Studzinski Recital Hall and Kanbar Auditorium at Bowdoin College (Maine)
A Sense of Place is a recurring University Business magazine feature of interest: THE CURTIS POOL BUILDING AT Bowdoin College is making waves again, but now from musical vibrations. A renovation project has replaced the indoor swimming pool with the Studzinski Recital Hall, a state-of-the-art performing space and practice facility. In May, it opened with an inaugural concert series in its 280-seat Kanbar Auditorium. Since 1928, the old building-designed by McKim, Mead and White-served as the location of the college's pool. That changed in 1987, the year the Farley Field House complex opened. The old building had not been used since.
Una Fuerza to Reckon With
From Ron Schachter, this article is published in University Business magazine: For the past 15 years, Hispanic-Serving Institutions around the country have been facing the challenges, and fulfilling the educational promise, of the growing numbers of Latino students.
The league of HSIs, which is barely 15 years old, reaches from community colleges to state universities across 15 states and Puerto Rico, and enrolls almost two-thirds of all Latino college students. While the majority of these schools are located in the states bordering Mexico, they also include members as far flung as St. Peter's College in Jersey City, N.J.; Columbia Basin College in Pasco, Wash.; Morton College in Cicero, Ill.; and Donnelly College in Kansas City, Kan.
7 Best Practices for Emergency Notification
This article by Diana Schaffhauser, is from Campus Technology magazine: [S]chools have found religion when it comes to solutions designed to deliver critical information to the campus community in a timely fashion. And the vendor community is now offering a multitude of routes to the Promised Land. The question is: Will the "right" technology solution solve all your mass communication problems? Those who have weathered campus emergencies that depended upon fast, effective communication with the campus community say technology is only part of the solution. Following, from those who have "been there," are seven critical best practices for emergency notification you need to put into place now.
All Hands On the Plan
This Business Officer article is by Jeffrey S. Pittman: While boards of trustees and senior leaders always influence the strategic direction of a college or university, campuswide involvement is a critical element for creating the kind of momentum that fulfills institutional mission. When everyone sees the big picture, competition among departments and divisions, whether real or perceived, is more likely to give way to consensus. Rather than asserting, “I must have this for my department,” people who engage in an ongoing, organizationwide conversation are more likely to step out of their silos and say, “We as an institution need this even more.” And, when all agree on “who” you are as an institution, mission focus becomes second nature.
"Greater Expectations" from Students and Their Families
This Business Officer article is by Karla Hignite: Striking the right balance between fulfilling students’ wants and giving them what they need is a complex undertaking, especially when confronting today’s tech-attuned consumers. Mission, audience, and institutional philosophy play a part in the decision matrix determining campus offerings. And, while leaders focus on the need to communicate the real value and purpose of higher education to a new generation of students and their families, they must also come up with the goods.
Trends At Work: Demands on Higher Ed Managers
This Business Officer article is by Sandra R. Sabo: Think you’re the only one badgered to build sustainable facilities, bolster employee benefits, upgrade systems, and improve service? All while balancing the institution’s budget? You’re in good company, say leaders of firms specializing in higher education products and services. Institutions of all types and sizes are feeling the heat stoked by competition for top students and outstanding faculty. At Business Officer’s invitation, representatives of five firms recently offered their national—and sometimes international—perspectives on these key trends playing out on campuses today. They also cited creative solutions they’ve observed in working with college and university clients.
Beloit College Mindset List: "They've never 'rolled down' a car window."
This annual list is full of great stuff: Food has always been a health concern. Consumer awareness about ingredients and fats has always been energized. They’ve never “rolled down” a car window, and to them Jack Nicholson is mainly known as the guy who played “The Joker.”
As usual, they remind their elders how quickly time has passed. For them Pete Rose has never been in baseball. Abbie Hoffman’s always been dead. Johnny Carson has never been live on TV, and Nelson Mandela has always been free.
As for the Berlin Wall, what’s that?
The Changing Campus Scene - Built Environment News!
Hurricanes' Disruptions Kept 35,000 Students Out of College a Year Later, Report Says
This Chronicle of Higher Education article requires a subscription for access, however the report it is reporting on is available, from the Southern Education Foundation (SEF) here: Some 35,000 college and university students from Louisiana and Mississippi did not return to their campuses last fall, a year after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck, or enroll in other colleges, because their lives were still too disrupted by widespread damage and government neglect, according to a report released on Wednesday by the Southern Education Foundation.The report, "Education After Katrina: Time for a New Federal Response," found that nearly one out of every six students from public colleges and universities in Louisiana dropped out for the entire 2005-6 academic year after the hurricanes struck at the beginning of the fall semester, forcing the temporary closure of two dozen colleges and universities in the New Orleans area and five along Mississippi's Gulf Coast. For black students, the dropout rate in Louisiana was one out of five.
Avoid Costly Litigation and Settlements
Well, there may be a slight bit of hyperbolic attitude in this brief Greentree Gazette article, it nonetheless contains some useful things to keep in mind: Any higher education administrator who has not been involved in a lawsuit is unusually fortunate and will most likely sooner or later face major litigation. Although administrators make continuing efforts to protect the safety and health of campus community members, lawsuits are being filed daily.Legal compliance, employment, business, safety, environment, social and technological risks are fertile ground for litigation. Lawsuits drain money, time and energy from institutional teaching, research and public service missions. Claims paid drive up insurance premiums, and disputes resulting in out-of-court settlements are costly.
