Category: Uncategorized

Training Peer Mentors for First-Year Students: What’s Missing

Peer educators can serve as an effective front line in the student development and academic success of first-year students, and employing peer mentors (either as employees or as volunteers) can save on costs. Yet many institutions provide only the most cursory training and orientation for their peer mentors. This week, we turned to Sarah Whitley, the forward-thinking director of first-year experience and family programs with Longwood University. We asked her what critical efforts are often missing from peer mentor training. Here are three items she drew our attention to. Introduce Student Development Theory “One thing that I have found incredibly useful and successful, and that many universities aren’t doing, is to actually provide a training session on student development theory. I know that probably seems a bit “heavy” for undergraduates. It seems like more of a graduate school topic. But offer a basic overview to kick off your training program, because it’s really important for the peer mentors to understand the developmental level of new students coming into the institution.”Sarah Whitley, Longwood University Whitley suggests that a basic overview of Chickering and Perry and brief discussions of student development vectors, how students are trying to make decisions, and how students […]

3 Ways to Help Peer Educators Succeed

In a related article, we asked Sarah Whitley, director of first-year experience and family programs at Longwood University, to offer her insights on what critical items are often missing from peer mentor training. Whitley’s answers indicated the need for a shift in thinking about the support and development peer educators need, whether your peer educators serve primarily as peer mentors or whether they lead first-year seminar courses or other elements of the first-year student experience. We decided to dig deeper in a follow-up interview. Sarah Whitley and Jennifer Latino, the director of first-year experience at Campbell University, suggest three keys to helping peer educators step into a leadership role and take greater ownership of their work: Shift the Focus from Orientation to Leadership Development “Don’t think of this as just training,” Latino suggests. “Think of this as a process of development for peer educators. I think where we often fall short in administering these training programs is that we don’t take into consideration the impact on the peer mentor. We know that training peer educators is good for first-year students, but peer mentoring is also a profound experience for the mentors themselves. When our training is focused on what to […]

Naming Opportunities for Athletics: 4 Tips

by Vincent E. Duckworth, CFRE

Because the marketplace for public arenas and sports stadiums is now saturated with corporate namings and sponsorships, many corporations are turning increasingly to the higher education sector for naming opportunities. At the same time, many athletics departments in higher education are striving to become more entrepreneurial, particularly at institutions that have recently cut athletics budgets to preserve funding for academic programs. Yet often athletics directors focus almost solely on fundraising, neglecting the growing marketplace for athletics sponsorships. Though sponsorships are usually far smaller in dollar amount than philanthropic naming gifts, it’s important to realize that: “More corporations are seeing the value of aligning themselves with like institutions to build awareness of their brand. These opportunities deserve more than a cursory glance.”Vincent Duckworth, ViTreo We turned to Vincent Duckworth, partner and chief marketing officer at Vitreo, to learn more about how institutions can take advantage of this changing marketplace. Duckworth offers these four tips. Tip 1: Do You Have a Naming Policy for Your Athletics Naming Opportunities? Duckworth advises that your naming policy needs to provide guidelines around: This policy needs to be transparent and publically available. This ensures both that corporate sponsors can find you — and that you can […]

Succession Planning: Advice for the President, the Board, and HR

Is external search the best approach? The president and the board at least have an open and honest conversation about whether to pursue succession planning, asking whether an internal successor who knows the culture and has the trust of other key stakeholders would be better positioned to take the helm and affect change. Lucie Lapovsky, president of Lapovsky Consulting and past president of Mercy College, recently spoke with us about the results of consultants Booz & Co.’s 12th annual CEO Succession Study (subscription required) released on May 30, suggesting some takeaways for higher education. Among the findings: In the corporate sector, 4 out of 5 new CEOs are hired from inside the organization, and in terms of their tenure, “inside” CEOs usually outlast outsider CEOs. What’s most interesting is why: “It takes a long time to really get to understand how a company works,” one of the consultants remarked. “Insiders have a better ability to understand how to affect change within an organization than outsiders typically do.”Per-Ola Karlsson, Managing Director of Europe, Booz & Co. Lapovsky, who has written on succession planning in higher education, suggests that this is an important finding for leaders in higher education to note. “When […]

Designing Sustainable Facilities as Learning Spaces

“We have this expression here that the campus is another member of the faculty. In our planning and our design we need to always keep this in mind, because students will learn from and interact with the physical space. It’s not just a passive setting.” Jack Byrne, Middlebury College For institutions that have made sustainability a strategic objective, the ideal approach is to involve both facilities planners and academic leaders in the planning process for new facilities and facilities upgrades, from concept to design to execution. This allows you to plan the facilities in such a way as to maximize their potential as learning spaces and as learning opportunities. Jack Byrne, the director of Middlebury College’s Sustainability Integration Office, offers this example. When adding a $12 million biomass combined heat and power plant, Middlebury College made a series of decisions early in the planning process with the intent that the facility would support student learning and faculty research: The facility would be located near the student center and on the main quad The operation of the facility would be as visible as possible — in this case, the entire facade along one side was to be a glass wall “We […]

