House Passes Stimulus Bill; Now for the Great Senate Debate

The Christian Science Monitor, which by the way is now a Web-only newspaper, often does a good job of covering issues in ways that other periodicals might not, so we often look for information there. This article by Gail Russell Chaddock takes a look at the forhtcoming Senate debate:

With the biggest spending bill in American history on the line, the US Senate is gearing up for a debate for the ages.

With Republicans at 41 in the 100-member Senate – precisely the number they need to block legislation with a filibuster – Democrats could muscle the bill over the line by breaking off just one or two Republican votes.

Instead, President Obama is putting on a full-court press for a bigger, bipartisan vote to signal change in Washington. That means a more open process, including a full debate.

“I hope I communicated a sincere desire to get good ideas from everybody,” said Mr. Obama, after meeting separately with House and Senate Republicans on Tuesday.

“My attitude is, this is the first major piece of legislation we’ve worked on and that over time, some of these habits of consultation and mutual respect will take over, but old habits die hard.”

In contrast to the House, where Republicans complain that the $819 billion economic recovery package has been drafted without their input, the Senate is ramping up for a more open process. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed on Wednesday by a vote of 244 to 188, with no Republican support. Eight Democrats voted with 177 Republicans to oppose the bill.

The Hope of Audacity: Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell's got a new book out, Outliers. It's about nature/nurture, among other things, and you can read a review of it in Salon here. Okay, so this really doesn't have much to do with the stimulus package, but it's interesting. Some critics are being a little more aggressive about this book than they have been in the past. We know that when he's presented to SCUP audiences, he's been well received, so we thought we'd share this positive essay about Gladwell, by Rachel Toor, in Inside Higher Ed:

Gladwell is also accused of being too entertaining. He takes creaky academic work and breathes Frankensteinian life into it. He weaves anecdotes together, creating a tapestry that builds to an argument that seems convincing. This, some reviewers have claimed, is like perpetuating fraud on the (non-academic) reading public: because Gladwell makes it so much fun to follow him on his intellectual journey, he’s going to convince people of things that aren’t provably, academically true. He will lull the hoi polloi into thinking they’re reading something serious.

Which is, of course, the most common complaint about Gladwell: He’s not serious enough. He’s having too much fun playing with his ideas. And, really, you can’t be Serious when you’re raking in so much coin. Anyone who gets paid four million bucks for a book that mines academic work — and not necessarily the stuff that is agreed to be Important — is going to become a target. His speaking fees are beyond the budgets of most colleges. In this way, his career is now similar to that of David Sedaris, who can command an impressive audience and still be dissed by the literary folks. Everyone who’s anyone knows that you can’t sell a lot of books and be a serious writer. Just ask Jonathan Franzen. Or Toni Morrison.

Stimulus Plan Would Provide Flood of Aid to Education

Sam Dillon wrote this article for The New York Times, which also has a special "Times Topics" Web section on the stimulus package.

The economic stimulus plan that Congress has scheduled for a vote on Wednesday would shower the nation’s school districts, child care centers and university campuses with $150 billion in new federal spending, a vast two-year investment that would more than double the Department of Education’s current budget.

The proposed emergency expenditures on nearly every realm of education, including school renovation, special education, Head Start and grants to needy college students, would amount to the largest increase in federal aid since Washington began to spend significantly on education after World War II.

HR1 - The Stimulus Package - Download the Whole Thing

You can download a PDF of the House Bill 1 (the stimulus package) here (PDF). The higher education portion begins on page 180 and is section 9302, "Higher Education Modernization, Renovation, and Repair."

Clearinghouse Website: Federal Funding Stimulus for School Facilities

SCUPer Judy Marks, who is the associate director of the National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities (NCEF), made a point of letting us know about that organizations newest addition to its vast collection of educational facilities-related annotated bibliographies:

The National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities has just added a new webpage, Federal Funding Stimulus for School Facilities, to the NCEF website.

The first webpage section, "Status of the School Funding Stimulus," describes the school-related elements of the January 15th draft House bill. This section will be continually updated as the house and senate bills proceed through Congress.

The second section, "What You Can Do Now," provides advice on the most effective way of spending the stimulus funds. We will be adding much more to this section over the next week.

There are four additional sections, "Funding Stimulus News," "Related Events," "Recent Journal Articles," and "Related NCEF Resource Lists." We will continually add information to these.

Anticipating Stimulus Money for Campus Projects, Colleges Get 'Shovel Ready'

Scott Carlson, of The Chronicle of Higher Education, recently wrote a must-read article about the stimulus package, and he's arranged for SCUPers to have an unprotected link to read it. Thanks, Scott.

The billions of dollars in the bill before Congress would be distributed through the Department of Energy and through state higher-education agencies, in the form of grants and loans. Of the $7-billion, at least $2.5-billion would go toward energy-efficiency projects certified by programs like Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED. (The legislation also includes $500-million for training in green jobs.)

In awarding the money to institutions, the bill's language specifies, state higher-education agencies should give preference to colleges that serve large numbers of minority students, have been hit by a natural disaster, or are planning energy-efficiency projects. The money should not go to new construction, sports facilities, or facilities used for religious worship or divinity schools.

The language or the amounts in the bill could change as Congress debates the stimulus measure, which legislators are expected to make final within the next few weeks. For now, colleges are preparing lists of projects that are "shovel ready," should the money roll down from Washington. The bill includes "use it or lose it" requirements: At least half of the money would have to be spent within a year of the measure's being enacted, and the rest within two years.

The Big Picture: Gazing Into Higher Ed's Crystal Ball for 2009

This broad-ranging article by Amy Milshtein in College Planning & Management magazine addresses some pertinent facilities and capital budgeting trends, but goes wider than that, to curriculum, food, IT, safety, and more. Definitely worth a read.

2008 was quite a roller coaster. From an historic election to a worldwide financial crisis to yet even more technological advances, everyone, including today’s students and their parents, has been on a wild ride. How can colleges and universities cope and compete in the uncertain months ahead? College Planning & Management asked some experts to gaze into their crystal balls and find some answers.

“Not every college will be impacted in the same way . . . . [s]chool budgets that are profoundly tuition-based are very vulnerable. But even endowments are shrinking. They may not be the usual three to five times the annual budget.”

