Category: Uncategorized

The Student-Alumni Transition: Encouraging Meaningful Giving

Just as it is important not to miss the opportunity of inviting students into a lifetime relationship with the institution at convocation or during orientation, it’s also critical to manage the opportunity presented by the students’ transition out of their undergraduate years. Many institutions miss the chance to educate students about the real role of private giving in the institution’s financial health and set the wrong expectations for their future alumni by relying on gimmicks to improve senior gift participation rates. What Doesn’t Work For example, here are three tactics that, while they may help drive up senior gift participation rates, also damage your ability to engage the seniors effectively as alumni later: Treating the gift as a “quid pro quo” by offering a t-shirt, tickets to an athletic event, or a university coffee mug to students who give — this sets the expectation that when your future young alumni give to the institution, they receive something tangible in return Asking that every student give one dollar — when the gift ceases to be meaningful, you gain participation rate at the expense of your renewal rate “Shaming” seniors into giving by publishing the names of students who do not participate in the […]

Five Website Tips for International Student Recruitment

Even as the demand in international markets for a US education continues to rise, more institutions are responding to budget pressures in part by stepping up recruitment of international students, who typically bring significantly more tuition revenue than domestic students. According to the Institute of International Education, in 2008-09, more than 26,000 Chinese students were enrolled in college in the United States, up from 8,000 students eight years earlier. The New York Times has playfully dubbed this “the China Boom.” US colleges continue to see rising enrollments from India and other nations, as well, with India’s top education officials seeking partnerships with US institutions for help in boosting college attainment rates. Even enrollment of international graduate students is rising after a recent lull, according to an annual report by the Council of Graduate Schools. However, if you are not an Ivy League school with a well-established reputation in your target countries, how can you ramp up your international recruiting efforts swiftly? PRIMERS ON KEY RECRUITING STRATEGIES Recruiting International Students: Getting Started (November 2009) Recruiting Chinese Students: What You Need to Know (May 2010) Web marketing guru Bob Johnson, president of Bob Johnson Consulting, LLC, notes that your website is the first […]

Research Consortiums: What Can Academic Libraries Do Today?

A report from the Association of Research Libraries (pdf) offers four scenarios for predicting the research needs that faculty, students, and other researchers will have in the year 2030, and offers strategic objectives for academic research libraries who will need to build capacity and collections to meet those needs. One of those objectives involves building capacity through consortiums and other cooperative efforts between research libraries: “Collaborative capacities serving groups of research libraries or the full community of research libraries allows for increasing opportunities to develop a strategy for maintaining and sharing open and rich general collections. Opportunities for cross-pollinating research activities and the potential for shared endeavors are also viable strategies.” From The ARL 2030 Scenarios: A User’s Guide to Research Libraries Paul Gandel, professor of information studies at Syracuse University and a thought leader on this issue, points out that research libraries are caught in a Catch-22, in two ways. First, academic libraries need to share resources in order to build capacity, but that sharing has competitive implications. “Most universities have invested in their collections as a competitive advantage,” Gandel notes. “To open up those resources to everyone has political implications, because the institution has made a significant investment […]

Recruiting for the Humanities

With philanthropic monies flowing to the sciences, and sharp declines in the number of students declaring majors in the humanities (8% of US undergraduates in 2007, down from 17% in 1996, according to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences) as students increasingly look for disciplines linked to specific career outcomes, there is a growing sense in higher education that the future of studies in the humanities — though the humanities are nominally core to a liberal arts curriculum — is threatened. “Within the general college-bound public, the understanding of the liberal arts is fuzzy at best and distorted at worst. Despite our best intentions, noblest desires, and most sincere efforts, the higher education community has been unable to educate the public about what the liberal arts represents.”W. Kent Barnds, Augustana College Without underplaying the importance of enrolling and graduating more students in STEM fields, many university presidents have recently begun promoting the humanities in their speeches on campus and abroad, and some — at institutions such as Cornell, Dartmouth, and Harvard — are pledging to boost their efforts to fundraise for their literature and arts disciplines. There is still a critical question to address — how can institutions recruit more students to […]

Retaining and Rewarding High-Performing Faculty

The news is filled with accounts of extended pay freezes and tightened departmental budgets. More than ever, it is crucial to identify creative, meaningful, and low-cost ways to reward and retain high-performing faculty. Mary Coussons-Read, professor of psychology and acting chair of the department of physics at the University of Colorado Denver, reviews low-cost practices that can make a difference. Rethink Performance Rewards “Don’t get so caught up in the trees that you don’t see the forest,” Coussons-Read warns. “The forest is the need to help your faculty feel good about the work they do. There are many trees you can shake besides the salary adjustment tree.” While rewarding performance will rarely be free of cost, you can consider a variety of low-cost and one-time expenses that allow you to appreciate faculty. The difficulty of a salary increase is that it is a permanent addition to the ongoing budget.  There are many options for rewarding performance for which that is not the case. Look for one-time expenses. Beyond salary increases, you can recognize faculty achievements and, at the same time, use those achievements to encourage a high-performing faculty culture by: Making the most of your faculty awards competition Inviting high-performing […]

