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Research Grants: Which Colleges are Getting Them?

Research grants are increasingly competitive, and our analysis shows that just the top 50 colleges and universities account for nearly two thirds of research expenditures in the U.S. by Sasha Egorova, Research Analyst, Academic Impressions A Disparity in Research Grants More higher ed institutions, including predominantly teaching universities, are facing a push to increase their research activity. Higher research expenditures mean prestige and contributions to economic development and innovation. However, breaking into this highly competitive space is a challenging endeavor. The current research environment in the US is as competitive as ever. Federal funding rates have been consistently declining over the past decades. For example, the NIH funding success rate has decreased from 31% in 1998 to 19% in 2017. The NSF funding rate has been hovering around 23% in the past couple of years. The increase in competition has been caused and amplified by multiple factors, including flat federal research budgets. Other key factors, though, include: Taken all together, this means that 1 in 4 federal proposals gets funded, and the winning proposal is most likely to have come from a top 50 research university. In Canada the competition for funding is not as fierce, with the government making […]

Retaining Your Major Gift Officers—From Day One

by Dr. Joshua Jacobs

Retaining major gift officers begins on day one—with how you onboard them and connect them with key networks across the institution. A formal process for major gift officer training is one of the key factors in their success that is also within your control. In my article “Recruiting the Right Major Gift Officers,” I encouraged managers to define the specific skills they are hiring for—and seek non-traditional candidates for major gift officers. Now I would like to encourage you to rethink how you onboard and support your major gift officers in ways that encourage their success and retention from day one. Major gift officers, due to their sporadic attendance in the office, need as much clarity as possible, and this is especially true if you are hiring non-traditional candidates who are new to both the work and the institution. This means more than just ensuring that you have a formalized onboarding and training process (one that communicates the unit philosophy, establishes a common foundation of expectations, and outlines options for potential professional development) and clear performance expectations for both input metrics (e.g., contacts, substantive visits, number and value of asks made, and office attitude/collegiality) and output metrics (e.g., dollars raised, […]

Are We Measuring the Impact of Advising the Right Way?

by Sue Ohrablo, Ed.D.

Here are three commonly used academic advising metrics that fail to measure the impact of advising, and three qualitative measures that DO matter. Advising administrators are challenged with recruiting, training, and retaining effective advisors. They are tasked with positively impacting student success and retention, and are often held accountable for student persistence, academic performance, and graduation rates. Additionally, advising administrators must develop measures to evaluate advisor performance to ensure that they are successfully meeting student needs. Because of these demands, administrators may use quantitative measures to evaluate student success and advisor performance. However, the use of these measures may be a source of frustration and dissatisfaction for advisors and may unjustly place the burden of student success on their shoulders. As a result, advisors may experience burnout that can lead to poor performance and possible departure. 3 Academic Advising Metrics That Fail to Accurately Measure the Impact 1. Number of Contacts an Advisor Makes The logic is sound. Research has shown that the more engaged a student is with an institution and its personnel, the more likely he or she is to persist. By encouraging advisors to reach out to their students, administrators are hoping to build connections to promote […]

Success Coaching: How to Turn Training into Action

by Steven Riccio, Ed.D., SPHR, PCC

How do you make sure that what you bring back from a conference gets followed up on and leads to action? How do you get more return on that investment and really build your capacity? Often the missing step is to pair training with success coaching. Here’s what that can look like. Take a moment to think back to the last time you researched a conference or workshop that you wanted to attend. If you are like most, it was probably an exciting experience, an opportunity to get “off campus” and meet new colleagues who are more than likely experiencing the same challenges you are. As you reviewed the content of the offering, you considered the changes you could implement when you returned from the training. After you registered and then attended, that feeling increased to the point where you could almost envision the changes already made and how those changes would impact you, your team, and maybe the entire institution. Having spent much of my career managing and facilitating training and development programs, there have been countless times when I would feel a high level of satisfaction observing participants’ energy and enthusiasm as each program concluded. In most instances, […]

Creative Destruction: The New Economic Reality in Higher Education

by Marcel J. Dumestre, Ed.D.

How is higher education changing, and can institutions rise to the challenge of their at-risk status? The answer hinges on how college and university leaders choose to respond. U.S. higher education is now a business enterprise. No longer is it universally considered a unique social institution dedicated to the common good. The recent Great Recession accelerated this transition process, which has been ongoing for at least the past two decades. Complacency will do nothing more than accelerate a troubling change in culture and society, and a call to action is needed in order for higher education to address this new reality. This paper will briefly: I hope this paper will provoke thought and conversation on your campus. Please read and share it with your colleagues. A New Economic Reality Change is constant, both individually and organizationally. But radical change can disrupt an entire economic sector in a relatively short period of time. There are 4 primary reasons that colleges and universities are now being perceived as a commercial industry. 1. Cost-Push InflationThe cost of attending a university has risen by almost 260% since 1980, while the consumer price index increased by only 120%. Compounding the problem is that real average wages (accounting […]

