News

The Physical Campus: A Critical Asset, a Key Opportunity – Second Edition

This report includes four chapters: Reconsidering the Physical Campus Improvement and stewardship of the physical campus is key to your institution’s competitiveness. It is critical to treat your physical campus as a resource, and manage it effectively and efficiently. With more intentional management of your facilities, you can: Yet too often, institutions make ad hoc and reactive decisions. And just as often, critical decisions are made without all of the key voices at the table — from academic leaders to the registrar, student housing, and facilities management. For this report, we’ve interviewed officials from across the college campus who have shown proven success in fostering cross-campus planning and buy-in around investments in physical facilities. These experts from the trenches bring outside-the-box thinking and a strategic, proactive perspective. We hope their advice will be useful to you. Read the report

Improving Student Learning with Well-Designed Student Life Facilities

“What I have seen, and this has been a relatively fast path over the last ten years, is the rise of students’ expectations of instant access, a 24/7 mentality about services, and immediacy — that there are immediate answers to their questions and that programs and quality-of-life amenities are in place and ready to respond immediately to their needs. We are called upon in student affairs, classically, to work with the out-of-classroom experience. I think it is passe to say that there is a classroom experience and an out-of-classroom experience. There is a holistic experience. So that expectation of immediacy exists in the classroom, in the residential facility, in the recreational facility, in the student union, etc.” George Brown, University of Alabama This means, Brown continues, that today’s physical campus needs to be seamlessly connected with technology. “You can’t have gaps,” he warns. “It is a fundamental expectation of today’s students and parents that technology can be delivered to them anywhere, at any time.” George Brown is the University of Alabama’s executive director of university recreation and the assistant to the vice president of student affairs for strategic health and crisis planning. He is also a leading thinker on how […]

Adapting RCM to Your Institution’s Needs

In this complimentary excerpt from a 2014 webcast session on Moving to a Responsibility Centered Budget Model, Larry Goldstein, president of Campus Strategies, LLC, discusses key principles for effectively implementing a similar budget model on campus, including: In this webcast, Goldstein emphasized that no one institution has ever fully adopted Responsibility Centered Budgeting on their campus. Many have taken these principles and modified the model to fit their own campus. Watch the full webcast here. One such example of balancing RCM principles and the unique institutional mission can be found at the University of Notre Dame. In our 2014 article “Tailoring the RCM Model to What Works For You,” Associate Vice President for Finance Linda Kroll discusses how Notre Dame was able to adopt some, not all, RCM principles in balancing departmental financial accountability with a more centralized culture. Watch Larry Goldstein’s Webcast

Rethinking Your Capital Planning Process: Focusing on the Student Experience

The key opportunity for chief academic officers, chief financial officers, and capital planners is to establish a data-informed prioritization process for capital planning efforts — one in which campus projects are prioritized based on how academic, residential, and recreational facilities on campus can be best used to improve enrollment and retention. We recently spoke with capital planning consultant Neil Calfee and had a deep conversation about how the capital planning process is changing (and how it needs to change) and what institutional leaders may want to rethink going forward. Currently the principal of NPC Group, specializing in the creation and negotiation of public/private partnerships, Neil Calfee previously served as Arizona State University’s director of real estate development. He has over 15 years of experience in development and management of complex development projects involving partnerships between government entities and the private sector. What follows are some key takeaways from our conversation: How the Capital Planning Process is Changing When asked what key factors he sees driving the capital planning process now that weren’t so critical 5-10 years ago, Calfee drew attention to three in particular: THE PREVALENCE OF ONLINE LEARNINGCalfee: “Students can now take core classes via the web which might take some pressure […]

Improving Student Learning with Well-Designed Academic Facilities

We see growing awareness at institutions that housing and recreational facilities can serve as learning spaces and as important factors in student success. But what about the academic facilities themselves — classrooms, the academic library, traditional learning spaces? How can these facilities be used more effectively to improve student learning? To investigate this question, we turned to experts Ken Smith, Virginia Tech’s vice provost for resource management and institutional effectiveness, and Nancy Allen, dean of the main library at the University of Denver. Redesigning Instructional Space Smith points to two qualities that define the modern instructional classroom: Ability to support multiple learning activities within the same class period, with minimal disruption. “In today’s classroom, faculty don’t necessarily stand and lecture while students receive information passively,” Smith notes. “The same session may include lecture, group work, and individual work. You need a classroom that can support all three modes of learning with minimal disruption when transitioning between them.” Seamless integration of technology. “Technology should no longer be a feature of the room but a tool that is available in the room to faculty and students. At Virginia Tech, we worked hard to make technology-integrated classrooms similar enough to other classrooms that there […]

How One Institution Took its Financial Literacy Program to the Next Level: Keys to Engaging Students

by Sarah Seigle Peatman (opens in new tab)

