Before you hire your next major gift officer, clarify what the team really needs in the newest MGO, identify the skills you need to ask for, and deepen your candidate pool by searching for non-traditional candidates who have the right combination of skills and personality traits to succeed. Here’s how. The retention and recruitment of major gift officers (MGOs) in higher education is problematic. 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. Additionally, the position requires specific talent. It is not possible to place just anyone in the role, due to the high-level of autonomy (substantial self-direction and travel), lack of direct accountability (difficulty assessing performance), and significant burden of institutional representation (a lone individual is representing […]
Here’s how Georgia State University is using predictive analytics to identify at-risk students and intervene quickly – and how they’re now testing the approach across other institutions. SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION SERIES The US Department of Education has awarded multi-million dollar “First in the World” grants to 18 colleges and universities that are innovating to solve critical challenges with access, recruitment, retention, and student success. At AI, we have interviewed each of the recipients to learn more about the projects these institutions are pursuing, how their approaches are unique, and what other colleges and universities can learn from these new efforts. This was the second year of the First in the World grants. You can read our interviews with the 24 institutions that received 2014 grants here. During the past ten years, officials at Georgia State University have tracked more than 140,000 student records and 2.5 million grades in order to identify mistakes that put a student at risk of dropping out. A decade later, they’ve identified more than 800 different mistakes, and continue tracking all 30,000 of their students so they can quickly intervene. Their next challenge? Using the same approach to track students at 11 different institutions across the country […]
A report from the Association of Research Libraries (pdf) offers four scenarios for predicting the research needs that faculty, students, and other researchers will have in the year 2030, and offers strategic objectives for academic research libraries who will need to build capacity and collections to meet those needs. One of those objectives involves building capacity through consortiums and other cooperative efforts between research libraries: “Collaborative capacities serving groups of research libraries or the full community of research libraries allows for increasing opportunities to develop a strategy for maintaining and sharing open and rich general collections. Opportunities for cross-pollinating research activities and the potential for shared endeavors are also viable strategies.” From The ARL 2030 Scenarios: A User’s Guide to Research Libraries Paul Gandel, professor of information studies at Syracuse University and a thought leader on this issue, points out that research libraries are caught in a Catch-22, in two ways. First, academic libraries need to share resources in order to build capacity, but that sharing has competitive implications. “Most universities have invested in their collections as a competitive advantage,” Gandel notes. “To open up those resources to everyone has political implications, because the institution has made a significant investment […]
While some colleges and universities are developing workplace bullying prevention programs (we’ll list examples in a minute), it is evident that we have a lot of work yet to do. And this work needs to be done; unaddressed, workplace bullying impacts the processes of tenure and promotion, the collegiality of the department, and the academic freedom of its junior members. In this article, find out what a policy should include, and what institutions have existing policies you can learn from. by Clara Wajngurt, Ph.D. What is workplace bullying? By this term, we’re referring to hostile behavior that includes repeated harrassment, physical harm, verbal abuse, or other conduct that is viewed as threatening, humiliating, intimidating, or sabotaging – behavior that interferes with the performance of the one who is being bullied. (See Namie & Namie, “Risk Factors for Becoming a Target of Workplace Bullying and Mobbing,” in M. Duffy and D. Yamada, Workplace Bullying and Mobbing in the United States, Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Press, 2018, 1-17.) These are the characteristics of workplace bullying: What Workplace Bullying Looks Like in Higher Ed Imagine the following scenarios of how workplace bullying manifests itself in an academic setting. SCENARIO AA unit director submits […]
Higher education mergers are often seen as a sign of personal and institutional defeat, to be avoided at all costs. Yet the truth is that waiting until the last possible moment, when the institution is in full tail spin, is the true sign of failure. The time to be watching for strategic partnerships or opportunities for merger or acquisition—specifically those opportunities that make the institution stronger, not weaker—is always now. An interview with Ricardo Azziz and Nivine Megahed Recently, we spoke with Dr. Ricardo Azziz, the Chief Officer, Academic Health & Hospital Affairs, State University of New York (SUNY) System Administration, who oversaw the merger that resulted in Georgia Regents University (now Augusta University), serving as founding president, and with Dr. Nivine Megahed, Ph.D., the President of National Louis University, who oversaw the university’s acquisition of Kendall college (a for-profit Laureate Education college). Dr. Azziz and Dr. Megahed also joined other experts in leading our 2019 conference Preparing for the Future: Institutional Mergers and Strategic Alliances in Higher Education. We wanted to ask a few key questions before the event. Here’s what Ricardo Azziz and Nivine Megahed shared with us. We hope you will find their perspectives useful and thought-provoking and […]