This lack of liquidity has schools making strategic budget decisions and yes, some cuts. “We have a major building project underway at Gettysburg and it will be completed,” related Fritze. “New projects will be re-evaluated.” She insisted that the academic experience should not suffer. “We just may have to get smarter in how we deliver it.”

R U Shovel Ready? New Email List to Use to Stay Informed

Judging by the emails and phone calls we receive, the entire higher education world is buzzing with preparations to be "shovel ready" for the forthcoming stimulus package funding. We've created a topical email list for those who might like to be connected with others on this topic. You can join it via the Web here or you can join it by sending a message to "shovelready-request@umich.edu" with the word "subscribe" in the Subject line (no quotes in what you type). Anyone can join, there is no fee or SCUP membership requirement.

We're also gauging right now whether there are other ways SCUP might be helpful to people regarding "shovel ready"—the difficulty is, of course, that things are moving with lightning speed, which leave little time to think, plan, and implement any kind of resource.

Coming of Age in Economia: The End/s of Anthropology?

Well, like we have written elsewhere, whether or not the humanities are "useful" or will "survive" seems to be on a lot of minds. Here's a piece about how one of our former professional associations - the American Anthropological Association - is looking at making it more obvious how useful anthropology can be. Note that the theme of that conference this year is "The End/s of Anthropology."

There are many reasons why President Obama didn’t initially think about an anthropologist or two for his economic team. Indeed, anthropology has long been lampooned as an obscure and eccentric academic discipline with little practical purpose. Truly academic (in the rather dismissive sense). However, many anthropologists have always been sleeves-rolled-up scholars. And some of its practitioners have been pushing to expand definitions of “the economic” in ways that might prove useful today, offering definitions that more properly and accurately contextualize economic transactions with respect to differently configured cultural and political domains. Anthropologists proffer cogent critiques of reductionist treatments of economic actions/relations, treatments that too easily decouple economic logics from the cultural logics within which they are embedded — and that provide the semiotic/interpretive engine for their permutations.

Why are important anthropological insights often marginalized in such debates, and would a robust reincorporation into such larger political and intellectual disputes be a turn of events that anthropologists should condone or condemn?

Friday-Only Classes? Why?

A brief note from The Greentree Gazette about some campuses which find offering some Friday-only classes to be beneficial:

Coming to campus only one day a week is beneficial for students who can arrange a four-day work week with their own employers. All students can benefit from using less gas and driving time to and from campus. Aiken Technical College began Friday-only classes in 2006 to help students deal with $3/gallon gas prices. When prices spiked higher in summer 2008, Volunteer State and J. Sargeant Reynolds began offering Friday-only classes for the same reason.

Mixing it up is popular

Campuses have learned that Friday-only classes can also be used by students in conjunction with other courses they’re taking. "Some students want to cut their number of trips from five days a week to three," says Nannette Smith, associate vice president of academic affairs at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College. Alice Frye, dean of allied health at Aiken Technical College, says the motivation to offer some courses only on Friday was to minimize the student time on campus rather than eliminate Monday through Thursday classes altogether.

Amid a California Construction Freeze, L.A. Community Colleges Push Forward With Plans

It's one characteristic of the current financial crisis, that it is affecting different kinds of institutions, in different places, in different ways. And that's even before the stimulus package is available for our "shovel ready" projects:

The University of California and California State University systems have both suspended construction projects. The shutdown could affect some $1-billion in projects in the Cal State system alone, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

But apparently the California suspension doesn’t affect plans at the Los Angeles Community College District. The Los Angeles Times reports that the community-college district is pushing ahead with $400-million in projects on its $5.7-billion plan, one of the largest higher-education expansion plans in the country.

The Relevance of the Humanities

For some reason, this particular "issue" keeps turning up in many places recently, during our routine environmental scanning. In this article, Gabriel Paquette argues for strong action to maintain the relevance of the humanities, but notes that some of those measures may be controversial:

The active collaboration of scholars with government will be anathema to those who conceive of the university as a bulwark against the ever encroaching, nefarious influence of the state. The call for expanded university-government collaboration may provoke distasteful memories of the enlistment of academe in the service of the Cold War and the Vietnam War, a relationship which produced unedifying intellectual output and dreadfully compromised scholarship.

To some degree, then, skepticism toward the sort of government-university collaboration advocated here is fully warranted by the specter of the past. Moreover, the few recent efforts by the federal government to engage with researchers in the social sciences and humanities have not exactly inspired confidence.

The Pentagon’s newly launched Minerva Initiative, to say nothing of the Army’s much-criticized Human Terrain System, has generated a storm of controversy, mainly from those researchers who fear that scholarship will be placed in the service of war and counter-insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan and produce ideologically distorted scholarship.

Don't Let the Downturn Get You Down

We were noticing this week, on the RPG discussion list, that the California community colleges are reporting very large increases in matriculation in the current semester. It made us wince, because we know that tuition does not cover expenses at community colleges, not even close. This article helps you to make a good case for more public support for community colleges, even in times of financial crisis:

As community colleges across the country defend themselves against across-the-board budget cuts, they need to go on the offense by mobilizing key constituency groups to make the case that community colleges offer the best hope of turning the U.S. economy around.

Our extensive work with community college systems in seven states and two in-depth opinion research projects reveals that few people understand the value of public two-year colleges and the huge impact they have on economic success. Similarly, too few community colleges have organized effective advocacy efforts, and when they do speak out, they often use messages that don’t resonate with their target audiences.

While those at community colleges feel beaten down by unfavorable comparisons with four-year institutions, they need to realize that a huge reservoir of good will exists and should be tapped. Our poll findings show that the public holds community colleges in high esteem, but they don’t understand two critical issues that undermine the support of these institutions on the state policy front:

College Outcomes for Work, Life, and Citizenship: Can We Really Do It All?

Some (see the Stanley Fish essay in this issue of SEN) think it likely that liberal education is "down the drain." Surely not the folks at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, though:

Taking cues from the limited number of people who formally recruit on college campuses, some college educators believe that employers only pay lip service to liberal education but actually prefer graduates who are more narrowly trained in professional fields. AAC&U’s research suggests that this is not the case. A clear majority of the employers we surveyed think colleges and universities should focus on providing all students with both a well-rounded education and knowledge in a specific field. As one employer put it, “I look for people who can take accountability, responsibility, and are good team people over anything else. I can teach the technical.” Another focus group participant noted, “when I hire someone, I’m investing in them. I want them to be able to study, to analyze, to present, to write” (Peter D. Hart Research Associates 2007).