Four Tips for Helping Students Graduate on Time

NPR’s Talk of the Nation interviewed a series of academic leaders and experts in academic advising to examine why many students find barriers to graduation within four years. At Academic Impressions, we decided to follow up with some practical advice for where institutions can see significant gains in helping students graduate earlier. Of the following four tips, the first two are focused on empowering students to plan their progress toward the degree intentionally; the second two are focused on identifying and removing those barriers or outdated academic policies that typically slow progress toward the degree. Empower students to build and manage their momentum, and clear their path. In gathering these tips, we spoke with Lucie Lapovsky, president of Lapovsky Consulting and past president of Mercy College; Dennis Pruitt, vice president for student affairs at the University of South Carolina; and Susan Ohrablo, a doctoral enrollment counselor with the Abraham S. Fischler School of Education at Nova Southeastern University, who previously served as the director of academic advising for the business school at NSU. Here is their advice. Tip One: Empower Students to Self-Audit Their Progress Lapovsky warns that inadequate advising or misadvising can easily occur. Getting false information to students is […]

Benchmarking Deferred Maintenance: A 2012 Survey

“You have to be clear on the distinction between deferred maintenance and ignored maintenance, and ensure that your institution’s leadership is clear on this. Intentionally deferring needed maintenance after a careful assessment of your facilities condition is a strategy. Ignoring maintenance is a problem.”Faramarz Vakili, Associate Director of the Physical Plant, University of Wisconsin-Madison Historically, institutions of higher education have built new facilities without budgeting for life cycle operational costs, and have built up a significant backlog of “ignored” maintenance projects. But the past few years have seen growing awareness that this is not sustainable, and more institutions are looking for ways to take proactive, not just reactive, action on facilities maintenance and renewal. In January – February 2012, Academic Impressions conducted a benchmarking survey of facilities managers at more than 75 institutions of higher education. While this is a small sample, the results were indicative. For example, the survey confirmed that addressing deferred maintenance has moved from a worry to a priority at the majority of institutions: When we dug deeper, we found facilities managers at a variety of stages in addressing the issue — but they all feel the pressure. Some are making presentations to the board; some […]

How Do You Make the Case for Funding Maintenance and Renewal for Campus Facilities?

YOU’LL ALSO WANT TO READ:Benchmarking Deferred Maintenance: A Recent Survey (May 2012)Proactive Approaches to Deferred Maintenance (November 2011) In our January – February 2012 survey of facilities managers (read the executive summary here), Academic Impressions learned that while physical plant operations at most institutions have assigned a high priority this year to addressing their deferred maintenance backlog, many falter in making an effective case for funding facilities replacement and maintenance needs. We turned this week to Daniel King, facilities manager at Auburn University (Auburn, AL), who has recently done some innovative thinking and piloting around just this issue. Here are two ideas Dan King offers – one for working with academic leaders to prioritize “small and modest” maintenance projects, and one for communicating to institutional leaders the big picture of the institution’s replacement and renewal needs. A Clear Process for Prioritizing Maintenance Projects Auburn University has piloted a prioritization process that involves soliciting maintenance needs from across campus and then meeting with the provost to evaluate the proposed projects on a regular basis. The keys to the process are the involvement of the entire campus in a discussion of the institution’s maintenance needs and transparency around the decisions made. King’s […]

What Might be Missing from Your Crisis Communications Plan

While most institutions now have a full crisis communication plan in place to allow their communications office to communicate with the emergency response team, the campus community, local entities, and the local media during a crisis, one particular contingency often goes missed: what if the crisis that occurs includes a sustained electrical outage? Your campus email, your emergency website, your institution’s twitter feed, and many of the communications systems you would rely on in the event of a crisis will be unavailable to you in the event of a regional power loss (such as that seen, for instance, during Hurricane Katrina). “It’s so obvious that often we forget to ask it. If you can’t send email, if you can’t get people on the phone, if you were to abruptly lose your communications infrastructure, what would you do? I have seen some campuses drill an electrical outage for 15 minutes, but you really need to think about this with a long-term view. What if you have an electrical outage that lasts for a full day, or for several days?” Cindy Lawson, DePaul University For advice, we turned this week to crisis communications expert Cindy Lawson, who is currently serving as the […]

The Transition Out: Moving International Students into the Donor Pipeline

With the balance of wealth shifting overseas — and with more colleges and universities increasing their international enrollment — international fundraising is likely to play an increasingly larger role in development at North American institutions. And by cultivating your international students and alumni as lifelong ambassadors for your institution, you not only strengthen and diversify your institution’s donor pool, you also create a network that can serve as a key resource in helping your school keep its curriculum global and current and connect with new students and new partners abroad. To learn how institutions can get started in such an effort, we interviewed Gretchen Dobson, the senior associate director for alumni relations at Tufts University and the principal and founder of Gretchen Dobson Go Global, a consulting firm focused on helping educational institutions, nonprofit member organizations, and consulate/embassy education officers facilitate alumni engagement and advance international programs. Dobson has also authored the book Being Global: Making the Case for International Alumni Relations (CASE, 2011). Inviting Students into a Lifetime Relationship Dobson notes that international alumni are “hard enough just to find”; if you are serious about cultivating lifetime relationships with this growing body of alumni, the key is to begin […]