Hiring Non-Traditional Candidates for Your MGO Team: Navigating the Opportunity and the Risk

by Dr. Joshua Jacobs

To find your talented next major gift officer, look beyond your borders and deepen your candidate pool by searching for non-traditional candidates who have the right combination of skills and personality traits to succeed. But also recognize that candidates who are new to university advancement or to higher education will need onboarding and support. The recruitment and retention of our best talent in higher education is fraught with challenge. In institutional advancement, the average tenure of an MGO, by some estimates, is just above 18 months, levying a high cost on the institution in repeated searches, lost philanthropic momentum, and severed relationships. Not only is the length of tenure brief, the search costs to replace MGOs are high. Because the central pillar of successful fundraising is the relationship with the donor, and because each representative of the institution must establish credibility and trust with the donor before the best gift can be secured, replacing one MGO with another is not a simple plug-and-play process. It’s a position — like many in higher education — that requires specific talent, and the competition for that talent is fierce. Recently, I recommended that leaders in advancement boost their odds of finding the right talent […]

Title IX Update: What You Need to Know

by Bev Baligad, J.D., Rabia Khan Harvey, M.Ed., MSHR

The New York Times recently reported that Betsy DeVos is preparing “new rules” on Title IX policy that would bolster the rights of students accused of assault, reduce liability for institutions, and encourage schools to provide more support for survivors. Two Title IX experts discuss: At this point, what do we know, what don’t we know, and what should we be doing? Rabia Khan Harvey. Bev, thanks for joining me for this conversation! Of course we’re all thinking a lot about the recent article in The New York Times about the coming changes to Title IX policy. Some of the points highlighted here could drastically impact the way institutions conduct Title IX investigations. I wanted to ask you: What was your own first reaction when you heard of the proposed new Title IX rule? Bev Baligad. When I learned of the NY Times article which suggested that new proposed rules where forthcoming, several questions went through my mind: To tell you truth, I’m not surprised. I believe there are many people out there that aren’t surprised that there may be changes made to the regs in the future. Even before DeVos became the Secretary of Education, we saw some indications that the pendulum […]

Athletic Department Strategic Planning: The Power of Defining Objectives, Not Just Tactics

by Ken Halpin

At Winthrop, we had never undertaken true, multi-year athletic department strategic planning. Here’s what we learned when we transitioned from annual work plans to defining annual objectives. by Ken Halpin and L. Jeffrey Perez, Winthrop University Those of us in higher education are sick and tired of hearing we face an unprecedented set of challenges: fiscal restraints, demography, technology, and heightened competition, to name a few.  Constantly confronted by these daunting circumstances we may be tempted to just get by – to manage for the next department review or board meeting. But institutions that don’t plan strategically over a number of years and instead adopt a hand-to-mouth approach to planning will face failure in its harshest terms. This is true not only for institutions as a whole but for divisions within the college or university — not the least of which are athletics departments, which face the same set of imperatives as the instiution itself. Athletic departments must maintain academic standards and provide life preparation to the student athletes, who are recruited as aggressively as any other prospects.  They must provide for efficient and cost-effective operations, which are often dependent on fundraising and other sources of revenue. Athletic departments must maintain […]

From Information Overload to Collaborative Learning: Why Higher Ed Needs Higher Tech

Our campus communities — students, faculty, staff, alumni — deal with information overload across many platforms and apps. Isn’t it time we brought campus communication and learning into one high-tech ecosystem? Editorial by Kathy Edersheim (President, Impactrics LLC) and Yasim Rahman (CEO, Unio) Today, while we all deal with massive information overload, this is an acute problem for students. Simply by carrying a smartphone, students are bombarded with information almost constantly. And, as mentioned in a recent Nielsen study, 98% of students from age 18-24 own a smartphone. Millennials wake up with their phones, sleep with their phones, take their phones to their bathrooms and, yes, some check it during sex. (See this study on smartphone separation anxiety.) The massive data deluge leads to information overload, confusion, and a general lack of focus and attention. Colleges need to do whatever they can to simplify navigation of the educational experience to foster a positive experience and successful completion. It is shocking that only about 60% of high school graduates who started college in 2009 finished within six years – by 2015  – and that challenges in coping with college were a key factor. Where does all the information – and information overload – […]

How Gender Bias in Higher Education Leadership Gets in the Way of the Collaboration We Need

Gender bias in higher education can lead us to prize men’s voices over women’s and to value authoritarian and transactional leadership over transformational, collaborative leadership. Yet collaboration is key to meeting the complex challenges our departments and institutions of higher education now face. So let’s explore: How best can men and women work together to develop this critical leadership trait that has traditionally been considered “feminine”? by Rosalind Spigel, Organizational Development Consultant and Leadership Coach, Spigel Consulting  Previous articles in this series: In this series we are looking at leadership traits, how they are deployed and recognized differently for men and women, and how gender bias impedes women’s advancement within our colleges and universities. In this fourth article, we’ll take a close look at collaboration. We’ll examine: Why Collaboration is So Critical Remember that memo distributed by a now ex-employee of Google, criticizing diversity and defending the skewed percentage of male coders? After debunking the former employee’s false claim that men were inherently better coders for “biological” reasons, senior leaders at Google also argued that the coder “had fundamentally misunderstood what skills were needed…such as collaboration, creativity and teamwork” (Swinson, 2018, p. 332). While there are many differences between the Google campus and […]

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