Piloting Mobile Learning

The Urgency of Going Mobile Several recent reports have highlighted a rising rate of adoption for mobile devices: Gartner, this week, released a projection that tablet devices such as Apple’s iPad will see more than 19 million units sold worldwide this year, most of them in the US; Gartner also anticipates that this figure will grow to more than 200 million units in 2014 In September, International Data Corp. (IDC) upgraded its forecast for sales of smartphones, suggesting that the end of 2010 would see a 55.4% increase since 2009 In short, though most universities in the US are only in the earliest stages of implementing mobile marketing initiatives, and though few universities are actively piloting mobile learning, there is growing urgency in the need to do so. “In a short period of time, much of what you do will need to be available on mobile devices. Don’t think of this as just an experiment to try. The majority of your students, even your returning adult students, are using mobile devices to manage a large part of their communication and to access information. So your most critical educational activities and resources need to be delivered on mobile devices.” Lynne O’Brien, […]

Key Strategies for Retaining Men

This week, the Washington Post highlighted the efforts many smaller colleges are making to add football programs as a strategy to recruit more men — one of several strategies colleges are currently employing to enroll more men (other efforts include adding academic majors that commonly appeal to men). However, recruitment is only the first part of the solution — colleges also need to address the growing gender gap in student retention. We interviewed W. Kent Barnds, vice president for enrollment, communication, and planning at Augustana College, who recently facilitated an Academic Impressions workshop on the issue, to learn more about where colleges have opportunities to engage male underclassmen. Barnds directs attention to the research collected in Why Boys Fail by Richard Whitmire and Teaching the Male Brain by Abigail Norfleet James, and then offers the following tips for applying the findings to practical strategies an institution can undertake to improve retention of men. Engage Men with Career-Oriented Experiences “Take a step back. Adding sports to attract young men is a good step, but beyond that, are you asking the critical questions to learn if your academic environment and your academic support environment will help you keep them?” W. Kent Barnds, […]

Securing New Resources in a Difficult Financial Climate

by Amit Mrig

In this report: October 2010. In reviewing the last two years, it might be easy to think that higher education’s economic challenges largely precipitated from the recession and are thus temporary. Unfortunately, most institutions have been operating in a financially unsustainable way for many years. Rather than make the tough decisions about what to invest in and what not to, many institutions have instead continued to add programs and seek new sources of revenue to fund these investments. However, this recession demands that institutional leaders face a hard reality: most new resources are not going to come from external sources but from strategic reallocation of the resources you already have. That’s why we’ve chosen to address resource allocation and reprioritization in our first issue of Higher Ed Impact: Monthly Diagnostic. Many institutions are already making difficult cuts that would have proven politically untenable in stronger economic times. Yours might be one of them. But are you being strategic in your approach to ensure that after these cuts are made, your institution is stronger and more competitive as a result? We’ve asked former presidents, provosts, and CFOs for advice on what campus leaders can do in both the short and long term […]

Prioritize Academic and Administrative Units

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE Advance with a Defined Sense of Purpose Identify Inefficiencies on the Academic Side of the House Prioritize Academic and Administrative Units Plan for Resource Allocation in Ways That Build Trust It’s vital to recognize that the single greatest source of financial resources will not come from tuition increases, state or federal funding, or alumni support, but rather from the reallocation of your existing resources. Institutions of all sizes, types, and selectivity are currently investing in academic and administrative programs that are not critical to their mission or their market position, and that in fact drain their financial resources and limit their ability to generate more resources. “Strategic plans have become purely additive. … These plans tend to assume several things: (1) the status quo as a given, with all current programs composing the baseline, (2) all programs, goals, and objectives are to be “maintained” or “enhanced,” but rarely diminished or eliminated, (3) if resources are mentioned at all, they are to be enhanced by hiking tuition, increasing enrollment, securing more appropriations or grants, or raising more money, or all of these, and (4) all planning goals are equal in weight and importance and thus lack priority. […]

Advance with a Defined Sense of Purpose

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE Advance with a Defined Sense of Purpose Identify Inefficiencies on the Academic Side of the House Prioritize Academic and Administrative Units Plan for Resource Allocation in Ways That Build Trust The economic crisis has opened a window of opportunity for institutional leaders. This can be a time to make previously unpopular cuts, and to engage the campus community in a strategic planning and prioritization effort. The economic situation demands that colleges and universities challenge old and long-held assumptions and planning/budgeting scenarios. However, it’s critical that leaders proceed with intentionality and clarity of purpose. It will be difficult to make strategic cuts and identify the right units to invest in if your institution does not have clear, strategic objectives and a defined sense of its mission. “Most institutions are unrealistically striving to be all things to all people in their quest for students, reputation, and support rather than focusing their resources on the mission and programs that they can accomplish with distinction.” Bob Dickeson, in Prioritizing Academic Programs and Services (2nd ed; Jossey Bass, 2010) We interviewed Bob Dickeson (President Emeritus, University of Northern Colorado), Lucie Lapovsky (Principal, Lapovsky Consulting; past president of Mercy College), Larry Goldstein […]