Trying to Remember 18
From the Confessions of a Community College Dean blog : All these years (ahem) later, it’s still hard to reconstruct just exactly what happened. I can rule out one of the usual suspects: I wasn’t partying my days and nights away. I discovered early on that I’m prone to hangovers of Biblical proportions (“and God said let there be Old Milwaukee, and there was a great weeping and gnashing of teeth...”), so that quickly kept the drinking within pretty strict limits. Drugs were out of the question. I even got a relatively decent amount of sleep, by college freshman standards. I didn’t join a cult or get into an obsessive relationship or generate unusual drama.
Where Do For-Profits Fit In?
Scott Jaschik has such an interesting job: At the beginning of their new book on for-profit higher education, William G. Tierney and Guilbert C. Hentschke talk about the academic division between “lumpers” and “splitters,” the former focused on examining different entities or phenomena as variations on a theme and the latter focused on classifying entities or phenomena as truly distinct. In New Players, Different Game: Understanding the Rise of For-Profit Colleges and Universities, just published by Johns Hopkins University Press, Tierney and Hentschke consider the ways for-profit colleges are part of or distinct from the rest of higher education. Tierney and Hentschke are professors at the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California, where Tierney is also director of the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis. They responded to questions via e-mail about their new book.
When Threats Are Like Spam
By Andy Guess from Inside Higher Ed: Are bomb threats a new fall rite of passage at colleges and universities? As classes began this week at many universities, some employees turned on their computers to find bomb threats sitting in their inboxes.
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At least seven universities had received threats between last Friday and Tuesday, including: - Carnegie Mellon University;
- Cornell University, where a threat e-mailed to a faculty member at the Johnson Graduate School of Management caused an evacuation;
- the University of Illinois at Chicago;
- Another university in the Southeast (unidentified, but not Duke or Emory) where the admissions office was fully evacuated.
Warnings Could Have Saved Lives at Virginia Tech, (External) Report Says
Rankings Help Community Colleges and Their Students
This article by Kevin Carey is in Inside Higher Ed and has a nice set of comments going: Last month, a woman from Seattle named Misty Wheeler told me a story of two community colleges. She went to the first college ten years ago, as a 19-year old freshman with dreams of becoming a writer. Unfortunately, it didn’t give her what she wanted, or needed. The English classes were dull and rote, and Misty soon dropped out without earning a degree. Jobs, marriage and children quickly followed, and her youthful aspirations began to fade. This kind of small educational tragedy occurs far too often in American higher education, for many reasons — poor high school preparation and inadequate financial aid among them. But one reason is rarely mentioned: a lack of community college rankings.
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The stakes here are high. Community college students are often first-generation, lower-income students who got a substandard high school education and who struggle to balance work, family, and career. Many stand at the precipice of social and economic opportunity. For them, the difference between a good two-year education and bad one can be the difference between one life and another. Community college rankings, incorporating surveys like CCSSE along with graduation and transfer rates, employment outcomes, and other measures, would help those students most of all. They’d be able to make better choices — perhaps looking beyond the nearest college to an institution more likely to help them succeed. Rankings would reward innovators and identify best practices for others to follow, providing strong external motivation for every college to stretch and improve. Given the importance of community colleges to the nation’s higher education system and long-term economic prosperity, the sooner we can create that kind of transparency and accountability, the better.
‘Confessions of a Spoilsport’: IOW, Not A Friend of Intercollegiate Sports
" In the interview that follows, he discusses his views on the place of sports in American society, the uncomfortable interaction of high-octane sports and high-powered academic standards, and the viability of faculty efforts to change college sports, among other things."
The Global State of Higher Education and the Rise of Private Finance
Cut and pasted from the home page of the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), and here is a press release about this publication.
The Global State of Higher Education and the Rise of Private Finance By Ryan Hahn
The Institute for Higher Education Policy’s Global Center on Private Financing of Higher Education (GCPF) released a report that explores the growing importance of private capital to nations where governments seek additional resources to share the rising per student costs and increasing enrollment rates. The report, The Global State of Higher Education and the Rise of Private Finance, also provides an overview of international good practices and lessons learned from individual countries where the business of tapping into private finance as a supplemental funding source has increased in the past two decades.
More >
A Model of Success: The Model of Institutions for Excellence Program's Successful Leadership in STEM Education
Cut and pasted from the home page of the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), and here is a press release about this publication. A Model of Success: The Model of Institutions for Excellence Program's Successful Leadership in STEM Education The Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) released a report that profiles an 11-year successful initiative supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to improve STEM enrollment and graduation rates at select minority-serving institutions (MSIs)—Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges and Universities. The report, A Model of Success: The Model Institutions for Excellence Program’s Successful Leadership in STEM Education, tracks the range of successful strategies utilized at the schools under the program called the Model Institutions for Excellence (MIE). More >
AAC&U Releases Three New Publications on Assessment
" Three new publications expand AAC&U’s portfolio of resources on student learning assessment. A Brief History of Student Learning Assessment offers an historical overview of testing in higher education and a proposal for future assessment that builds on the current Collegiate Learning Assessment, while Assessment in Cycles of Improvement chronicles how faculty at individual schools foster and assess student learning in essential liberal education outcome areas. Articles in the latest issue of Peer Review also address a variety of approaches to assessing the advanced learning outcomes derived from specific practices like internships, student research programs, capstone courses, and community placements. See all AAC&U assessment resources."