The clear message that has emerged from years of research, then, is that at least at a general level, there is, indeed, an emerging consensus on the most important outcomes of college. Moreover, it is clear from all this research that business leaders strongly endorse liberal education outcomes—including those related to ethics, values, and responsibility. Fifty-six percent of those we surveyed, for instance, believe that colleges should place more emphasis on cultivating in students a strong sense of integrity and ethics.

Prescription for Change: Starting, Acquiring, or Merging a Medical School

This article from NACUBO's Business Officer by Sandra R. Sabo is "spot on" for planners who have to cope with massive changes involving medical school expansion, acquisition, and integration. It features case study information from a Florida State expansion, a Drexel University acquisition, and the merger of systems at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and Johns Hopkins Health System (JHHS).

Even limited cultural and organizational change creates some tension and anxiety within an educational institution. Those feelings intensify as the scale of change grows and more people become unnerved by adjustments to the status quo. In fact, big projects and massive shifts can wreak behavioral havoc. “Even people you think you know,” says John Carnaghi, senior vice president of finance and administration, Florida State University (FSU), Tallahassee, “may become overwhelmed by anxiety and emotion, and begin doing or saying things that seem out of character.”

Efforts on the part of a university to start, acquire, or incorporate into its operations something as significant as a medical school certainly qualify as disruptions of a dramatic degree. For insights into the challenges—and rewards—of such massive change, Business Officer talked to representatives of three institutions that have undertaken transformative initiatives related to their medical schools and discovered prescriptions for success.

Campus Safety and Security: January-February Issue of Facilities Manager Magazine

This issue of APPA's Facilities Manager focuses on Campus Safety and Security, with the following articles: "Planning for Campus Safety" by Alan Dessoff; "APPA Participates in Innovative Effort to Enhance Campus Safety and Security" by Ruth E. Thaler-Carter; "Blueprint for Safer Campuses" by the IACLEA Special Review Task Force; and "The Price of Paralysis" by Steven C. Thweatt.

Golden Apples to Platinum Oranges: The Intricacies of Academic Remuneration

This interesting international look at who gets paid what, for what, is divided up with labels such as "Some Academics Are Less Equal Than Others" and "For Other Professors, More is Required."

How can we comprehend academic salaries? Does the sum paid monthly to a professor constitute his or her full remuneration? Our research on international comparisons of academic salaries found major variations among countries. Differences exist as well within countries—by rank, discipline, and other factors. In some countries, salaries are determined by an individual’s age, length of employment, rank, and often by civil service rules—without much cognizance of productivity or academic accomplishment. Indeed, in much of the world, academics are paid on the basis of their length of service and rank alone. In other countries, particularly in some of the newer private universities, salary structures are far from transparent.

The full-time professoriate—probably a global minority of the academic profession overall, since in many countries part-timers dominate the academic system—is divided by role, function, type of institution, and discipline. As interpreted by sociologist Burton Clark, the academic profession is divided by “small worlds, different worlds.” Academics are also divided by salaries. In many countries, faculty in private universities earn more than their counterparts in public institutions. Our research shows significant variations by rank. Not surprisingly, in our study of 15 countries, senior professors earned on average significantly more than junior staff.

The NetGens 2.0: Clouds on the Horizon

We've been following the work of Malcolm Brown, from Dartmouth College, for a decade or more. He always finds some insightful stuff to learn from just about anything. His latest shares a shift he has noticed in just the last 3-5 years, suggesting to him that we are past "Net Generation 1.0" and already into Net Generation 2.0:

For daughter #1, getting a laptop for college was a big deal. She had been using desktop computers for years, of course, but the combination of starting college and getting a laptop was an enabling rite of passage. For daughter #2, the laptop was more like socks, sweaters, and shoes. She’d been using a laptop throughout high school, so she simply packed her laptop along with all the other essentials. No big deal.

An additional marker of change was the use of e-mail and Skype. Daughter #1 had used her college’s e-mail system. Daughter #2, who has been using Gmail for some time, never really gave a thought to using the campus e-mail system. In addition, daughter #2 has moved beyond her cell phone and is using Skype for many of her communications. This shift in my two daughters’ IT outfittings is mirrored by students at Dartmouth. Four years ago, when Dartmouth contemplated giving up its quaint but antiquated home-grown e-mail system (called BlitzMail), it was the students who protested the loudest. For those NetGens, life without BlitzMail was unthinkable. Today, with Dartmouth going through the same exercise, the majority of students welcome an upgrade. Many, perhaps most, don’t even use BlitzMail, preferring Gmail, Facebook, or some other hosted service they’ve been using for years.

Something has shifted. Perhaps one way to delineate this shift of the past four years is to say that students have moved from being the “NetGens 1.0” to being the “NetGens 2.0.

Going… Going… Gone: Thoughts on Retirement

Brian Hawkins and Carol Barone, a couple of higher education professionals who many of us know and respect, have written this nice article in EDUCAUSE Quarterly about planning for retirement. Yep, planning for yourself instead of the institution. The first suggestion for attitude adjustment (out of 10) is titled, "Accept That Change Agents Must Change Too." We also like, "Recognize That You Can Retire and Still Have Liked Your Job."

The two of us have made different choices in life, and we do not share identical views on retirement, but we discovered that we have some amazingly consistent observations, many of which have been validated by friends and colleagues who have retired before us. In that light, we offer 10 suggestions that may help you not only navigate through the retirement process but also adjust to your new position and status.

This article is not intended to be an in-depth discussion of the nuances of each phase of the retirement process, nor is it meant to be a prescription for retirement satisfaction. We are all different, and retirement is a solo journey. How you deal with retirement depends on how you have lived your life (professional and personal). Decisions and choices made throughout your career will affect how you conduct yourself nearing and during retirement. Some people make a happy journey, and others do not.

Nurses Organize Around the Planning Table

After a conference in 2005, a bunch of nurses got together and decided to create some reosurces to enable better input from nurses into the design of health care facilities.So they created the Nursing Institute for Healthcare Design (NISD). We have to wonder if this kind of initiative might work for other professionals with an interest in ther design of the built environment?

