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What Every Higher Ed Leader Needs to Know About Supporting Women in Leadership

Posted on by Daniel Fusch

How can higher ed leaders support women’s leadership within their institutions? What do leaders need to know? Academic Impressions staff and leaders in the academy offer their advice and perspective. Several times a year at our Women’s Leadership Success in Higher Education conference, we bring together 200 women in leadership positions (or aspiring to leadership positions) in higher education to network, connect with mentors and success coaches, and share perspectives on the challenges of the academy. As we approach our next iteration of the event, we wanted to ask members of our previous faculty panel (as well as our internal team who designed the conference) what advice they most want to give this year to leaders in higher education who are committed to doing more to support women’s leadership growth and success. Here’s what they would like to share with you: 1. What’s one piece of advice you would offer those working in higher ed to support women in leadership roles? Karen Whitney. “If you really want to see more women in leadership, and in particular at the highest levels of leadership, then be prepared to be both honest and clear. “First, if a leader has asked for your support either as […]

5 Questions to Help Restore a Strained Town/Gown Relationship

Posted on by Kenneth Soldink

PART OF A SERIES ON RFPs, CAPITAL PLANNING, AND PUBLIC/PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS This is the first in a series of articles by Neil Calfee. 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. This article offers Calfee’s advice for strengthening often-strained town/gown relationships, and is written from his unique perspective in working for both Arizona State University and the City of Tempe. We also recommend his previous articles with AI: You may also be interested in his recorded webcast, “Creating Financial Expectations in the Housing RFP Process.” by Neil Calfee (NPC Group) “Love/hate” may be a little strong in describing many town and gown relationships, but “strained” may not be too far off the mark. The town/gown relationship can be full of drama, jealousy, passive-aggressiveness, and it can take “staying together for the kids” to a whole new level. But the town/gown can also be quite rewarding and mutually beneficial, and given that breaking up is nearly impossible, it’s best […]

Yield Rates are Declining – Why?

Posted on by Kenneth Soldink

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. 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 the most part, applications generated on the margin are softer, that is, less likely to […]

Professional Development as a Tool for Succession Planning: The Story of Colorado School of Mines Foundation

Posted on by Brady Stanton

Also Contributing Editors:Rusty Brunner, Human Resources Manager, Colorado School of Mines Foundation Succession planning and robust professional development programs are not often associated with advancement shops in higher education. Some feel that with the high employee turnover rate in advancement, they cannot justify the financial investment. However, an alternative perspective is that professional development leads to increased employee performance and retention, making it a sound investment. At the Colorado School of Mines Foundation (CSMF), leadership values staff development and has implemented a scaffolded skills-based development plan. Supporting employees and creating long-term succession planning has been integrated into their culture. This fundamental belief in how leadership views employment has played a big part in creating a higher-than-average retention rate. During an interview with Rusty Brunner, Human Resources Manager and Steve Kreidler, Vice President of Administration/CFO from the Colorado School of Mines Foundation (CSMF), I learned about their vision and approach. A growth focused and skills-based model The professional development and succession plan, in its current form, began two years ago at the CSMF. It is more than a commitment to provide employees with an annual webcast or two; it is a fundamentally different way of approaching employment. It is a growth […]

Success Coaching: How to Turn Training into Action

Posted on by Daniel Fusch

How do you make sure that what you bring back from a conference gets followed up on and leads to action? How do you get more return on that investment and really build your capacity? Often the missing step is to pair training with success coaching. Here’s what that can look like. Take a moment to think back to the last time you researched a conference or workshop that you wanted to attend. If you are like most, it was probably an exciting experience, an opportunity to get “off campus” and meet new colleagues who are more than likely experiencing the same challenges you are. As you reviewed the content of the offering, you considered the changes you could implement when you returned from the training. After you registered and then attended, that feeling increased to the point where you could almost envision the changes already made and how those changes would impact you, your team, and maybe the entire institution. Having spent much of my career managing and facilitating training and development programs, there have been countless times when I would feel a high level of satisfaction observing participants’ energy and enthusiasm as each program concluded. In most instances, […]

Research Consortiums: What Can Academic Libraries Do Today?

Posted on by Greta Bell

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 […]

How Georgia State University Plans to Use Predictive Analytics to Address the National Achievement Gap

Posted on by Kenneth Soldink

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 […]

Mergers and Acquisitions: Strategic Questions Every University Leader Should Ask Now – Not When It’s Too Late

Posted on by Daniel Fusch

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 […]

Recruiting the Right Major Gift Officers

Posted on by Daniel Fusch

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 […]

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