and succeed. They also need to plant seeds for future support and giving as these students graduate and potentially return to their home countries. HEAR FROM THE EXPERTS View a free recording of our June 2012 webcast “The Internationalized Campus” to hear from experts Darla Deardorff (AIEA) and Gretchen Dobson (Gretchen Dobson Go Global) about critical opportunities during the undergraduate years to introduce programming that supports international students’ academic success and persistence … and invites them to engage with the institution in the […]

Students at Risk of Suicide and Risk Management: Advice from Allan Shackelford

Student suicide has received renewed attention both in the US and Canada, not only because of the increased number of suicides by college students (with research studies indicating that as many as 1.5% of college students may actually attempt suicide, while many others will give suicide serious consideration at some point during their years on campus) but also because of increased legal scrutiny and the legal liabilities incurred by failing to address a risk of student suicide proactively and speedily. In an interview this week, we asked Allan Shackelford to offer his reflections on the issue. As an attorney and consultant, Allan Shackelford has advised institutions of higher education for more than 30 years. He is the co-author (with Anne Lundquist) of The Student Affairs Handbook: Translating Legal Principles into Effective Policies, as well as Responding to and Supporting Students with Disabilities: Risk Management Considerations. You can find his recommendations below. Legal Ambiguities: Forseeability and Liability Citing Robert Bickel and Peter Lake’s study The Rights and Responsibilities of the Modern University (1999), Shackelford notes that institutions of higher education owe a legal duty to students to protect them in every reasonable manner from forseeable risks: “At the heart of our […]

Measuring Brand ROI: An Interview with Bob Sevier

As the higher ed marketplace becomes increasingly competitive, it has become more critical than ever to be able to measure the impact of your marketing efforts on brand perception — critical, but not always easy. In a recent interview with Academic Impressions, Bob Sevier, senior vice president of strategy for Stamats Inc., shared with us his guiding philosophy for measuring the return on investment for branding efforts. Here is the interview, with links to additional resources — we hope you will find it useful for opening discussion within your office. Knowing What Works and What Doesn’t Academic Impressions (AI): Bob, why is it especially important to care about measuring brand perception now? Bob Sevier: From the vantage point of the marketing professional, there are two reasons. First, it helps to find out whether your brand campaign is actually working. A lot of marketers are slowly transitioning from measuring output (Are we busy?) to measuring outcomes (Is it working?). Second, measuring the ROI on your brand campaign tells your supervisor that you’re serious. Professionals show results, and when you can show results, you earn the opportunity for an increased budget. That’s why this is more important now than even four years […]

Video: Trust and the High-Performing Team in Higher Education

Drawing on current research on high-performing leadership teams both within and outside of higher education, Pat Sanaghan, president of The Sanaghan Group and author of Collaborative Leadership in Action (2011) and the forthcoming book, How to Actually Build an Exceptional Team (2013), has identified 10 differentiators of exceptional teams, 10 qualities that enable teams to rise to and perform at high levels consistently. Of the 10, Sanaghan points to trust as the most important quality that differentiates high-performing teams in higher education. “In a high-trust environment,” Sanaghan remarked in an interview with Academic Impressions, “you can do many things even with limited resources. But if you have low trust, even with high resources you can’t get much done. To build trust, you need transparency with information — especially around financial realities, decision-making roles, and process.” Higher education is by its nature a collaborative and people-driven enterprise — yet often, too little investment is made to improve the professionals within the institution work together. As the speed of change accelerates and higher-ed’s operating environment grows more complex, those institutions that will remain competitive and thrive will be those characterized by high-performing teams across all parts and levels of the organization. The High-Trust Environment […]