First of all, nurse leaders are being invited to the table, and the chief nursing officer is now considered one of the executives of the hospital. So now, instead of a director of nursing, there are chief nursing officers who are considered higher-level executives making higher-level decisions. They get to the planning table and don't have the information and preparation they need because we didn't have anything about healthcare construction in nursing school.

Through the online resource they can be inspired by knowing that there are nurses out there who are knowledgeable and could be a resource on this subject. “NIHD Connect” is where we pull together basic healthcare design and construction information—articles, videos, books, and links—we find about such topics as patient room design, hospital unit design, noise in the work place, and safety features. A lot of those design features deal with patient safety and infection control. You know, my mother knows you should put the sink by the door, but is this being done everywhere? So by reading some of this basic information about healthcare design and construction, the nurse leader will be equipped so she or he at least knows what to advocate for at the planning table. Or, if something doesn't ring true, they know where to go and dig deeper into the topic.

Oberlin: Where does the nurse-designer collaboration process need improvement?

Hayes: I think architects still have a tendency to discount the nurses' views, and sometimes that is because the nurses may not be giving the best answers. For example, I might ask a nurse at one hospital and they might tell me one thing, and then I ask a nurse at another hospital and she tells me the complete opposite. So if the architects are not getting good answers from the nurses, they may decide not to pay attention to them and only include them as a courtesy. And the problem may be that the nurses are telling them different things because of the way they are using the space or because of a lack of knowledge that, yes, you do need to put the sinks by the door.

New Journal: Journal of Issues in Collegiate Athletics

Everyone on a campus has an opinion about collegiate athletics. Planners often have the need to be at least as well-informed, most likely better-informed, that other administrators. This new open access journal may be of interest:

Created as an initiative by the College Sport Research Institute (CSRI) the
Journal of Issues in Collegiate Athletics is "intended to foster an
atmosphere that encourages personal and intellectual growth for faculty and
students, demands excellence and professional integrity from faculty and
student affiliates, supports independent critical college-sport research,
and advocates for college athletes' rights and education." Visitors to the
site can look over information about their editorial board and staff, their
complete mission statement, and then make their way to the actual journal.
The publication was started in 2008, and visitors can view articles such as
"Collegiate Sport Chaplaincy: Problems and Promise" and "Can the Faculty
Reform Intercollegiate Athletics? A Past, Present, and Future Perspective".
The site is rounded out by a listing of links to related organizations,
conferences, and online resources. [KMG]

Federal Stimulus Funding for School Modernization, Renovation, and Repair

We bet you and others on your campus have been thinking a lot about "shovel ready" projects? (We're talking $6B here!) So have the great folks at the National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities (thanks to SCUPer Judy Marks for the info) who have created this new Web page category for related information:

The first webpage section, "Status of the School Funding Stimulus," describes the school-related elements of the January 15th draft House bill. This section will be continually updated as the house and senate bills proceed through Congress.

The second section, "What You Can Do Now," provides advice on the most effective way of spending the stimulus funds. We will be adding much more to this section over the next week.

There are four additional sections, "Funding Stimulus News," "Related Events," "Recent Journal Articles," and "Related NCEF Resource Lists." We will continually add information to these.

Why So Many Minds Think Alike: The Neuroscience of Conformity

Recent brain image research supports new understanding of why people tend to go along with the majority view, even if that is clearly incorrect. This kind of brain research is a must-understand for people whose jobs require them to manage planning conversations with large groups of people. The story highlights are listed as: "New study looks at how people change opinions of the beauty of images"; "Brain imaging shows group opinion actually shifts perception in the brain"; "Solomon Asch studied conformity in famous experiment in 1950s"; and Researcher: Rethink committees that decide by unanimous consent." Here's a link to a popular article about the research and here's a brief video on the research.

E-AIR, the Oldest Email Newsletter in Cyberspace

The "Electronic AIR" is the single oldest, still-publishing email newsletter on the Internet. It's not just the oldest in higher education or among associations, it is the oldest period. It's been publishing regularly since October of 1987. SCUP's own "SCUP Email News" is the second oldest email newsletter on the Internet, having begun publishing one month later in November of 1987. It's no coincidence that the two began at about the same time, because the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) and SCUP share a lot of interests, and also a lot of interesting people. E-AIR is monthly, so it won't add tremendously to your inbox if you subscribe to it, which we recommend. Among items in the current issue are a Practitioner Profile of Gordon Mills, director of institutional research at the University of South Alabama; Technical Tips From the Field, this about some of the more sophisticated ways you can Google search; and the ever-amusing annual E-AIR Limerick Contest.

The Last Professors We'll Ever See?

No, it's not an Indiana Jones movie. It's Stanley Fish essaying about the potential end of higher education as we know it and lamenting that a young Stanley Fish today would not be able to have the career that he has had. He's reviewing The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities,” by Frank Donoghue.

Universities under increasing financial pressure, he explains, do not “hire the most experienced teachers, but rather the cheapest teachers.” Tenured and tenure-track teachers now make up only 35 percent of the pedagogical workforce and “this number is steadily falling.” Once adjuncts are hired to deal with an expanding student body (and the student body is always expanding), budgetary planners find it difficult to dispense with the savings they have come to rely on; and “as a result, an adjunct workforce, however imperceptible its origins . . . has now mushroomed into a significant fact of academic life.”

Meetings Are a Matter of Precious Time

This expert's take on maximizing the utility of meeting time is easier than most to take because acknowledges his own understanding that there is great potential value in some meetings that are maybe not quite as organized as some would like.

The meeting spills over into its second hour. We are discussing an employee productivity initiative. At the moment, our most talkative committee member is describing a similar effort at another company. Her descriptions are peppered with self-consciously clever turns of phrase and images.

Another participant chimes in with the idea that we need some kind of incentive system to reward employees for behaviors we want from them. This is the same solution he offers for every problem, at every meeting.

Then, our self-appointed parliamentarian interjects a long story about a previous institutional effort — to make the point that our team is not the proper entity to recommend the kinds of changes we are proposing.

I, meanwhile, contribute nothing useful.