Colleges Stress Moral Leadership
This article from the Christian Science Monitor describes a consortium formed by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) "to share experiences as they work to foster five key components of 'educating students for personal and social responsibility': striving for excellence; personal and academic integrity; contributing to a larger community; taking seriously the perspectives of others; and ethical and moral reasoning." The article specifically mentions work at William Jewell College, Duke University, Carnegie Mellon University, and also refers to the annual survey by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) which showed 67 percent of the entering class of 2010 last year chose "the importance of helping others" as a high priority.
Virginia Tech Probe Finds No Fault in Massacre Response
CNN reports that an internal Virginia Tech review has recommendations for improving security but finds no blame among university staff for the events on the day of the massacre earlier this year. An independent group headed by former Virginia Governor Tim Kaine will release its own report soon. Virginia Tech's own coverage of the report can be read here, and the full report can be downloaded here (PDF). The report was requested by Virginia Tech President Charles Steger. It was released Wednesday and includes reviews of the university's security systems, communications and counseling services that dealt with at-risk students. It recommends many improvements -- ranging from locks on classroom doors to overhauling the campus communications system -- but doesn't fault any university or police officials for the way they handled the massacre.
Thought-Provoking Excerpts From a Government Report
Two -- Count 'Em, Two -- (LEED) Platinum Buildings at Ithaca College
This article by Scott Carlson is from the Chronicle's "Building & Grounds" blog: [There are] two new green structures now under construction at Ithaca College, both situated at the front of the campus. Interestingly, the buildings are not associated with the environmental-studies program or the biology program. The glassy building, designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects, is for the business school and will cost $18-million. The other green building, for which there is only space cleared at the moment, is an administration building by HOLT Architects that will cost $21-million.
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The materials in the business building might be conventional, but their arrangement is not. “There are so many things to learn,” said Dave Geiger, the foreman for one of the contractors working on the building. “I’ve been in the business for 40 years and I’ve never put insulation on the outside of a building before. But it makes sense.” “When I first heard this project was going to be LEED platinum, I was a little scared” of the paperwork and certification involved, said Sean Cahill, the project manager for the Gilbane Building Company. But now he is visibly excited about working on the building. “This is going to be a signature project for the college.”
This article by Lawrence Biemiller is in the Chronicle's "Building & Grounds" blog. Many SCUPers are involved in this project with ACUHO-I: Ideas for the dorm room of the future fill a new book from the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International, which is in the midst of a three-part competition to design a model residence hall for the 21st century. The book is based on the first stage of the competition, which sought suggestions just for individual dorm rooms. Eight finalists presented their ideas at a conference in Phoenix earlier this year (The Chronicle, February 23), and their submissions are fully described in the new volume — including that of Jonathan Levi Architects, of Boston, which a jury chose as winner of the competition’s first stage.
Despite Booming Growth, Chinese Universities Find Themselves Buried in Debt
This article by Pail Mooney of the Chronicle: The survey, of 76 colleges and universities affiliated with the Ministry of Education, showed that the institutions were heavily reliant on bank loans and government funds, the official China Daily reported on Wednesday, quoting a report in the Chinese-language 21st-Century Business Herald. The university's survey also found that the 76 institutions of higher education had a total income of $8.14-billion in 2005, the bulk of which came from government funds and tuition. That same year, debt was about $4.17-billion, or an average of $54.8-million per institution. The report said that the government was the main source of funds for universities, providing more than 49 percent of their income.
Student Persistence: Who's in and Who's Out?
A report from Elia Powers of Inside Higher Ed: Among the main themes to emerge from meetings of the Education Secretary’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education: whether students — and not just the so-called “traditional” ones — are making sufficient progress toward a degree. A new report from the National Center for Education Statistics, the federal entity that collects data for the Department of Education, provides a first glimpse at what type of progress recent students are making.
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Roughly one-third of the members of the entire cohort had no degree and were no longer enrolled after the three-year period. More than half of students who entered a two-year for-profit had left academe without a degree, compared to 45 percent of students at a two-year public and 40 percent of those at a two-year private nonprofit institution. “What we’re showing here is that a strong majority of students are retained somewhere, which is very different than what you hear sometimes,” said Lutz Berkner, one of the report’s authors and a senior research associate at MPR Associates, an education research and consulting firm.
Urban Community Colleges: UCLA Community College Bibliography
This item is an annotated bibliography by Amy Liu published in Volume 31, Issue 8 (August 2007) of the Community College Journal of Research and Practice. Subscription to the journal or a set of subscriptions may be required for access. The following references provide an overview of recent scholarship concerning students, faculty, and curriculum at urban community colleges. Organizational and institutional studies of urban community colleges are also included in this bibliography. The research below addresses important issues of student retention, faculty turnover, academic success, and minority populations. Urban community colleges provide higher education opportunities for significant numbers of students and, therefore, it is important to better understand their mission as well as to assess the effectiveness of programs offered. The citations below provide an ideal starting point for further personalized research on urban community colleges.