The Great Resignation is hitting colleges and universities especially hard. Even before the pandemic, retention of the best staff and faculty was a growing concern, given the lure of higher pay in the corporate sector, competition between academic institutions themselves, and increased and continual pressure to do more with less in the academic workplace. The COVID-19 pandemic worsened these challenges by severely depressing departmental budgets, demanding rapid transitions in the way higher-ed professionals pursue their work and deliver services to students, and by exposing and deepening workplace inequities, particularly for women and for faculty and staff of color. A recent survey that we conducted found that nearly half of respondents reported feeling clinically meaningful levels of burnout, not far off from the working population at large. Today, when we speak with human resources professionals in higher ed, they frequently share their frustration (and sometimes even fatalism) at what many see as a long and losing battle to hire, retain, and develop top talent for their institutions at a time when higher education is seeing unprecedented brain drain toward private industry and when the prospect of working together toward a common good is no longer enough, by itself, to attract and […]
Best Places to Grow Showcasing Innovative and Impactful Higher Education Leadership & Professional Development Programs We’re proud to announce the honorees of our Best Places to Grow initiative—an opportunity to celebrate higher education departments and institutions leading the way in professional and leadership development. These campuses don’t just support growth, they champion it. Through bold, intentional programs, they empower faculty, staff, and students to thrive in their roles, innovate in their fields, and grow as leaders. Their commitment fosters cultures of creativity, collaboration, and lifelong learning. Best Places to Grow is our way of spotlighting those investing in people and transforming what’s possible in higher education. Join us in recognizing the institutions that are truly the Best Places to Grow. Explore the Honorees Campus-Wide Leadership Development Academic Leadership Development Senior Leader and Team Development Campus-Wide Leadership Development Best Campus-Wide Leadership Development Program Honoring the institution that goes above and beyond to provide leadership. The 2025 recognition goes to… The University of Texas at Dallas Learn about Their Program Expand We are excited to recognize the BRIGHT Leaders program at the University of Texas at Dallas, a professional development initiative dedicated to growing leadership potential across campus. Their program’s guiding philosophy, […]
Series: Changing How We Understand the Market In this new series by Jon Boeckenstedt, 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. More in this series:Is the International Enrollment Boom a Rising Tide that Lifts All Ships? Colleges nationwide are suffering from declining yield rates, and everyone wants to know why. In some sense, it’s the tendency of colleges to chase the measure of prestige known as selectivity, as defined by a low admit rate. People believe the best way to do this is to increase applications, to allow for a lower admit rate. The problem is that colleges have a natural market, and, for […]
By Katrina Carter-TellisonVice President for Academic Affairs, Lynn University At Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida, the pandemic caused us to challenge long-held assumptions and reimagine everything from classroom schedules and course delivery methods to campus tours. As an independent institution with approximately 3,400 students from more than 100 counties, it was important to increase flexibility and reduce risk during a prolonged period of uncertainty with rapidly changing conditions. We developed a plan for block scheduling as a way to minimize exposure for faculty and students and to enable administrators to implement a quick switch from in-person to remote instruction if necessary. We also sought to provide students with more options to fit their circumstances due to health issues or travel disruptions. After implementing the approach for a full academic year, we are seeing that this innovation precipitated by the pandemic has the potential to become a permanent feature. Reimagining the 16-week semester Block scheduling breaks up traditional 16-week semesters into four-week sessions with synchronous classes four days per week. Students can choose to focus on one course at a time or fast-track with two courses each session. They also have the option to complete the semester early, start late, […]
A FACULTY DEVELOPMENT CASE STUDY With minimal budget for faculty development, McKendree University has taken a unique approach to: Here is the story of what McKendree University has tried and what is working. At McKendree University, the idea to attach a theme to a week of faculty development activities was initially a bit of a fluke according to Tami Eggleston, associate dean for institutional effectiveness and professor of psychology. She was preparing for a series of professional development workshops offered in conjunction with provost Christine Bahr after classes ended in May, and they decided to decorate the conference room. She bought some beach balls and sand buckets as decorations, and faculty liked it enough that they specifically mentioned it in their post-workshop evaluations. Since then, the university has raised the bar each year to keep faculty development engaging and fun while also addressing specific themes to improve teaching. We talked with Eggleston to learn more about how McKendree spices up their development activities on a small budget — and why she advocates for May as the perfect time to tackle faculty development. Keeping Faculty Development Fun After classes end in May, McKendree faculty are invited to participate in a couple of […]