Finally, the woman who set the meeting calls it quits and tells us we’ll continue the discussion next week. We drift back to our offices wondering what went wrong and how to make up for the wasted time.

Colleges Scramble to Help Cash-Strapped Students

We guess that even a "cash-strapped" college has more liquidity than a cash-strapped student?

Facing job losses, dwindling college-investment accounts, and a tight credit market, students and parents have been streaming into financial-aid offices, asking for adjustments to their aid packages. Colleges are trying to help, but as the second semester starts up, some students have had no choice but to drop out or scale back the number of classes they're taking.

To expand financial aid, many colleges are cutting back on hiring, and construction projects are going on hold. Some institutions are getting creative on the fundraising front – think special appeals to alumni. Another tactic: Some colleges are offering leniency to students with unpaid balances.

School officials thought the trouble would hit this past fall. Instead, overall enrollments were "perfectly normal," says Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) in Washington. But now, he says, "people are apparently running out of steam."

Midyear departures are particularly disruptive. Schools create budgets based on enrollments for the year. And for students, "it's very hard, having done one semester, to then [temporarily stop or transfer] and not end up losing a lot of credits and a lot of time," Mr. Nassirian says.

Nearly a quarter of private colleges and universities and 13 percent of publics expect second-semester retention to be worse than last year's, according to a survey of 214 chief financial officers by The Chronicle of Higher Education and Moody's Investors Service.

Data Brings Sunshine: Research Publics Not Spending Money on Classroom Instruction

Even more interesting than the latest findings are some implications for the future:

The greatest value of the Delta Project’s report may yet to be realized. Leaders of the project, which is funded by the Lumina Foundation for Education, plan to create a Web-based function that will allow users to look at the spending and revenue data of individual institutions. While the raw data is already public through the federal data clearinghouse for higher education, known as the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), the Delta Project hopes to create a function that adds context and meaning to the often dizzying IPEDS numbers.

Charles Miller, who chaired the U.S. Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, said he welcomes the greater sunshine that the Delta Project is bringing to postsecondary education.

“Unless you have data that’s in this kind of form, it’s very hard to make decisions and policy judgments that are objective,” he said.

After reviewing the report, Miller said the Delta Project had made a data-driven case for reform, without having to use the sometimes tough language that’s found in many such reports, including the one Miller’s own commission presented.

“It doesn’t say ‘Here are the failings of the system,’ and a lot of the report is going to avoid doing that, but [Wellman] implies it,” he said.

Bringing Sustainability and Urbanism Together

From Architecture Week by Daniel K. Slone, exploring the intersection between sustainable development and urban development:

It is not, however, intuitively obvious to everyone why high-density, extensively hardscaped projects would be good for the environment.

First, there are some adverse consequences that do accrue if density is merely clustered without appropriate design. Aggregate air and water (surface and groundwater) impacts may be more significant and harmful than smaller, dispersed impacts that are more easily diluted and absorbed.

Second, numerous projects are advanced as urbanist projects despite the fact that they do not meet the basic criteria for urbanist projects. Often the ways these projects have been diluted or hybridized means that they cannot deliver the hoped-for benefits of urbanism, including the environmental benefits. In some instances, projects pretending to be New Urbanism have been simply a pretty way to sprawl or to deliver density without parks or connected streets, and are designed in such a way that few social or environmental benefits occur.

Business Intelligence: From Data to Information

An interesting article, with a couple of mini-case studies and some bulleted specific "what to look for" suggestions about purchasing systems:

“Historically we had programmers, and we could ask them some specific questions, and they’d go off, and if we were lucky they’d come back sometime in our lifetime with the answer to our questions,” recalls Richard Burnette, FSU’s director of student information management. “Or else we had a number of fixed reports that we’d been using for years to track where we were and plan strategically off of them. That’s not very flexible.”

***

Only within the last decade, says industry analyst Nicole Engelbert of Datamonitor, has higher education began effectively exploiting BI solutions. Even then, it was something of a luxury reserved for the largest institutions. But external trends have made BI much more attractive to a wider range of IHEs. “Institutions are under a lot of pressure from a productivity and efficiency perspective,” she says. “There’s a lot of push for accountability—from the federal government, state governments in some cases, accrediting bodies, even from the U.S. News & World Report. ... That’s pushed high-level decision-makers to think, ‘How can we do better? How do we know if we’re doing better, and what should we do to do better?’”

Academic Freedom Post-9/11: How Have Outspoken Professors Fared?

This essay by Robert M. O'Neil covers the ground of outspoken and controversial scholars from the torture-condoning John Yoo of Berkeley Law and the Bush administration to Sami al-Arian of the University of South Florida and Ward Churchill of Colorado. It'll give you a nice overarching perspective and record:

While most outspoken professors based in the United States have fared far better than one might have expected after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the same could hardly be said of controversial foreign scholars who seek to teach and to address academic gatherings in this country.

Internationalization: Unintended Consequences?

Most articles in International Higher Education are brief, and this is no exception, but it covers a lot of territory, examining: The Rankings Race; Double and Joint Degrees; The Brain Train; Diploma, Accreditation, and Visa Mills; For-profit Internationalization Equals Commercialization; Increased Access: Equality of Elitism; Cultural Diversity or Homogenization?

As we progress into the 21st century, the international dimension of higher education is becoming increasingly important and complex. Headlines from recent higher education newspapers paint a colorful picture: “China could be vulnerable to ‘education dumping’ by overseas universities seeking to exploit the rapid expansion of higher education in the country.” “European Higher Education Fairs ‘conquer’ Vietnam.” “Ten universities in the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia begin sharing education content on iTunes U.”

These new developments and unintended consequences illustrate that nothing unfolds entirely as planned. It is necessary to stay alert to unexpected twists and turns along the road to internationalization. With innovation come new opportunities, successes, as well as threats. It is imperative that the international, intercultural, and global dimensions of higher education continue to be proactive and innovative, while keeping a close watch on unanticipated spin-offs and implications. As internationalization matures through its ages and stages of growth, a critical eye and strong will are needed to monitor intended and unintended results—for today and 25 years hence.