Outsourcing Student Housing in American Community Colleges: Problems and Prospects
This article, by Gray Bekuers of the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, is published in Volume 31, Issue 8 of the Community College Journal of Research and Practice (August 2007). You may or may not have access, depending upon your own or your employer's subscription to this and other journals. Here is the abstract:Today's community colleges are experiencing tremendous growth at a time when higher education is experiencing little success in the fierce battle for public funding. Administrators believe that providing housing on college campuses increases enrollment and improves access, but they are having difficulty meeting students' demands for both quantity and quality of student housing. Community college leaders are challenged to find alternative ways to achieve new housing on their campuses. With resources already stretched, institutions sometimes struggle to find funding sources for these projects due to their impact on institutional debt service. Many colleges are turning to private foundations and corporations for their financing, construction, and management needs. This practice has increased dramatically over the past 10 years. To date, there have been over 214 privatized, nonrecourse-financed student housing projects on college and university campuses in the United States, with at least 11 occurring on community college campuses. Due to increasing demand, privatization of student housing is likely to increase. Very little literature exists addressing the evolution, problems, and potential of this practice, but administrators may need to have an understanding of the process as it becomes more commonplace on community college campuses. Interviews with community college administrators, student housing administrators, and representatives of private development and management corporations and a literature review were conducted. The results are synthesized into a history and overview of outsourcing student housing construction and management in the United States, including problems with outsourcing, strategies to avoid failure, future possibilities, and recommendations for future research. Labels: community colleges, dormitories, outsourcing, residence halls, student housing
Off the Quad: When Managing Space, Who Goes?
In this wide-ranging article for Inside Higher Ed, Elia Powers starts with the coming move of much of Stanford's business affairs division's planned move off-site, during the coming year, and engages a number of experts in discussion of the considerations to be made when making such decisions. Among those interviewed are SCUPers Ira Fink of Ira Fink & Associates, Dan Paulien of Paulien & Associates, Margaret Dyer-Chamberlain of Stanford, Connie Carlson of Wake Forest, and Rick Perales of the University of Dayton. Some of the comments to this article are quite interesting: "[M]any individuals who work for universities do so, often with less remuneration, because of the mission . . . [e]mployees who feel they’re being exiled to an office park will also ask why they’re working for a university when they might be able to work in another office park and get paid more." "I don’t care what your duties entail — you have to be a part of a university to know how to serve your students and work in the best interest of that school." "The physical environment of any college or university is intricately interwoven, and it sounds like campus planners have their work cut out for them in determining which offices are functionally viable when cut out, lifted, and pasted at a distance." "[P]robably better off moving these people off campus rather than asking whether the university really needs them." "Let’s just hope we don’t all end up in FEMA trailers."
Many Good Things in v30n3 of EDUCAUSE Quarterly
Market v. Meaning: Starchitecture Clash of Rem Koolhaas and Peter Eisenman
This article by Giancarlo La Giorga includes quite a few very nice images in addition to stimulating dialogue: On June 10, internationally renowned architects Rem Koolhaas and Peter Eisenman shared their often-conflicting opinions on what they consider to be the most pressing issue in architecture today, during a discussion entitled "Urgency" at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montréal.
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"It is not always clear whether we are using our position to engage in an intellectual discourse or an incredible ego free-for-all. Unfortunately, we have not been able to provide any dignity to the profession due to our complete technical inability to conquer market pressures and our willingness to be totally manipulated," [Koolhaus] said. Eisenman said: "We are in the rococo phase of modern architecture. The consummate rococo figure is Santiago Calatrava, whose work people like, in the same way they like Gothic architecture, because it's sweet and you don't have to think about it. You see it once and go 'Wow!' Of course, we know that not much happened in 300 years of Gothic architecture. It was always the same 'Wow!' However, I personally resent, for example, two billion dollars being spent on a subway station in New York City that looks like a bird. I have no idea why a subway station should either look like a bird or cost two billion dollars."
Vedanta University (India) Slide Show of Campus Planning
The new university, near the Bay of Bengal, would occupy 7,500+ acres. This brief slide show shares some geographical images, as well as images of the campus plan, including the initial notes on what looks like a paper bag, a napkin, or part of a paper tablecloth.
News Briefs on New Buildings
Scott Carlson has filed a brief post with links to news about four new campus-based buildings around the US. They include a health and gerontological studies building at Western Carolina University, a new health sciences building at Shasta College, plans for a band building at the University of Florida, and Kenyon College's restoration of an historic building used as a dining hall.
Are You Prepared for the 2007 Hurricane Season and Other Potential Crises?
This brief item by Florence Kizza in The Greentree Gazette, discusses information from Lynn University, NACUBO, and SCUP about preparedness and response to disaster. A related item in the same magazine is an interview with Casey Green, of the Campus Computing Project, regarding IT crisis management activities: Actually, IT crisis management activities have stalled. While upwards of two-thirds of campuses have IT disaster plans, the percentage reporting strategic IT disaster plans barely increased between fall 2002 and fall 2005. No doubt the Katrina experience will be a catalyst for many institutions to either update their current plans or finish the initial ones. The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Wired Campus" blog also has a brief item with several links on a very recent statewide security and technology meeting of college and university officials in Virginia. SCUP has a Web document, Crisis & Disaster Management Planning for Higher Education, dedicated to links to places and resources that can be of assistance. Among other items, it links to the monograph cited in the Kizza item. That monograph is Lessons From the Front: The Presidential Role in Disaster Planning and Response (PDF).
