News

Enrolling and Supporting Women in STEM: Practical Steps to Take

by Daniel Fusch (opens in new tab)

During a tour early this summer of the Colorado School of Mines, I had the opportunity to hear from a number of women enrolled in the geophysics and engineering programs there, and to speak with Stephanie Berry, the former director of CSM’s innovative WISEM (Women in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics) program. WISEM is certainly a program worth a close look, as it has achieved some remarkable outcomes: I wanted to find out more about how they have achieved this, and what lessons their successes might offer for other institutions. The keys to WISEM’s success? Let’s take a closer look. 1. Marketing STEM Programs to Women “Traditional wisdom is that women are attracted to careers that help people,” Berry explains, “so Mines’s marketing campaigns have focused on shifting how engineering is talked about. We’ve focused on what STEM is for, how engineering helps people. So we say, ‘Engineers don’t find the problems, they solve the problems.’ Or we say, ‘Make the world better: Be an engineer.’” The campus’s section of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) also provides conferences for elementary, middle, and high school girls in the region. One of the goals of these events is to raise awareness of the many different […]

The 5 Biggest Mistakes Team Leaders Make

by Patrick Sanaghan (opens in new tab)

Over the years, I have had the opportunity to work with over 100 senior teams and cabinets in higher education. Overall, the experience has been quite positive due to the intelligence, dedication, aspirations, and integrity of those veteran leaders. Unfortunately, about 10% of teams I have worked with just never performed well, despite great effort and talent. This article is an attempt to conduct a “post mortem” on the teams that just didn’t make it. These mistakes go beyond some of the essential elements of stellar team performance, such as having a shared purpose, holding each other accountable, open and trusted communication, and high levels of trust. All these are very important, but the absence of these was not responsible for these talented teams’ failures. The following five “mistakes” may sound like common sense, but they are often overlooked when leaders at colleges and universities are building their teams. For a limited time only: We have opened up our leadership content to registered users. Please login or create a free account to read the full paper. 1. The team leader falls prey to the “comfortable cloning” syndrome. “Comfortable cloning” describes our natural tendency to seek out other team members who are similar to us or who […]

Faculty Checklist: Steps to Respond to Classroom Incivility

by Lisa Cook (opens in new tab), Daniel Fusch (opens in new tab)

Finding a balance between protecting free speech and keeping classroom discussions professional is often easier said than done in an election season when anything from climate change to history lessons might quickly become a hot topic. For practical, useful advice on classroom civility, we talked with Barbara Lee, Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at Rutgers University, and Kathleen Rinehart, General Counsel and Secretary of the Corporation at Saint Xavier University. With their help, we’ve developed the following quick sheet for faculty. We hope you will forward or print this checklist and share it with your colleagues! If you found the checklist helpful, we also recommend our popular recorded webcast “Faculty Civility and Academic Freedom: Protecting the Workplace while Preserving Academic Culture.” In this 90-minute training, learn how to address faculty incivility without violating academic freedom. You can view an excerpt from this recorded online training and purchase the training for your department. Watch Our Recorded Webcast on Faculty Civility

Presidential Dialogues: Making Difficult Decisions

by Amit Mrig (opens in new tab)

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.

10 Tips for Optimizing the Return on Professional Development

To get the most out of your limited professional development (PD) and training budget, consider these 10 tips: SELECTING THE EVENTS AT THE EVENT ON THE WAY HOME ​BACK ON CAMPUS We hope these tips will prove useful at your conferences this year! Learn more about how some institutions are leveraging professional development in our report, The State of Professional Development in Higher Education.” Read the full report here. Check out an AI Conference AI conferences are unique because they are informed by our research on professional development and are designed to facilitate the kind of planning and action discussed in this article.

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

by Jon Boeckenstedt (opens in new tab)

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 […]

Why Measuring Diversity Matters

by Jon Boeckenstedt (opens in new tab)

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 “How the Simpson’s Index Can Offer Universities a Different Look at Diversity” by Jon Boeckenstedt. 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. Also in this series: _______________________________________________________________ by Ricardo Azziz, Regents’ Professor, Augusta University;Former President, Georgia Regents University & Georgia Health Sciences University;Senior Fellow, Pullias Center for Higher Education, University of Southern California Diversity. Seems to be top of mind in a lot of conversations on university and college campuses today, not the […]

One Big Mistake New Presidents Make

by Kathy Gaval, Ed.D. (opens in new tab), Patrick Sanaghan (opens in new tab)

A presidential transition can be a fragile time for any campus; expectations are high and so is the stress level. Almost everyone wants the new president to be successful and create a new beginning for the institution. The transition process can be a minefield of challenges and opportunities, and a new president must navigate both of these carefully and strategically. Several years ago, we co-authored a book, Presidential Transitions: It’s Not Just the Position, It’s the Transition (Praeger, 2008). In the process, we talked with scores of presidents about their own transitions, and they were surprisingly open to discussing the good, the bad and the ugly parts of their journey. We have continued these conversations with a whole new set of presidents, and once again, have learned a lot. Many Presidencies Derail in their First 3 Years In the continually changing world of higher education, what happens at the micro level when there is leadership transition in the campus presidency has a disproportionate impact. That is to say that the higher ed world is shifting and issues loom large, the pace is lightning fast, and the learning curve is steep. All too often, presidencies derail before they have barely begun. Frequently, presidencies […]

Developing a Metrics-Driven Culture within Student Affairs

by Paul Marthers (opens in new tab)

Series: Managing the Student Lifecycle This new series convenes expert perspectives on student success and predictive analytics. We hope to empower enrollment managers, student affairs professionals, deans, and faculty to think deeper about their student data, predictors of success, and managing the student lifecycle holistically from recruitment to retention to completion. Earlier in this series:Improving Student Success Can’t Be a One-Office Effort Metrics-driven student affairs: Can it be done? Why is it difficult? How do we get there? Enrollment management and student affairs offices tend to agree that managing the student lifecycle to promote greater levels of student success requires collaborative effort. Yet as enrollment and student affairs offices move to work more closely together, there can be cultural disconnects over the extent to which those offices rely on data and analysis in their day-to-day work. Managing the student lifecycle intentionally and effectively will require bridging that gap and adopting a more metrics-driven approach in student affairs. Closing the Gap For enrollment managers, metrics are already a part of their daily work. Enrollment management has been a data-driven culture for more than a decade. In fact, sometimes enrollment managers feel like coaches whose success gets measured by wins and losses. […]

Financial Modeling for New Academic Programs

by Melissa Morriss-Olson, Ph.D. (opens in new tab)

Also in this series: Is it Time to Launch that New Academic Program? The Art and Science of Answering that Question Feasibility Checklist: The Science of Bringing New Academic Programs to Life Developing a 4-Year Financial Proforma In my previous article, Feasibility Checklist: The Science Behind Bringing New Academic Programs to Life, I discussed the importance of cultivating a discipline around process and metrics to new academic program development and success. Gaining a clear and accurate sense as to what it will take to launch and sustain your new program before you enroll your first student is a critical prerequisite and a helpful exercise for surfacing and testing important assumptions. At Bay Path University, all new academic program proposals must include a four-year financial proforma, which is typically developed jointly by the dean, the chief financial officer, and the provost. Through this process, we invariably surface financial assumptions, strategies and program operational plans or outcomes that when checked more thoroughly prove to be unworkable or in need of revision. For example, in developing a new graduate program a few years ago we discovered that our “creative” approach to structuring the curriculum was not financially viable without some major tweaking. The financial […]

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