News

Allocating Campus Space Strategically

“Space is a critical resource, just like your institution’s financial resources; it has to be managed effectively and used efficiently. It is an asset that you need to allocate in order to support short- and long-term priorities.” Frances Mueller, University of Michigan Institutions of higher education have a limited history of tracking and allocating their existing space effectively, but facing state budget cuts and/or rising enrollments, a handful of institutions have taken recent action to organize campus-wide space management initiatives to help reallocate prime “real estate” on campus in support of strategic priorities, looking for ways to optimize the space they already have. This is a critical step, and it involves: Acknowledging that your campus space is a strategic asset for your institution Building out a robust space database to allow for more sophisticated tracking of space utilization Taking steps to change the culture of space ownership on campus, shifting space from a departmental asset to an institutional asset Frances Mueller, project manager for the Space Utilization Initiative at the University of Michigan, and Phil Rouble, facilities planning specialist at Algonquin College, offer their advice about making this shift. Assessing Your Space Use For example, Mueller recommends assessing your use […]

Taking a Proactive Approach to Energy Savings and Deferred Maintenance

“You have to be clear on the distinction between deferred maintenance and ignored maintenance, and ensure that your institution’s leadership is clear on this. Intentionally deferring needed maintenance after a careful assessment of your facilities condition is a strategy. Ignoring maintenance is a problem.”Faramarz Vakili, Associate Director of the Physical Plant, University of Wisconsin-Madison In January – February 2012, Academic Impressions conducted a benchmarking survey of facilities managers at more than 75 institutions of higher education. The results were indicative. For example, the survey confirmed that addressing deferred maintenance has moved from a worry to a priority at the majority of institutions: When we dug deeper, we found facilities managers at a variety of stages in addressing the issue — but they all feel the pressure. Some are making presentations to the board; some are proposing five-year or three-year plans for reducing the maintenance backlog. Some have succeeded in allocating a small annual budget for the purpose, and are now working to prioritize a campus’s worth of maintenance needs. It’s critical to develop a sustainable model for funding facilities replacement and renewal. To learn from successful models currently in place at two very different institutions, we turned to Faramarz Vakili, […]

The Physical Campus: A Critical Asset, a Key Opportunity

In this Report: Improvement and stewardship of the physical campus is key to your institution’s competitiveness. Given deferred maintenance backlogs and changes in student expectations for the campus, 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 around space allocation; renewal, replacement, and construction of student housing; and deferral of maintenance needs. 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 issue, 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. See Upcoming Facilities Events

Training Peer Mentors for First-Year Students: What’s Missing

Peer educators can serve as an effective front line in the student development and academic success of first-year students, and employing peer mentors (either as employees or as volunteers) can save on costs. Yet many institutions provide only the most cursory training and orientation for their peer mentors. This week, we turned to Sarah Whitley, the forward-thinking director of first-year experience and family programs with Longwood University. We asked her what critical efforts are often missing from peer mentor training. Here are three items she drew our attention to. Introduce Student Development Theory “One thing that I have found incredibly useful and successful, and that many universities aren’t doing, is to actually provide a training session on student development theory. I know that probably seems a bit “heavy” for undergraduates. It seems like more of a graduate school topic. But offer a basic overview to kick off your training program, because it’s really important for the peer mentors to understand the developmental level of new students coming into the institution.”Sarah Whitley, Longwood University Whitley suggests that a basic overview of Chickering and Perry and brief discussions of student development vectors, how students are trying to make decisions, and how students […]

3 Ways to Help Peer Educators Succeed

In a related article, we asked Sarah Whitley, director of first-year experience and family programs at Longwood University, to offer her insights on what critical items are often missing from peer mentor training. Whitley’s answers indicated the need for a shift in thinking about the support and development peer educators need, whether your peer educators serve primarily as peer mentors or whether they lead first-year seminar courses or other elements of the first-year student experience. We decided to dig deeper in a follow-up interview. Sarah Whitley and Jennifer Latino, the director of first-year experience at Campbell University, suggest three keys to helping peer educators step into a leadership role and take greater ownership of their work: Shift the Focus from Orientation to Leadership Development “Don’t think of this as just training,” Latino suggests. “Think of this as a process of development for peer educators. I think where we often fall short in administering these training programs is that we don’t take into consideration the impact on the peer mentor. We know that training peer educators is good for first-year students, but peer mentoring is also a profound experience for the mentors themselves. When our training is focused on what to […]