Assessment From the Ground Up
Donna Engelmann writes about her experience at Alverno College, which has an outcomes-based, developmental curriculum that integrates assessment throughout. In an article in the Association of American Colleges and Universities' Peer Review, "Can Assessment for Accountability Complement Assessment for Improvement?" Trudy Banta observed that across the country "some faculty in virtually every institution" are trying out the assessment of learning outcomes for their potential for improving student learning. She recommends that we should look very carefully at the validity and reliability of standardized tests before we adopt them wholesale. If we must compare student performance across institutions, in those cases where institutions share learning goals, comparing student performance in relation to common rubrics would give much richer and more relevant evidence of what students are learning than standardized tests. Accountability for results is not inconsistent with assessing to promote student learning, but promoting student learning should always come first. Banta hopes, as I do, that calls for assessment for accountability — what I have called "trickle down assessment" — will not stifle this movement for assessing from the ground up.
15 "Green" This, and 15 "Green" That
Time Magazine's 2007 "Back to School" Supplement
This issue has a Web feature with 10 different timely articles, many of which are of interest to SCUP's constituency: Mental Health
Can We Avoid Another Virginia Tech?
After Virginia Tech, there's still a lot of confusion when it comes to when and how schools can share information about a troubled student. But the best policy seems to be responding to early warning signs
Vice
The Newest Addictions on Campus
Health officials are seeing increases in students' abuse of caffeine and video-game playing. But are they dangerous conditions or simply irresponsible habits?
Activism
A Student Backlash Against Coke
Coca-Cola has been kicked off more than 20 college campuses for alleged labor and environmental abuses. Can the company win back student consumers?
Going Global
Luring Students Overseas
A new bill might help more college students study abroad, and in more unconventional locales
Safe Sex
Birth Control Prices Soar on Campus
Many female college students are coming back to campus to find their birth control prices have tripled or quadrupled, and health providers are worried they'll give up on prescription contraceptives altogether
Financial Aid
Navigating the Murky World of Student Loans
Amid widespread misconduct in the student-loan industry, college kids are learning about private lending the hard way
Environment
Getting Schools to Think and Act Green
Sustainability has become a buzz word on college campuses, with more research, courses and projects devoted to environmental issues
Politics
The Return of SDS on Campus
Students for a Democratic Society — or at least a group who has claimed the name of the 1960s' New Left organization — is back and still wants to take on "the system"
Q&A
Virginia Tech's Suzanne Higgs
Higgs, a rising junior and journalism major at Virginia Tech, participated in producing the upcoming book, April 16: Virginia Tech Remembers
Photo Essay
Foam Heads of Fury
A gallery of the nation's most eccentric college mascots
An Anthropologist in the Library: The U. of Rochester Takes a Close Look at Students in the Stacks
This excellent article by Scott Carlson, in the Chronicle, may require subscription, a Web pass, and/or registration for access: "This has forced us all to abandon our preconceptions of what college is like now," says Susan Gibbons, an associate dean at Rochester's library who helped lead the study, which has gained some attention from institutions around the world. Other libraries, including ones as near as Syracuse University and as far away as the University of Queensland, in Australia, are considering hiring anthropologists to conduct similar studies. When Ms. Foster, Ms. Gibbons, and other librarians set out to study undergraduates, they came up with a guiding question for their research: "What happens when a professor assigns a paper to a student?" "It's a black box, and we wanted to look into that box," Ms. Gibbons says. "Beyond that we had no agenda." Armed with munchies and $5 bills as enticements, they went out to find students who would tell them about life as an undergrad.
A Calculated Gamble Pays Off: Villa Julie College Bets $101-Million of Debt on its Future
Audry Williams June write in the Chronicle about how Villa Julie College (Baltimore) did more than just some branding work. Requires subscription and registration for access: Three years and a total of $101-million in debt later, those apartments and three more residence halls with room for another 606 students now sit on Villa Julie's second campus. Known as Villa Julie College-Owings Mills, the 80-acre site also features a community center, a dining hall, a two-story academic building that houses the School of Graduate and Professional Studies and several administrative offices, and a sports-and-wellness center fashioned from what used to be a practice facility for the NFL's Baltimore Ravens. The college's experience shows how carefully calculated debt can leverage quick institutional change and enrollment growth. Villa Julie's approach to growing its student body "is a strategy that a lot of colleges employ," says Michael K. Townsley, a former college chief financial officer turned consultant, who helps colleges develop financial strategies. "You can use the revenue stream from the housing to pay the debt service, and then you can pick up extra revenue from tuition."
Cooperation Between Business, Higher Ed Sectors Can Help Keep America Competitive
"Colleges and universities should look to the business community for answers and inspiration as they strive to meet America’s needs in this global economy. That’s what a panel of four experts told state legislators and legislative staffs today at the opening session of the National Conference of State Legislatures’ 2007 Legislative Summit" on August 6. The Web report includes video clips of the panelists, "Hank Brown, president of the University of Colorado; Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education; and Phyllis Eisen, a senior vice president at the National Association of Manufacturers. Jim Hunt, former governor of North Carolina, moderated the session, The Big Squeeze: The Challenges to Higher Education."