From Here to There: Effectively Managing Organizational Change

A useful quick read by Casey J. Wick (PDF) from Facilities Manager about unfreeezing the status quo, shaping a new one, then re-freezing:

Ask any manager to recount a time when significant changes to their organization were required, and the response will more than likely be a woeful tale of suspicion, resistance, and eventually reluctant acceptance. Initiating and implementing organizational change can be, and very often is, a journey characterized by periods of temporary progress followed by slow regression back to old habits and operating practices. Countless challenges and barriers rooted in individual and group perceptions lay around each and every bend in the road to effective and lasting changes. More importantly, the journey of organizational change is one in which the pressure influencing change can shift rapidly and without warning making the destination seem unattainable. Fortunately, with firm commitment and thorough planning, the initiation and implementation of pressure-driven changes can be successfully made within an organizational setting. . . . Other strategies identified include manipulation, co-optation, and explicit/implicate coercion. While these strategies are defined and accepted, they are not considered desired or even ethical. Most often these tactics lead to rapid inappropriate changes that are short lived. Additionally, these strategies certainly leave participants feeling as though they have been deceived and taken advantage of. Such emotions will only serve to diminish individual and group trust which is extremely destructive to an organization.

The Easiest Way to Boost Rankings: Kill the Humanities?

An interesting OECD look at college and university rankings around the world:

Exhortations to become world class have tucked universities into a Procrustean bed of indicators. Presidents anxiously cut back programmes, reorient their university’s mission, swell application numbers to tighten student selectivity, and seek mergers with higher-ranking institutions–conversely, those higher up jealously guard their hard-won reputations and shy away from collaborating with anyone but their peers. Deep excisions may be made into the social sciences and humanities to leave more room for the natural sciences and research. Speaking at the biennial conference of the OECD’s Programme on Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE) in September, Ellen Hazelkorn of the Dublin Institute of Technology, cited a respondent to an international survey which said that “the easiest way to boost rankings is to kill the Humanities”. Clearly not a realistic proposition, though another survey told her that “reputation, unfortunately, is always based on research, and research attracts the best talent”.

But rankings are not going to go away. After all, they can provoke useful questions, such as “why exactly are we not in the top group?”, or indeed, “how can we maintain this lead?”. Governments and universities will still use them, as fierce competition between universities induces copycat behaviour unless policy encourages diversity. Whether they serve as an accurate guide to higher education is therefore strictly academic.

Sustainability: Community College Course Offers Housing Solution for Families in Need in California

This brief case study outlines the process of developing and implementing an inexpensive community college course curriculum that could be used just about anywhere for outreach to families on the edge:

We have found ourselves with an unfortunate confluence involving a community that has traditionally put a low premium on education, industries that have outgrown their labor force, and a region that is so stunningly beautiful that people would rather live here in poverty than move to urban areas where there are more jobs. For many, this place has been their home for generations, and they intend to stay.

Our poverty carries the same consequences that exist wherever there is poverty: substance abuse, domestic violence, health problems, substandard housing, child neglect, and a loss of hope. No community college can cure these problems, but every community college serving an impoverished community has the obligation to boldly address them. We took a run at the housing issues that were preventing students and potential students, most of them single mothers, from focusing on their studies.

***

Minimal Costs, Life-Changing Benefits. We started with a budget of $600 for this program, anticipating that we would receive $300 in fees from students and spend perhaps twice that amount on instructor stipends and so forth. Thanks to the generosity of instructors who refused the stipend and to CRDN for not charging a facility rental fee, the entire first class cost $365, $210 of which was offset by registration fees. This is a program that can be easily replicated anywhere, including in communities without a community college partner.

Trends to Watch: State by State

This website is a nifty addition to anyone's collection of environmental scanning tools:I

t’s no surprise to anyone that the world is changing. But the facts of just how the world is changing still have the power to startle—and elude us.

This is why the Pew Center on the States offers Trends to Watch, which seeks to help state policy makers, the media, and the general public follow the major trends that determine if states thrive—or not—and track where the 50 states stand relative to each trend.

The site will be updated continuously, and new data and analyses will be added as they become available and as new trends emerge across a wide range of public policy concerns, including economic competitiveness, education, the environment, the democratic process and government performance.

Inside the Savant Mind: Tips for Thinking from an Extraordinary Thinker

Another one in our series about thinking, learning, and the brain:

I am unusually creative—from visualizing numerical landscapes composed of random strings of digits to the invention of my own words and concepts in numerous languages. Where does this creativity come from?

My brain has developed a little differently from most other people’s. Aside from my high-functioning autism, I also suffered from epileptic seizures as a young child. In my book, I propose a link between my brain’s functioning and my creative abilities based on the property of ‘hyper-connectivity’.

In most people, the brain’s major functions are performed separately and not allowed to interfere with one another. Scientists have found that in some brain disorders however, including autism and epilepsy, cross-communication can occur between normally distinct brain regions. My theory is that rare forms of creative imagination are the result of an extraordinary convergence of normally disconnected thoughts, memories, feelings and ideas. Indeed, such “hyper-connectivity” within the brain may well lie at the heart of all forms of exceptional creativity.

The I.R.S. Considers Pressing Schools to Further Reveal Their Business Activities

So, is your school one of the 400 that are being looked into by the IRS right now?

The Internal Revenue Service is considering expanding its scrutiny of colleges and universities to focus on billions of dollars associated with academic research, federal financing and intellectual property, a senior agency official said on Tuesday.

The expansion of an investigation would put pressure on the schools to further disclose their inner financial workings as the I.R.S. undertakes a major effort to learn more about whether academic institutions are improperly using their nonprofit status to avoid paying certain taxes.

The expansion, while not yet certain, “is on the table,” Lois G. Lerner, the I.R.S.’s director of exempt organizations, said in a brief interview.

The Doors That Claiborne Pell Opened

Beth Macy writes about the death of Claiborne Pell and the impact of Pell Grants on her own life:

I'm not rich now by any means. But on the night following Pell's death, I stared into my fireplace and wondered where I'd be without him: scrambling to pay my bills, like so many in my family? Stuck in a bad marriage or an addict?

The year I was born, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson wrote: "At the desk where I sit, I have learned one great truth. The answer for all our national problems — the answer for all the problems of the world — comes to a single word. That word is education." Call me corny, but it's a sentiment that still chokes me up.

As our president-elect talks about rebuilding national infrastructures and creating new technologies, I hope that Pell's promise of an established right to postsecondary education isn't forgotten. If new ideas are key to buoying our tanking economy, we need to first build an intellectual infrastructure to spark them.

