Category: Research & Reports

10 Articles Every Leader in Higher Ed Should Read

by Patrick Sanaghan, Amit Mrig

Over the past 7-8 years, Academic Impressions has designed and delivered leadership programs for over a thousand leaders across the higher education landscape. We have had the opportunity to work with academic and administrative leaders as well as presidents and provosts. The learning experiences have been outstanding because almost every participant was curious and interested in learning about leadership, not pontificating about it. One of the protocols we use in every leadership program is the creation of a “learning agenda” that is produced by participants and is a list of highly relevant articles, books, and papers on leadership. The criteria for inclusion on the learning agenda list is that the suggested reading must be something that influenced a participant, made them think differently about how they view leadership, or had a positive and meaningful impact on how they actually lead. Participants populate the list over the course of the 2 or 3-day program. They also provide a 1-minute snapshot about the suggested book or article, with a brief rationale about why their suggestion is worth reading. This article provides an annotated list of some of the strong recommendations from past participants. There is a lot of blather and clutter out there […]

Preventing Presidential Derailment

by Patrick Sanaghan

Do you know the 10 early warning signs? Patrick Sanaghan, Kathleen Gaval, Steve Riccio, and Steve Titus review the early signs of a derailing president in this paper informed by decades of experience from university presidents and professionals who work closely with them. Presidential derailments (defined by Stephen Trachtenberg as an exit in less than three years) are occurring with greater frequency—and the early signs that a presidency is off the rails are remarkably similar across dozens of cases. This paper will review those signs, as well as advice for new presidents and four steps to take if the early warning signs appear. Preventing Presidential Derailment: 10 Early Warning Signs: Read the paper. Related Resource: Check Out The Presidential Transition Guide

6 Powerful Ideas for Building a First-Class Team on Campus

by Patrick Sanaghan, Clint Sidle

Why You Need a Stellar Team To build a high performing team is a daunting and noble task, and such teams are as rare as blue diamonds. The silo mentality that often exists on our campuses often limits our collective actions, and creates redundancy and replication. Given shrinking resources and the rapid pace of change, the siloed approach to team building and decision making is neither strategic nor feasible. We must work collaboratively to utilize the collective talents of our campus stakeholders. And learning to build high performing teams is one of the most effective ways we can meet the many challenges that confront us. If a senior leader can build a stellar team, the organizational leverage that can be achieved is powerful and can be a game changer for a campus. In this scenario: We have had the opportunity to work with scores of senior teams in higher education. Almost always, these teams were comprised of highly intelligent, dedicated, honest, and mission-driven individuals. But few of them ever became a first class team.  When you witness a high performing senior team being transparent with each other, asking for help, dealing with conflict effectively, and listening carefully to each other, […]

Presidential Dialogues: Making Difficult Decisions

How do you make important decisions when you don’t have perfect information? When you know there will be resistance? Recently, we convened six leaders from very different institutions to discuss how they have approached making difficult decisions. In this quick, practical paper (a 15-minute read) hear advice from these six presidents on making the difficult decisions: What this paper presents is a departure from the traditional model for presidential leadership. Culturally, we acclaim decisive decision makers or heroic, charismatic personalities. But these six presidents were diverse in leadership style, approach, and personality, and all of them were skeptical of the value of decisive action unaccompanied by deep understanding of the institution’s culture and deep efforts to build trust and collaboration. We hope their insights and experiences will be useful to you! Read the paper. Related Resource: Check Out The Presidential Transition Guide

How Simpson’s Index Can Offer Universities a Different Look at Diversity

by Jon Boeckenstedt

This is one of two companion articles that form a dual installment in our “Changing How We Understand the Market” series. The companion article to this one is “Why Measuring Diversity Matters” by Ricardo Azziz. 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. If you were to poll a cross section of faculty and staff at colleges and universities today to determine the topics most frequently discussed, it’s likely diversity would be among those at or near the top of the list. Yet even people who are in agreement about the benefits of diversity are often at odds when it comes to […]

Overcoming the Heavy Weight of Tradition: A Practical Approach

Series: Costs Down, Quality Up Historically, initiatives to improve quality have also meant added cost—smaller class sizes, more faculty who conduct research, etc.—but this is no longer a sustainable model for all institutions. What are the innovations that can actually drive the cost to educate a student lower while driving critical outcomes like student success and completion higher? This series offers provocative questions that challenge the cost-quality paradigm and the old ways of managing institutional strategy and growth. Also in this series: Rethinking General Education: Too Many Options? Why Good is Still the Enemy of Great for Most Colleges and Universities 3 Ways to Address the Cost/Quality Challenge Facing Higher Ed: Lessons from the Healthcare Sector by Marcel J. Dumestre, Ed.D. The media is rife with predictions about a significant increase in university closings and mergers over the next decade. In fact, this dire higher education meme has become so commonplace that it has lost its cautionary impact. And that is a mistake. More than a decade into the 21st Century, it is becoming increasingly evident that the traditional university business model is moving many institutions into an at-risk status. Consider: The cost of attendance has increased at an inflationary rate over the past […]

Is it Time to Launch that New Academic Program? The Art and Science of Answering that Question

by Melissa Morriss-Olson, Ph.D.

Related Articles: Feasibility Checklist: The Science of Bringing New Academic Programs to LifeFinancial Modeling for New Academic Programs The challenges facing higher education in recent times are well documented. Never has it been so critical for colleges and universities to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset.  Especially for resource-constrained institutions (which is most of us), traditional financial management approaches such as resource prioritization and/or cutting one’s way to sustainability are no longer sufficient long term solutions. In this current context, successful institutions are outward-looking and have developed a discipline around driving entrepreneurial growth in ways that live and further leverage the mission. This is what having an entrepreneurial mindset is all about; from my experience, nurturing such a mindset at the institutional level requires both art (intuition, active listening, and keen attention to opportunities) and science (rigorous discipline and process). I consider myself an academic entrepreneur.  Throughout my career in higher education, I have been focused on looking outward and asking key questions such as “How can we do this differently?”; “What do we do really well that might be leveraged in new and unique ways?”; and “What market opportunities exist that we are uniquely equipped to meet?” At Bay Path University […]

Yield Rates are Declining – Why?

by Jon Boeckenstedt

Series: Changing How We Understand the Market In this new series by Jon Boeckenstedt, 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. More in this series:Is the International Enrollment Boom a Rising Tide that Lifts All Ships? Colleges nationwide are suffering from declining yield rates, and everyone wants to know why.  In some sense, it’s the tendency of colleges to chase the measure of prestige known as selectivity, as defined by a low admit rate. People believe the best way to do this is to increase applications, to allow for a lower admit rate.  The problem is that colleges have a natural market, and, for […]

5 Strategies for Leading Change

by Marilu Goodyear, Jenny Mehmedovic

Addressing the challenge of institutional change is necessary and difficult. Each institution has a unique path forward; the ones most successful at moving forward are those that match their unique organizational strengths to a compelling vision of the future. Implementing change within our diffuse decision-making structures requires an approach anchored in social science, communication studies, and organizational management disciplines. Drawing on the academic literature from these disciplines, in this article we discuss five strategies that leaders can employ to effect change at their institutions: 1. Be clear about the purpose for the change and paint a picture of the new reality. If leaders fail to communicate clearly why a change is needed, the change effort will suffer both from a lack of focus and also from a lack of compelling reasons for the organization to participate in the change process. It’s important to articulate the need for change within the context of the institution’s broader environment and the outcomes you hope for in the future. The more you can describe how current trends influence the direction you need to take (or what might happen to the organization if you don’t change), the more likely people are to help you get […]