State Budgets Fall on Hard Times, Possibly Imperiling Spending on Higher Education
A note in the Chronicle blog:
The economic upswing that most states have been enjoying since 2005 appears to have come to an end across much of the United States, according to a report being released this week by the National Conference of State Legislatures, and that trend could herald declines in state spending on higher education. After experiencing improvements in their finances at the end of the 2005 and 2006 fiscal years, a majority of states saw their fiscal conditions decline over the 2007 fiscal year, which ended on June 30 in most states, the report says.
Merger Talks Resume Between NYU and Polytechnic U.
Why Differences in Community Colleges Matter
Scott Jaschik examines some of what's being learned about the differences between community colleges, including some description of the new Carnegie Classification's subcategories: A new Education Department analysis of two-year colleges confirms widely held beliefs about them, such as that they enroll many low-income, part-time students and that their student bodies are diverse. But the analysis — by examining different groups of two-year colleges (including those in the for-profit sector) — also finds that there are significant differences within the two-year sector, and that these differences result in different demographics, faculty characteristics, enrollment goals and graduation rates. The analysis arrives at a time of increased interest among some educators, foundation and government officials in using more subtlety and sophistication in looking at community colleges, which have too frequently in the past been assumed to all be similar and to be defined by a single characteristic of not awarding bachelor’s degrees.
In Study Abroad, Gifts and Money for Universities
This article is by Shea Roggio for The New York Times. Registration may be required for access. As overseas study has become a prized credential of the undergraduate experience, a competitive, even cutthroat, industry has emerged, with an army of vendors vying for student money and universities moving to profit from the boom. At many campuses, study abroad programs are run by multiple companies and nonprofit institutes that offer colleges generous perks to sign up students: free and subsidized travel overseas for officials, back-office services to defray operating expenses, stipends to market the programs to students, unpaid membership on advisory councils and boards, and even cash bonuses and commissions on student-paid fees. This money generally goes directly to colleges, not always to the students who take the trips.
Faculty Innovation Center: Resources
Copyright 2007 Internet Scout Project - http://scout.wisc.edu http://www.fic.engr.utexas.edu/resources/index.cfm The University of Texas’s College of Engineering is committed to continual improvement of their undergraduate curriculum and they have created the Faculty Innovation Center in part to work on this process. Along with the work they do in the classrooms at the University of Texas, they also provide a number of tremendously useful online materials that are relevant to both those involved in engineering education and those who teach all manner of college courses. These resources are divided into several sections here, including “Teaching and Learning”, “Teaching with Technology”, and “Distance Learning”. All told, there are over eighty resources here, including a worksheet on developing effective lectures, a “best practices” overview for videoconferencing, and a guide to using student feedback. [KMG]
The Public Voices of Private College Presidents
Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, and a friend of SCUP, writes recently in University Business about private college presidents taking stronger leadership roles in their communities and regions: Presidential leadership is often a matter of making discrete decisions that anticipate a future in which the institution will thrive. Sometimes that means offerring a spirited defense of the college's historic values, and sometimes it means pursuing entirely new directions. Officials at Hillsdale College (Mich.), for example, believe so deeply that the government should not meddle in higher education that they have not accepted federal funds for many years. More recently, several dozen college presidents have come to believe so strongly that U.S. News & World Report measures the wrong things that they have decided not to participate in the annual "reputational" rankings.
Universities for the Civically Engaged
James Martin and James S. Samels write, in University Business, about "the new town/gown gestalt": Consider Clark University in Worcester, Mass., the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. These exemplary urban institutions have led the way in tearing down walls, welcoming the community on campus, and leveraging the academic enterprise to work for the betterment of their host communities. The results of their noble efforts are palpable: engaged students, committed faculty, stronger communities, better prepared applicants, and safer local streets. Whatever you call it-an urban renaissance, town/gown collaboration, or self-preservation-it comes down to committed institutions stepping up to address the failure of private, governmental, and nonprofit sectors to establish two-way bridges between campuses and community.
Undergraduate Research Grows Up
In University Business, Julie Sturgeon writes about science facility upgrades, and new facilities. The article includes mini-case studies from Dominican University, Murray State University, Clark Univrsity, Florida International University, and the University of Oklahoma: SCIENCE PROFESSORS BEGAN shifting their classroom curricula in the early 1990s. Turns out, studies showed that they could attract more students to their disciplines if the kids were allowed to get their hands on the good stuff. Participating in research as early as freshman year-and we're talking not talking about dissecting a frog-fosters a contagious excitement. Ricky Cox, a biomedical chemist at Murray State University (Ky.), invites his undergraduates to help him in the lab, and as a result, one girl recently graduated with five publication credits to her name. Who couldn't use a slice of prestige just like that?
Reporter's Notebook: Higher Education Meets International Development
Beth McMurtrie writes, in the Chronicle: (Requires a subscription or purchase of a Web pass for access.) Much of this year's Higher Education for Development conference, which wraps up its annual meeting here today, has revolved around people explaining what they have done to promote social and economic development around the globe. That, after all, is the purpose of the group, which provides short-term grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development to projects run jointly by universities in America and abroad.
But while the theme was predictable, the range of examples was not. In Qatar, where the government is heavily promoting improvements in higher education, a university is building a journalism program to create an informed citizenry. In Ethiopia, where the government has had an adversarial relationship with the press, a university is creating a journalism program despite a lack of government support.
