News

Is There a Financial Bubble?

by Amit Mrig

This article is an excerpt from our paper “The Other Higher Ed Bubble: The Bubble We Aren’t Talking About.” To read the rest of the paper, click here. As government-subsidized debt continues to fuel higher ed’s growth, there is increasing speculation as to whether higher ed is the next bubble to burst—following the real estate burst of 2008 and the dot-com burst in 2000. Like those industries, higher ed cannot sustain its volume of customers without large infusions of subsidized debt and equity. The financial bubble argument gained significant traction in 2010 when the total amount of student loan debt in this country surpassed credit card debt. Some have used this milestone, coming on the heels of the Great Recession, to imply that, like housing, higher education is another part of the American Dream that is going to be increasingly difficult to reach. Why It’s Not That Simple One of the primary challenges with this argument is that it paints higher ed with a single brushstroke, and the reality is that the different sectors—community colleges, independents, publicly-supported, and for-profits (to say nothing of different competitive sectors)—graduate students with very different debt loads, job prospects, and core skills. The cost of […]

Assessing Student Learning Outcomes: Surveys Aren’t Enough

In a recent Academic Impressions webcast, student learning assessment expert John Hoffman polled student affairs representatives from 200 institutions of higher education about their data collection methods for assessing student learning. Participants were asked to select their two most common methods of gathering data. The results were dismaying but perhaps unsurprising: …but, only: The reliance on surveys is telling. Surveys appear easy to design and deploy, but Hoffman cautions that there are a number of shortcomings with using surveys as your primary method of collecting data to assess student learning: KEYS TO EFFECTIVE ASSESSMENT: “ROLLING UP YOUR SLEEVES” “Surveys are valuable, but often what we get is the student’s self-report of their learning. Yes, you can test them within the survey, for instance by asking if the student can name three examples of services provided by your career development center — that invites more direct assessment of what they have learned. But to really get the data we need, we have to roll up our sleeves and collect data during interaction with the students.”John Hoffman, California State University, Fullerton KEYS TO EFFECTIVE ASSESSMENT: FOCUS ON COHORT LEARNING “You might be asking, ‘How am I supposed to assess learning in a […]

The Other Higher Ed Bubble

by Amit Mrig

Is there a higher education bubble? June 2013. Amid recent discussion of whether higher education is the next big financial “bubble,” It’s my view that what isn’t being talked about is a bubble of another type—a “denial” bubble. In this report, I’ll offer a new diagnosis of the challenges facing higher ed leadership, and a call to action for college and university leaders. Amit MrigPresident, Academic Impressions Read the full report. __________________________________ 5 Years Later Want to read our follow-up? Check out the 2018 report The Future of Higher Education, subtitled Will Higher Education Seize the Future or Fall Victim to It? __________________________________ Member Exclusives: Responses from the Experts Exclusively available to Academic Impressions members, in these two 30-minute podcasts, hear higher-education experts Bob Dickeson, Larry Goldstein, Lucie Lapovsky, John Lombardi, and Pat Sanaghan offer practical advice for higher-ed leaders in response to The Other Higher-Ed Bubble. See Upcoming Leadership Workshops

Lessons Learned from Institutions Undertaking Program Prioritization

At Academic Impressions, we recently offered a national snapshot of efforts to prioritize academic programs and administrative services at higher-ed institutions. Our report included commentary from Bob Dickeson (who literally wrote the book on program prioritization) and Larry Goldstein (president of Campus Strategies, LLC), in which these two experts identified the prerequisites for success. The key takeaway from our report: when program prioritization breaks down, it is usually because of a deeply flawed process (rather than flawed people). In the past few weeks, we have returned to the institutional leaders we surveyed previously, leaders from both two-year and four-year institutions who have recently undertaken or are in the midst of a program prioritization effort. We asked them to share the most significant obstacles they have faced and any lessons they have learned about managing the prioritization process. We wanted to share their responses and their key takeaways with you. Lessons from Your Peers Here’s what the leaders we spoke with had to say: HIGHLIGHT: TAKEAWAYS FROM THE PRIORITIZATION EFFORT AT FLORIDA A&M UNIVERSITY In 2011, Florida A&M University recently conducted a productivity study of academic programs. In their effort to reallocate resources, they terminated 23 academic degree programs and suspended […]