Originally published in 2015. As average student loan debt climbs to over $33,000 and the cost of living continues to grow higher, more and more colleges and universities are taking steps to build robust financial literacy programs on their campuses. Such programs typically offer a variety of services and educational tools for students on fiscal responsibility and debt management. When financial literacy programs are backed by sufficient resources and have a broad enough reach among the student body, they can have a real impact on both retention rates and the quality of the student experience, and can also do much to prevent students from defaulting on their loans after graduation. Even after the proper resources have been secured and the fundamentals of the financial literacy program have been put in place, however, marketing the programs on campus and promoting student participation in them can prove challenging. Students are busy: they have a multitude of personal, academic, and professional obligations to attend to. To reach students, the brand and message for your financial literacy program—as well as the venues you then use to deliver that message—have to be able to “cut through the clutter” and stand out. The success of Syracuse […]

Turnover Stinks, Part 2: Three Ways to Minimize It

by W. Kent Barnds (opens in new tab)

Turnover stinks! In December, I released my article “Turnover Stinks: Some Critical Perspective for Admissions Leaders” to help admissions directors shift the way they think about it. Now, looking ahead at the new year, I’d like to offer some advice on how to deal with turnover. While many would say (and I would agree) that the solution to turnover is to pay better and improve the working condition, there are many other things you can do as an admissions leader. Here are a couple of suggestions to help prevent turnover and build a high-impact admissions team. 1. Train Well and Often Training and re-training is critically important to aligning strategy and execution of responsibilities. Training also represents a time and opportunity to get into theory and examination of what you do and what you want done. Yet too often, training is a secondary priority. One might think, “He’ll get it once he does it for a while,” or “They won’t be into it; they have too much experience.” This is the wrong approach. Think of training as an opportunity to: Build time into your annual plan for training for everyone, not just the new members of your staff. In my office, we […]

Tough Issues We MUST Discuss as Academic Leaders

by Amit Mrig (opens in new tab)

Recently, I read Jay D. Kenton’s article “Harvesting the High-Hanging Fruit” in the September/October issue in Change. Kenton, who serves as the interim president for Eastern Oregon University, argues that when it comes to managing the costs of providing a higher education, we are quickly exhausting (if we haven’t already) the “low-hanging fruit” of administrative bloat and costs related to infrastructure and support services. He redirects attention to the “high-hanging fruit,” arguing that the largest, ripest, juiciest fruit to harvest is on the academic side of the enterprise. His analysis is right on target. The need to trim costs on the academic side is difficult work, but it is also the heart of the issue. He cites, for example, the very real costs of: Kenton notes that release time at some institutions can account for 30-40% of faculty time. That’s a cost of millions of dollars that could be rectified without negative impact on faculty employment. There are certainly legitimate reasons why faculty receive release time; the issue arises when the institution doesn’t have clarity on when and why release time is offered and how this is aligned with strategic priorities of the institution. Simply through intentional reallocation of faculty […]

Why AI? The Perspective I Bring to Higher Education

by Daniel Fusch, Director of Research and Publications, Academic Impressions I’ve been with Academic Impressions for over eight years — a pretty significant portion of my life. In this article, as I look toward the new year, I reflect back on my career with AI, how I came here, what it has meant to me, and why I’m excited about the way we’re having an impact on higher education. – Daniel Fusch Falling Out of Love, Falling In Love I love higher education. At one time, I dreamed of a tenured faculty position. I pursued (and achieved) my Ph.D in English and wrote my dissertation without thinking too much about the job market. But back in 2004-06, a funny thing happened on the way to commencement. I fell more and more in love with higher education, and fell out of love with the idea of a faculty research position. We talk about the triad of faculty commitments — teaching, research, and service — and increasingly, service was calling to me: I sat on a curriculum redesign committee as a graduate student representative, and later as an adjunct faculty representative. I co-directed an interdisciplinary conference hosted at our institution. With several fellow […]

Turnover Stinks: Some Critical Perspective for Admissions Leaders

by W. Kent Barnds (opens in new tab)

Turnover stinks! This is a typical sentiment, especially when the so-called “right people” choose to leave an organization. Or, at least, that was the way I felt when I first assumed leadership. In fact, for a long time, each time a valued staff member made the decision to leave, I was tormented. At first, I remember getting mad. Then I agonized over each loss and replayed in my mind what I could have done better or differently. I always ended with a period of mourning. I can’t imagine I’m alone in this. I expect every great leader out there has asked, what could I have done to keep that employee? I’ve asked myself that question a number of times over the years and have recently come to three conclusions I can live with: 1. It’s not always about you, so get over it My own experience and countless conversations with my counterparts over the years reveal three reasons why staff leave or stay at an institution. And while (a) money frequently is an issue, it’s not the primary issue. More often the reasons include (b) family and (c) a new opportunity or professional growth. One of my dearest friends has worked at […]

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