The Overworked College Administrator
"Professors complain about growing workloads and often blame campus managers. But we’re drowning, too, writes Barbara Mainwaring": As an administrative director at a small East Coast university, I spend my days performing meaningful, challenging work. Yet, like many other college administrators, even those at institutions with more than enough financial resources to hire adequate staff, I struggle daily with an impossible workload. Why this should be so, I’m not exactly sure, and I am unlikely to find out. At the college where I work, it’s verboten to bring up the subject with our supervisors, as damaging as it would be at a high-powered law firm where one was trying to make partner.
The Community College Role in Developing Countries
Elia Powers, shares some information in Inside Higher Ed, about community college activities in Namibia, South Africa, Vietnam, all involving US-based institutional outreach: During the second day of an international higher education conference co-sponsored by U.S. AID and Higher Education Development, which helps coordinate partnerships between American and international academics, several speakers explained how their collaborative projects (made possible by the U.S. AID grants) helped create better academic environments in the developing countries.
State U. of New York's Campus Is Modernist From End to Distant End
Another nice article by the Chronicle's Lawrence Biemiller. Accessing the article may require registration, however viewing and listening to the 4-minute narrated slide show does not: Fans of Modernist architecture can’t help but be wowed by the expansive campus that Edward Durell Stone designed for the State University of New York at Albany in the early 1960s. Stone chose a vaguely Islamic, vaguely Mediterranean style that features sleek columns, elegant arches, and vistas that never seem to end — in part because the main block of academic buildings is more than five football fields long. Tip of the hat to SCUPer, and former SCUP staffer, Mendi Spencer.
News and Notes About LEED Buildings
In this brief item, Scott Carlson reports on LEED-certified building developments at five different institutions, with links to additional information about each one.
Sustainability: How to Pay for It
Scott Carlson reports on a conference session featuring creative ways for community colleges to find dollars to fund sustainability initiatives: Most community colleges depend on local or state governments for money, and so those colleges should inform local officials about what they are doing in sustainability. And if a college gets a lawmaker on board and gets money for a sustainability project, organizers of the conference said, the college should be sure to bring the lawmaker to the photo op to share any glory. But colleges have to think beyond support from local governments. “You have to think about being entrepreneurial,” said Peter Bardaglio, a former provost at Ithaca College who is now a senior fellow at Second Nature, a group promoting sustainability in higher education.
EcoVillage at Othacas: What If Your Campus Housing Looked Like This?
Scott Carlson describes (nice photos) Ithaca's version of an "intentional community," one of the best known of its type. The village was a tour available to those attending the Sustainability for Community Colleges: Curriculum, Culture, Conservation conference: The EcoVillage stands on 175 acres that were originally slated for bland, suburban housing. Ninety percent of the land would have been taken up by houses, and 10 percent would have been left green. When the EcoVillagers got their hands on the land, they turned those figures around. Ten percent would be taken up by development, and the rest left alone. Car parking is on the perimeter of the development, leaving the areas between and around the houses open for pedestrians and playing kids. Much of the open land could be used for agriculture; there are two organic farms on the site, and the villagers would like to have more.
Affirming Professors’ Role or Denigrating It?
Scott Jaschik writes this article about Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's current situation regarding faculty governance and the relationship of contingent faculty to the university. The comments section following this article is quite extensive: But the e-mail flying at RPI Tuesday wasn’t full of praise. That’s because the governance reform is viewed by some professors as nothing more than an attempt to abolish a Faculty Senate that this year decided — against the wishes of the administration — to grant voting rights to “clinical” faculty members (RPI’s term for full-time, non-tenure track faculty members who focus almost entirely on teaching). The announcement of the governance reform said that the RPI board had decided that governance must be restricted to tenured and tenure-track faculty members. To drive home the point, the board said that during the period in which governance is being changed, the recently elected Faculty Senate and its committees would not have power because they were elected in votes that included the non-tenure-track professors. Instead, key committees from the prior year — before the Faculty Senate had expanded the franchise — would continue.
A Different Type of Sustainability
Report Card: Collecting and Reporting Institutional Data
"Collecting data is crucial, but so is an efficient system for putting that data to use." Elizabeth Millard, reporting in this article on issues and circumstances at several institutions, writes that creating "accurate, consistent reports is affecting every institution." [A] database is only as good as the reports that can be drawn from it. After all, there's utility in compiling information like the age of all professors, but there's even more in using that data to predict retirement so that new hiring drives can be started early.
As databases get more complex and departments begin building their own as well as relying on centralized databases, reporting functions also become more multilayered, with challenges all their own. Some colleges and universities are attempting to equip departments with their own database applications to take the pressure off IT, while others prefer to hire more reporting specialists to do technology support and respond to requests.
Either way, the issue of how to create accurate, consistent reports is affecting every institution of higher ed and driving the need for stronger reporting and more oversight of the reporting process.
Wanted: Foreign Students
"The good news: Foreign enrollments at American universities are on the rise. The bad news: Competition for international students if fiercer than ever." In this article, Ron Schachter comprehensively reviews the changes in issues raised regarding US institutions' recruiting and matriculating of students from other countries since 9/11. The annual Open Doors survey of 2,700 American higher education institutions by the Institute of International Education in Washington, D.C., tells a different story. IIE reports that in 2003-2004, foreign enrollment nationwide dropped by 2.4 percent and by another 1.3 percent the following year before leveling off in 2005-2006 (the most recent year for which IIE has national data) to almost 565,000, a total decline of almost 22,000.
