News

Forging the Future: Five Considerations for Developing Leaders at Your Institution 

by Nicole Pruitt (opens in new tab), Beth Rotach (opens in new tab)

Many have written, studied, and offered advice on the skills higher education leaders need to be successful, and in the wake of COVID-19, some of the needs have shifted and some have reached a fever pitch. Burnout, enrollment declines, artificial intelligence, and political and cultural polarization are just some of the external factors a leader needs to navigate. Internally, there are staffing and salary freezes, politics, racialized hierarchies, and tenure battles – it’s no wonder many institutions are struggling with recruiting and retaining key faculty and staff1.  Although employees have many reasons for leaving their jobs, one stands out. From April 2021 – April 2022, a McKinsey survey2 showed that the top reason for quitting a previous job is a lack of career development opportunities and advancement, outranking inadequate compensation. These results closely mirror those from a Pew Research Center survey3, which found lack of opportunities for advancement tied with inadequate pay as the reasons people quit. So, while there are multiple factors associated with driving employees away, it is telling that lack of growth within the organization ranks so highly.  It’s a message that’s beginning to resonate in higher education. Institutions and departments are beginning to recognize the need […]

Disrupting the Status Quo: 5 Counterintuitive Notions for Inspiring Creativity

by Stephen Whitehead (opens in new tab)

Creativity is an essential aspect of human nature, yet many people struggle to embrace it, either from insecurity or fearing its potential unpredictability. While it is tempting to stick to familiar routines that afford the comfort of not dealing with potential failure or uncertainty, there is no room for personal or organizational growth with this mindset. Today, the need to foster creativity that drives innovation and growth in organizations is a highly regarded requirement for leaders. However, simply telling your team to “think outside the box” isn’t exactly inspiring. To quote Ted Lasso, “Takin’ on a challenge is a lot like riding a horse. If you’re comfortable while you’re doing it, you’re probably doing it wrong.” While we all agree that change is scary, what makes creativity so satisfying is the opportunity to see situations from new perspectives. In this article, we will explore five counterintuitive notions that can help to cultivate a creative culture. Embracing creativity is both a challenging and rewarding process. While these examples may appear to be counterintuitive, give them a try and see how they are able to unlock the full potential of your meetings, employees, and organization to help drive innovation. Lean into embracing […]

When Innovation is More Than a Buzz Word

by David Kiel (opens in new tab)

Here’s how department chairs, deans, and unit directors can build and support the innovations that will help their institution thrive in the years to come. On many campuses you will find creative faculty, students, staff, and senior leaders who start programs that grow and eventually become transformative for the institution. These ventures build the school’s reputation, improve services to students and faculty, strengthen the curriculum and co-curriculum, enhance research, and improve community service. Often, they also generate major revenue streams. They make the institution more competitive and attractive in every sense. Yet the internal entrepreneurs (I call them intrapreneurs) who deliver these benefits, lack the support they need to bring their innovative ventures to maturity in a timely way. What would it look like if there were a pipeline of support for such ventures and the intrapreneurs who create and guide them at your institution? What if your college or university leaders had an active process for identifying such promising intrapreneurs, testing their ideas, and helping them with both the skills and resources needed for their ventures to mature? What would it look like if support for such efforts wasn’t haphazard and ad hoc, but structured and planned? To visualize […]

Understanding Those Who Need Us: 4 Types of Students and How to Help Them

by Sue Ohrablo, Ed.D. (opens in new tab)

As next semester’s registration period ramps up, advisors will see an increase in student traffic, experiencing long days juggling back-to-back appointments, walk-ins, phone calls, and emails. It’s a time of year filled with stress. Students are concerned that they won’t get the classes that they need, worried that they may not pass a prerequisite course, and eager to get some direction from an advisor. Advisors are busy trying to triage the student traffic, struggling to respond to and assist all the students who are seeking their help, and managing a myriad of administrative duties between students. It’s the same thing every semester. Or is it? Does it have to be? These are the thoughts and questions I’ve posed to myself throughout my career in higher education. There must be a better way to avoid the mad rush of registration leading up to the start of the semester. While institutions struggle with managing this workflow throughout the year, I have not found any system that effectively reduces or eliminates the rush. Such is the nature of human beings in need. They seek us out, which is a very good thing. The problem is, there are usually not enough of us to […]

Advising: Meeting Student Needs?

by Carol Moore (opens in new tab)

Several months ago, the Chronicle featured an article on advising focused on the work of Dr. Ned Laff, who detailed the importance of broad-based advising and the gaps between what today’s students need and what they frequently receive. Drawing upon an advising career at multiple colleges, Laff focused his comments on the disconnect between advising and career services. I resonate with his analysis, and, with more than four decades of my own in higher education, I contend that the gaps reach even deeper. At the root of the problem is the failure of colleges to keep up with evolving market demands. Neither the fundamental concepts of college advising nor the associated reward system have been updated in decades, resulting in a disconnect between market demands and what the academy is delivering. We need to do a better job for today’s students. Why aren’t we delivering? It is my observation that we will not deliver what students need until we connect advising to faculty evaluation. Multiple surveys over a decade or more indicate that today’s students and parents expect a college diploma to come packaged with a clear-cut career path—not just a major and a broad general education, but experiences that […]