Alumni Relations ROI: An Approach

Marquette University has piloted (and refined) an innovative metrics tool for measuring the impact of alumni engagement efforts. Numerical scores are assigned to specific activities that are indicative of alumni engagement and participation, and the scoring is used to measure the return on investment for alumni relations efforts in quantitative terms and to inform allocation of future resources. To learn about the basics of the approach and how these metrics have informed decision making at Marquette, we interviewed Andrea Petrie, director of development for Marquette’s College of Nursing, and Taylor Schult, an associate engagement officer who serves on Marquette’s Affinity-Based Giving team. Schult notes that what is especially empowering about Marquette’s point-scoring system of alumni relations metrics is that once you have numerical scores, you can set specific goals for improving those scores for specific groups of alumni. And those goals can then be measured quantitatively. BY WAY OF EXAMPLE: MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY’S METRICS Marquette University uses a 16-point model to assess alumni engagement and giving. For each alum, up to 8 points are assigned to metrics that assess engagement: 8 points are assigned to metrics that assess giving: The Marquette point system (above) is just one example of how an […]

Special Edition: Engaging Your Alumni

Are your alumni engaged? Are you sure? According to a national survey conducted by the Collaborative Innovation Network for Engagement and Giving, only 52 percent of alumni at the 100 institutions with the highest alumni participation rates believe that their alma mater keeps them closely connected and values its alumni relationships. That’s a foreboding statistic. At your own institution, do you: Over the past 3 years, Academic Impressions has surveyed hundreds of institutions, offered dozens of educational programs for alumni relations professionals, and has interviewed experts from those institutions that have seen success in increasing alumni participation and giving rates. We offer you their insights, practical tips, and case studies in this Special Edition on alumni engagement. We hope you will find this edition useful and use it to start key conversations in your alumni relations and development office. See Upcoming Advancement Events

Addressing Student Mental Health Issues – On a Budget

by Anne E. Lundquist I was very interested in the article by Kristen Domonell that appeared in University Business on March 19.  In this article, she emphasized that, in an era of increasing numbers of students with significant psychological disabilities and serious mental issues, colleges and universities are being forced to “do more with less” because of the escalating financial pressures occurring on many campuses at the same time. Domonell outlined strategies that some counseling centers are employing to address these issues and concerns. Data from the 2012 National Counseling Center Directors (NCCD) Survey confirms this pressure to meet demand: 92% of the respondents report that the number of students seeking help at their centers has been increasing in recent years. 88% of directors state that the increased demand for services, along with the increase in clients with more serious psychological problems, has posed staffing problems for them. Yet I think it is important to emphasize that many institutions are in a position to build on other resources that they already have in place in other areas of their operations to help to accomplish these same goals, to serve the best interests of all students. You don’t always need to […]

Meeting the Challenge of Program Prioritization

Report: May 2015. In this report, you’ll see a national snapshot of program prioritization efforts based on a recent survey of over 100 institutional leaders — plus critical lessons learned to aid you in your own efforts, including: Read the report. See Other Topics in Institutional & Academic Planning

Naming Opportunities: Don’t Miss Them

Those shops that are best able to leverage naming opportunities to secure gifts and to steward long-term relationships with donors will be those that have thought ahead. Even as more institutions look to launch new campaigns — often increasingly ambitious ones in terms of their dollar goals — donors are increasingly interested in attaching their names to philanthropic projects representative of their values. Those shops that are best able to leverage these opportunities to secure gifts and to steward long-term relationships with donors will be those that have thought ahead — those that have an intentional plan in place for how opportunities for naming gifts will be identified and managed. Over the past two years, we have interviewed Vincent Duckworth, partner at ViTreo and one of the leading experts on naming opportunities in higher education, frequently on this subject. Here are some of the highlights from the advice he has shared with us. Creating a Naming Opportunities Plan To move from a reactive to a proactive approach to opportunities for soliciting naming or renaming gifts, Duckworth recommends assembling a specific and well-defined naming opportunities plan to be shared internally. “You don’t have to put this out in the New York […]

Are Outdated Policies Holding You Back?

“Your company’s organizational memory might be holding it back,” business professor Vijay Govindarajan and retired management consultant Srikanth Srinivas cautioned in Harvard Business Review this week, offering advice that spans the for-profit and non-profit sectors. According to Govindarajan and Srinivas, Organizational memory – the way we have always done things – can include “obsolete policies and practices, outdated assumptions and mind-sets, and underperforming products and services. This organizational memory creates biases that get embedded in planning processes, performance evaluation systems, organizational structures and human resource policies. This becomes a big burden when non-linear shifts occur.” What policies and practices, perhaps unexamined for 20 years, are holding your institution back? As the pace of change accelerates and the challenges your institution faces becoming increasingly complex, an even more critical question might be: How do you encourage leaders throughout your institution to question long-held assumptions? Without letting go of the strengths of your institution’s hard-won and extensive experience (after all, a college’s “organizational memory,” unlike a dot-com’s, is measured in decades or even centuries), it’s time to ensure that your planning and budgeting processes as well as your systems for hiring, training, and evaluation are welcoming of disruptive and innovative questions and […]

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