What's more, before the events of 9/11 raised the requirements for F1 visas and the anxieties of foreign students considering a U.S. education, American schools could count on at least a 5 percent annual increase. "We had experienced nonstop growth," recalls Bruce Rindler, associate director of Boston University's CELOP. "We were doing very little marketing and were seeing more and more students coming to us."
And while many schools say they are again building their foreign enrollments-a statement backed up by the Open Doors report, which showed an 8 percent increase in new students for 2005-2006-they are facing greater challenges than ever before in attracting students. In another recent IIE study of 1,000 member institutions of higher ed, more than half indicated they have increased their recruitment efforts at a time when universities in Europe, China, and a host of English-speaking countries are doing the same. The Open Doors Survey can be found here.
Private Colleges Aggressively Reducing Tuition Costs
This is a brief listing of several different kinds of institutional tactics to keep private institutions accessible.
New Book: The University In Chains?
In this article, Scott Jaschink interviews Henry A. Giroux, the Canadian author of the new book, The Unversity in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex. I began with Eisenhower’s speech in the book in order to underscore that at least historically there was a deep concern about the autonomy of the university and the necessity for it to have some remove from the influence of military and corporate power. Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial-academic complex strikes me as more worrisome today than when it was delivered in 1961. While some critics might believe that higher education is a hotbed of left-wing radicalism and that college campuses are “intellectually akin to North Korea,” as the notable syndicated columnist George Will once quipped, the fact is that the greatest threat faced by higher education is its annexation by the military-industrial complex and its attack by a well funded group of right wing ideologues and foundations, the result being a fundamental change in the university’s relationship with the larger society that necessarily signals a crisis in democracy and the critical educational foundation upon which it rests.
House Panel Quizzes Universities on Value of Overseas Ventures
In this article, Goldie Blumenstyk reports that congressional "[l]awmakers [are questioning] whether university ventures, all of which are indirectly or directly subsidized by taxpayers, might be undermining America's economic competitiveness by helping other countries develop better scientific and technological work forces." Article may require registration for a ccess.
Dissecting "Why Accreditation Doesn't Work and What Policy Makers Can Do About It"
Alan Contreras, in this point of view (may require registration for access), pokes around in the American Council of Trustees and Alumni's recent report and finds that "[s]ome of what it contains is a helpful commentary on what doesn't work well in the accreditation process. But some is irrelevant or misinformed." Many states don't require that colleges earn accreditation. In California, for instance, you do not even need to have attended an accredited institution to be licensed as a lawyer or psychologist. As of 2006, California had 179 unaccredited secular institutions that granted degrees; the estimated 250 religious colleges in the state are on top of that. Florida, as another example, had 35 unaccredited, secular degree-granting institutions in 2007.
The worst are the so-called Seven Sorry Sisters, the states with such awful oversight of college quality that they are considered havens for diploma mills. The actual number in the group varies, depending on which states have the worst standards or oversight at a given time; the current Sisters are Alabama, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Mississippi, New Mexico, and either Missouri or Wyoming, depending on which way the political winds blow at the moment. Indeed, in several of those states, operators of substandard colleges are major political players whose goal is to make sure that the states never have genuine, enforceable standards.
Educators Hope New Accreditation Standards Will Improve Higher Education in Central America's Poorest Countries
This article may require registration for access.But a decade of forums, fund raising, debate, and hard work, led by leaders at Central America's 18 public universities, may soon pay off. A regional organization called the Central American System for the Evaluation and Accreditation of Higher Education, which has been in the works for nearly a decade, now oversees a number of new, specialized regional accreditation groups.
In addition, the Central American System is responsible for monitoring national accreditation agencies in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Panama to ensure that they keep to the same high standards as the new regional agencies. The organization is also working with countries like Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua to help them set up their own national accreditation programs.
Independent observers are encouraged by the push toward regional accreditation and hope it will benefit Central America's more than 700,000 university students as they seek advanced degrees and work beyond their home country.
Worldwide, Financing for Higher Education Is Increasingly Shifting From Public to Private Sources
The title says it all. This article is a report by Burton Bollag of The Chronicle for Higher Education. He writes (requires subscription and registration for access): The shift toward private financing has been driven by rapidly growing enrollments in almost all countries in the world. This has been caused in part by expansion of public school systems, resulting in growing numbers of young people graduating from high school. The other factor is economic: the growth of a global, "knowledge" economy that increasingly requires employees with a college education.
Those trends are all clearly visible in three of the world's largest countries. In China college enrollments more than doubled between 1998 and 2004. That expansion followed the introduction of tuition at Chinese institutions. By one estimate, from 1990 to 2001, the share of public financing in Chinese higher education dropped from 99 percent to 55 percent. India and Indonesia experienced similar developments. Together, those three Asian giants account for 41 percent of the world population. The report on which the article is based, from the Institute for Higher Education Policy, is titled, "The Global State of Higher Education and the Rise of Private Finance," and can be downloaded in full (no fee) here.
How to Pursue Sustainability at Community Colleges
In this article, "Mary F.T. Spilde, of Lane Community College, in Oregon, and Kathleen Schatzberg, of Cape Cod Community College, said underfunded commuter campuses can use cooperation, ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and good old grit to make progress in energy efficiency, recycling, water conservation, and other environmental programs."
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