With college tuition increasing at a rate more than double the rise in need-based aid, I have often wondered what would have happened if I'd tried to go to college 20 years later than I did. Ask my mom to cosign for a loan?

The College Savings Delusion

Kevin Carey thinks that "saving for college" has mostly been a scam on the middle class:

Except it turns out the that stock market is run by liars and thieves who, instead of efficiently allocating capital to productive purposes etc. etc., actually spend their time constructing ever-more-elaborate schemes to defraud the entire world out mind-boggling sums of money. Worse, they turn out to be really stupid thieves who ended up blowing up the entire edifice on their way out the front door with all the money they stole in plain sight of the aforementioned policymakers who were apparently too busy doing things like choosing the font size on the stationery for the Center for The Study etc. to notice.

As a result, there are now tens of thousands of families across the land with children starting college or in college who would have been better off sticking their money in a mattress than investing in a 529 plan. Heck, they’d have been better off sticking 70 percent of their money in a mattress and spending the other 30 percent on a flat-screen TV and a Wii, because at least that way they’d have a fun way to spend time with their kids during the day while they’re not at the job they’ve just lost and their kids aren’t at the college they’re not attending because it’s too expensive and half their tuition money disappeared in the Wall Street rubble. Meanwhile, the people who run 529 plans have nothing to offer other than utterly senseless comments like this from the p.r. guy in Maryland, who said “We remind people that investments for college are meant to be for the long-term. It’s important to stay the course.”

And that’s whole the problem in a nutshell. Retirement is long-term, in the sense that it happens both in a long time and over a long time. People saving for retirement can afford to ride out ups and downs in the market, and since the goal is to live off the income from your investments and retirement itself lasts (hopefully) for several decades or more, there’s also more flexibility to weather a financial storm once you’re retired. College, by contrast, is at most a mid-term proposition, eighteen years at the outside. And paying for college is decidedly short-term, since, last I checked, colleges still get paid up-front.

There’s an alternative to all of this: Families pay their fair share of taxes under a reasonably progressive system and policymakers use that money to adequately support higher education and need-based aid while also exercising oversight over colleges and universities that in turn show some restraint in pricing while rejecting enrollment management techniques that direct scarce aid dollars to wealthy students. And when the time comes for people who ride Metro to pay for college, they don’t have to worry about astronomical bills or whether their hard-earned money somehow ended up paying for a disgraced trader’s second summer house in the Hamptons, because college is affordable.

College Affordability: The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

Anthony P. Carnevale explores some of the ways that he suggest are better ways to examine the issue of college costs:

A major flaw in the popular narrative on rising tuitions is the failure to distinguish public from private colleges. Tuition increases affect private and public colleges differently. Public enrollments are less affected by tuition increases because of their lower threshold prices. As tuitions rise, college enrollments shift from private colleges to the lower priced publics creating an increasing public funding burden, especially in recessions when families are looking for bargains. Private tuitions distort the data on rising tuitions as illustrated by this statistic: College tuition rates have risen more than 300 percent since 1987, when overall prices have only risen by a little more than 80 percent. Look closer and you will see that the big tuition increases come at the high-priced private institutions, not the public colleges. Tuition increases in public colleges have been relatively constrained and competitive. According to the College Board Trends in College Pricing survey in 2007, tuitions at four-year public colleges have risen by a little more than 50 percent in the last ten years and by about 20 percent in public two-year colleges – a far cry form 300%.

A deeper confusion stems from the fact that the dominant narrative on affordability fails to distinguish between college tuition and college cost. Tuition is the price that students and families pay for college. Cost is what colleges pay to educate students.

Book Review: How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything in Business

From the January–February–March 2009 issue of Planning for Higher Education, this "SCUP Links Blog" post provides an opportunity for you to share comments or additional resources/links about the review by John C. Adams of the book, Book Review: How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything in Business. You can read the entire article here [LINK TO COME], in Planning for Higher Education.

Book Review: How College Affects Students

From the January–February–March 2009 issue of Planning for Higher Education, this "SCUP Links Blog" post provides an opportunity for you to share comments or additional resources/links about the review by Simone Himbeault Taylor of the book, How College Affects Students. You can read the entire article here [LINK TO COME], in Planning for Higher Education.

Book Review: The Student Leadership Challenge

From the January–February–March 2009 issue of Planning for Higher Education, this "SCUP Links Blog" post provides an opportunity for you to share comments or additional resources/links about the review by SCUP office work-study student Clayton McPherson of the book, The Student Leadership Challenge. You can read the entire article here [LINK TO COME], in Planning for Higher Education.

Book Review: A Guide to Planning for Change

From the January–February–March 2009 issue of Planning for Higher Education, this "SCUP Links Blog" post provides an opportunity for you to share comments or additional resources/links about the review by Sandra L. Kortesoja of the book, A Guide to Planning for Change. You can read the entire article here [LINK TO COME], in Planning for Higher Education.

At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard

We have visited the MIT Introductory Physics classroom described as part of this story. It is not surprising that the flunk out rate in that class has declined to about 1/3 of what it was before the change in space and programming for that space:

But now, with physicists across the country pushing for universities to do a better job of teaching science, M.I.T. has made a striking change.

The physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. Last fall, after years of experimentation and debate and resistance from students, who initially petitioned against it, the department made the change permanent. Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.

M.I.T. is not alone. Other universities are changing their ways, among them Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, North Carolina State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Colorado at Boulder and Harvard. In these institutions, physicists have been pioneering teaching methods drawn from research showing that most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully, and are better able to apply them, through interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning.

College Recreational Sports: Pivotal Players in Student Success

From the January–February–March 2009 issue of Planning for Higher Education, this "SCUP Links Blog" post provides an opportunity for you to share comments or additional resources/links about the focus of the article, College Recreational Sports: Pivotal Players in Student Success, v37n1, pp. 52–62 by Kent J. Blumenthal. You can read the entire article here [LINK TO COME], in Planning for Higher Education.

The article "blurb" reads: The importance of a bona fide campus recreation sports/wellness program cannot be overstated.