Naming Opportunities for Athletics: 4 Tips

by Vincent E. Duckworth, CFRE

Because the marketplace for public arenas and sports stadiums is now saturated with corporate namings and sponsorships, many corporations are turning increasingly to the higher education sector for naming opportunities. At the same time, many athletics departments in higher education are striving to become more entrepreneurial, particularly at institutions that have recently cut athletics budgets to preserve funding for academic programs. Yet often athletics directors focus almost solely on fundraising, neglecting the growing marketplace for athletics sponsorships. Though sponsorships are usually far smaller in dollar amount than philanthropic naming gifts, it’s important to realize that: “More corporations are seeing the value of aligning themselves with like institutions to build awareness of their brand. These opportunities deserve more than a cursory glance.”Vincent Duckworth, ViTreo We turned to Vincent Duckworth, partner and chief marketing officer at Vitreo, to learn more about how institutions can take advantage of this changing marketplace. Duckworth offers these four tips. Tip 1: Do You Have a Naming Policy for Your Athletics Naming Opportunities? Duckworth advises that your naming policy needs to provide guidelines around: This policy needs to be transparent and publically available. This ensures both that corporate sponsors can find you — and that you can […]

Succession Planning: Advice for the President, the Board, and HR

Is external search the best approach? The president and the board at least have an open and honest conversation about whether to pursue succession planning, asking whether an internal successor who knows the culture and has the trust of other key stakeholders would be better positioned to take the helm and affect change. Lucie Lapovsky, president of Lapovsky Consulting and past president of Mercy College, recently spoke with us about the results of consultants Booz & Co.’s 12th annual CEO Succession Study (subscription required) released on May 30, suggesting some takeaways for higher education. Among the findings: In the corporate sector, 4 out of 5 new CEOs are hired from inside the organization, and in terms of their tenure, “inside” CEOs usually outlast outsider CEOs. What’s most interesting is why: “It takes a long time to really get to understand how a company works,” one of the consultants remarked. “Insiders have a better ability to understand how to affect change within an organization than outsiders typically do.”Per-Ola Karlsson, Managing Director of Europe, Booz & Co. Lapovsky, who has written on succession planning in higher education, suggests that this is an important finding for leaders in higher education to note. “When […]

Four Tips for Helping Students Graduate on Time

NPR’s Talk of the Nation interviewed a series of academic leaders and experts in academic advising to examine why many students find barriers to graduation within four years. At Academic Impressions, we decided to follow up with some practical advice for where institutions can see significant gains in helping students graduate earlier. Of the following four tips, the first two are focused on empowering students to plan their progress toward the degree intentionally; the second two are focused on identifying and removing those barriers or outdated academic policies that typically slow progress toward the degree. Empower students to build and manage their momentum, and clear their path. In gathering these tips, we spoke with Lucie Lapovsky, president of Lapovsky Consulting and past president of Mercy College; Dennis Pruitt, vice president for student affairs at the University of South Carolina; and Susan Ohrablo, a doctoral enrollment counselor with the Abraham S. Fischler School of Education at Nova Southeastern University, who previously served as the director of academic advising for the business school at NSU. Here is their advice. Tip One: Empower Students to Self-Audit Their Progress Lapovsky warns that inadequate advising or misadvising can easily occur. Getting false information to students is […]

Designing Sustainable Facilities as Learning Spaces

“We have this expression here that the campus is another member of the faculty. In our planning and our design we need to always keep this in mind, because students will learn from and interact with the physical space. It’s not just a passive setting.” Jack Byrne, Middlebury College For institutions that have made sustainability a strategic objective, the ideal approach is to involve both facilities planners and academic leaders in the planning process for new facilities and facilities upgrades, from concept to design to execution. This allows you to plan the facilities in such a way as to maximize their potential as learning spaces and as learning opportunities. Jack Byrne, the director of Middlebury College’s Sustainability Integration Office, offers this example. When adding a $12 million biomass combined heat and power plant, Middlebury College made a series of decisions early in the planning process with the intent that the facility would support student learning and faculty research: The facility would be located near the student center and on the main quad The operation of the facility would be as visible as possible — in this case, the entire facade along one side was to be a glass wall “We […]

Benchmarking Deferred Maintenance: A 2012 Survey

“You have to be clear on the distinction between deferred maintenance and ignored maintenance, and ensure that your institution’s leadership is clear on this. Intentionally deferring needed maintenance after a careful assessment of your facilities condition is a strategy. Ignoring maintenance is a problem.”Faramarz Vakili, Associate Director of the Physical Plant, University of Wisconsin-Madison Historically, institutions of higher education have built new facilities without budgeting for life cycle operational costs, and have built up a significant backlog of “ignored” maintenance projects. But the past few years have seen growing awareness that this is not sustainable, and more institutions are looking for ways to take proactive, not just reactive, action on facilities maintenance and renewal. In January – February 2012, Academic Impressions conducted a benchmarking survey of facilities managers at more than 75 institutions of higher education. While this is a small sample, the results were indicative. For example, the survey confirmed that addressing deferred maintenance has moved from a worry to a priority at the majority of institutions: When we dug deeper, we found facilities managers at a variety of stages in addressing the issue — but they all feel the pressure. Some are making presentations to the board; some […]