Risk Management in Higher Education

This Chronicle blog post by Eric Kelderman briefly describes some of the concurrent session content from the University Rick Management and Insurance Association's (URMIA) annual conference.

Colleges are increasingly using sophisticated accounting procedures to measure risks on campus, from football games to foreign travel by students and faculty.

But Pennsylvania State University took a decidedly low-tech approach to deciding what the greatest threats to its campus were, said Gary W. Langsdale, the Nittany Lions’ director of risk management. A team of administrators, drawn from various business and academic departments, identified 109 top concerns, wrote them on sticky notes, considered each of them for 60 seconds and then placed them on a big sheet of butcher paper where an ad hoc Cartesian graph represented the probability and severity of the risks.