4 Essential Leadership Competencies Department Chairs Need to Lead in the New Normal

by Jennifer Scott Mobley, PhD (opens in new tab)

Introduction As a higher education leader for almost 20 years and a former department chair for ten, I have witnessed time and time again how the right department leader can animate an academic program. As John C. Maxwell once said, “The reality is that 99 percent of all leadership occurs not from the top, but from the middle of an organization.” Sitting at the nexus of the student body, the faculty, and the administration, department chairs are poised to provide crucial leadership in the effort to help students progress toward graduation and their institutions toward transformation. Despite their important positioning, department chairs are rarely taught how to lead nor are they typically rewarded for good leadership. Nearly 50,000 currently serve as department chairs in the United States with about a quarter of them being replaced each year (Gmlech and Buller, 2015). And yet only 3.3 percent of department chairs came to their positions with formal coursework in the administrative skills they need (Cipiano and Riccardi, 2012). While challenges facing higher education grow in intensity and become more complex, many department chairs enter the role woefully unprepared for the challenges that await them. The convergence of interconnected crises in recent years—including […]

The Great Resignation or the Great Joy in Higher Education: Emerging Lessons from the Pandemic

by Kathleen Vinson (opens in new tab)

I. Introduction The Great Resignation, the Great Attrition, the Great Disengagement, and the Big Quit are a few of the names for the phenomenon occurring throughout different industries, including higher education.1 Higher education is not immune from this great exodus and is at a turning point as retention of faculty, administrators, and staff is more important than ever.2 What’s joy got to do with it?3 Can it drive those who work in higher education to stay, leave, or return?4 Money is not enough by itself to retain workers.5 Over the last two years, higher education, like other industries, is facing a fundamental shift in how people view their work, their employer, and their life.6 Perhaps this is an opportunity for the Great Joy: to (re)discover joy in your work; reevaluate what you want from work, be open minded, and possibly reinvent how you work, where you work, who you work with, and what you work on. This article explores the challenges higher education faces as the pandemic continues to alter attitudes on work. It then offers some strategies to (re)discover joy in work. Finally, it discusses ways to maximize joy in work. II. The Struggle Exhausted, isolated, disconnected, burnt out, […]

Surviving and Thriving in the After Peak Advising Period: 7 Strategies to Regroup

by Sue Ohrablo, Ed.D. (opens in new tab)

The beginning of the fall semester is a tumultuous time for students, parents, staff, and administrators. Everyone is focused on enrolling new students and supporting continuing students. The weeks preceding the start of the term up through add/drop are intense for academic advisors as we urgently strive to manage the influx of appointments, walk-ins, calls, and emails. During these weeks, it’s easy to let the stress and fatigue get to you. The job becomes essential, but almost meaningless as you wade your way through email after email asking to get into a closed class, override a prerequisite, or help students accomplish last-minute registrations and schedule adjustments. During this time of year, I’ve heard many advisors (myself included) exclaim “this is not advising!” The work loses its luster when it becomes reactive, transactional, and limited in scope. Even though students who access advising during these critical weeks most certainly value our assistance, it can leave advisors exhausted and at risk for burn-out. So, what can you do to avoid it? This, too, shall pass. Earlier in my career, I internalized students’ stress and thought I’d never get through everything I needed to in time to meet critical registration deadlines. I’d reach […]

The Legal Landscape of Higher Ed: A High-Level Overview for Academic Leaders and Faculty

by Jon Boeckenstedt (opens in new tab)

We’ve arrived at the final of six posts about enrollment management, yet we haven’t really touched on why enrollment management (EM) is different from just admissions, or marketing or financial aid, or some of the other areas that are often found in a typical EM portfolio. In itself, this might be instructive; if you’ve found yourself occasionally confused or overwhelmed by the complexity of the previous five topics (Marketing, Demographics, Recruitment, Admissions, and Financial Aid), you can imagine how challenging it can be to put them all together into one big package, and to get those pieces and parts to work together in harmony. It can get even more complex when other areas of your university’s administrative functions—like the registrar, orientation, student success, housing, or retention—are rolled into the mix. Suffice it to say that enrollment management is really about managing and balancing the tradeoffs inhert in every decision a university makes about its enrollment strategy. I often tell people that the concepts of EM are much like a triangle balanced on the head of a pin: It’s easy to make any one corner go up if you push two down, or vice versa. It’s only when you try to […]

Access and Prestige: The Complex Function of Financial Aid in Higher Education

by Jon Boeckenstedt (opens in new tab)

In my last post, I wrote about how admissions works, although the lesson, perhaps, is that the term “admissions office” means very different things at different institutions. And while it’s still true that we in admissions and enrollment management all agree on one thing—that if a student never applies, they won’t enroll—it’s also true that the final step in the process is the processing and delivery of financial aid. A caveat: This is hard to grasp on the first pass—if it sometimes does not seem to make sense, that just means you probably understand it better than you think you do. I recommend paper, a pencil, and some note-taking to get you through this. It’s going to be challenging to navigate. About 15 years ago, I started gauging the age of my audience during presentations by putting an image on the screen. It’s the floorboard of an automobile, showing part of the brake and floormat for some context. You’re likely to notice the bright red carpet before you notice something else that doesn’t look quite right: To the left of the brake is a silver button, a little bigger than a quarter. I ask the audience members to raise their […]

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