[ABSTRACT TO COME]

Note that this issue of Planning is the second of a two-part themed volume with the overall title, Student Life. The first part was published in October 2008. Assembled, the two parts will be available later in 2009 for purchase as a single PDF document for your quick and easy reference.

Fusion Building: New Trend With Some Old Roots

From the January–February–March 2009 issue of Planning for Higher Education, this "SCUP Links Blog" post provides an opportunity for you to share comments or additional resources/links about the review by Simone Himbeault Taylor of the book, How College Affects Students. You can read the entire article here [LINK TO COME], in Planning for Higher Education.

Students in My Backyard: Housing at the Campus Edge and Other Emerging Trends in Residential Development

From the January–February–March 2009 issue of Planning for Higher Education, this "SCUP Links Blog" post provides an opportunity for you to share comments or additional resources/links about the focus of the article, Students in May Backyard: Housing at the Campus Edge and Other Emerging Trends in Residential Development, v37n1, pp. 34–43 by John Martin and Mark Allen. You can read the entire article here [LINK TO COME], in Planning for Higher Education.

The article "blurb" reads: Where is the campus edge? Is it becoming more defined or disappearing?

[ABSTRACT TO COME]

Note that this issue of Planning is the second of a two-part themed volume with the overall title, Student Life. The first part was published in October 2008. Assembled, the two parts will be available later in 2009 for purchase as a single PDF document for your quick and easy reference.

Prevention Through Connection: Creating a Campus Climate of Care

From the January–February–March 2009 issue of Planning for Higher Education, this "SCUP Links Blog" post provides an opportunity for you to share comments or additional resources/links about the focus of the article, Prevention Through Connection: Creating a Campus Climate of Care, v37n1, pp. 26–33 by Jesse Owen and Emil Rodolfa. You can read the entire article here [LINK TO COME], in Planning for Higher Education.

The article "blurb" reads: To whom does the Millennial student in psychological stress reach out?

[ABSTRACT TO COME]

Note that this issue of Planning is the second of a two-part themed volume with the overall title, Student Life. The first part was published in October 2008. Assembled, the two parts will be available later in 2009 for purchase as a single PDF document for your quick and easy reference.

The Serious Matter of Informal Learning

From the January–February–March 2009 issue of Planning for Higher Education, this "SCUP Links Blog" post provides an opportunity for you to share comments or additional resources/links about the focus of the article, The Serious Matter of Informal Learning, v37n1, pp. 18–26 by Peter Jamieson. You can read the entire article here [LINK TO COME], in Planning for Higher Education.

The article "blurb" reads: From the development of learning spaces to a broader understanding of the entire campus as a learning space.

[ABSTRACT TO COME]

Note that this issue of Planning is the second of a two-part themed volume with the overall title, Student Life. The first part was published in October 2008. Assembled, the two parts will be available later in 2009 for purchase as a single PDF document for your quick and easy reference.

Make Way for Millennials!

From the January–February–March 2009 issue of Planning for Higher Education, this "SCUP Links Blog" post provides an opportunity for you to share comments or additional resources/links about the focus of the article, Make Way for Millennials!, v37n1, pp. 7–17 by Persis C. Rickes You can read the entire article here [LINK TO COME], in Planning for Higher Education.

The article "blurb" reads: From generations in perspectives, through generational cycles, and on to the influence of Millennials on campus space.

[ABSTRACT TO COME]

Note that this issue of Planning is the second of a two-part themed volume with the overall title, Student Life. The first part was published in October 2008. Assembled, the two parts will be available later in 2009 for purchase as a single PDF document for your quick and easy reference.

Introduction - Dynamics of Change: Millennial Students Impact on Their Total Collegiate Experience

From the January–February–March 2009 issue of Planning for Higher Education, this "SCUP Links Blog" post provides an opportunity for you to share comments or additional resources/links about the focus of the article, The Inheritance of Millenial Students: What They will Inherit from their Campus Experience—What Legacy Will They Leave, v37n1, pp. 5–6 by John A. Ruffo. You can read the entire article here [LINK TO COME], in Planning for Higher Education.

This item is an introduction to the second issue by the guest editor, John Ruffo. There is no abstract for this article. The article "blurb" reads: The previous issue of Planning for Higher Education is the first half, and this issue the second half, of a single themed issue on student life and its impact on the built campus environment.

Note that this issue of Planning is the second of a two-part themed volume with the overall title, Student Life. The first part was published in October 2008. Assembled, the two parts will be available later in 2009 for purchase as a single PDF document for your quick and easy reference.

When College Students Reinvent the World

This may be one instance where "learning by gaming" actually works. It's hard to imagine an entire class of students "getting" some of these potential lessons learned from just reading texts:

The people of Mekka’ kneel in the dirt, sorting pastel cereal loops for their colonizer, the Peek-a-boo nation. “Put each color into [its] own little baggy as quick as possible, and then we will feed you,” orders a Peek-a-boo boss clad in a pink Kansas State sweat shirt. Later, Peek-a-boo declares it is killing off the rebellious populations of two other colonies – Bagheera and Phanat Nikhom. “We’ve been genocided,” a dejected victim says as her group leaves its spot in Kansas State University’s giant rodeo arena – serving as a mini Planet Earth.

With moments like that, the World Simulation – aka Anthropology 204 – burrows into the hearts and minds of students who otherwise would be choosing A, B, or C on a multiple-choice exam. Cultural anthropology professor Michael Wesch came up with “World Sim” to push students to stop asking, “What’s going to be on the test?” and to contemplate bigger questions: Why are some people poor and some rich? How does the world work?

This young professor teaches in ways that reach far beyond the drab, leaky auditorium where hundreds gather for the introductory course. The goal, he says, is to create an environment where students can expand their capacity for empathizing with and loving those who are different from them.

How the City Hurts Your Brain . . . And What You Can Do About It

A new body of knowledge is beginning to support an understanding that the presence of some sort of "nature" - like the open space of a campus(?) is "surprisingly beneficial" for your mind and its ability to learn and remember:

In a study published last month, Berman outfitted undergraduates at the University of Michigan with GPS receivers. Some of the students took a stroll in an arboretum, while others walked around the busy streets of downtown Ann Arbor.

The subjects were then run through a battery of psychological tests. People who had walked through the city were in a worse mood and scored significantly lower on a test of attention and working memory, which involved repeating a series of numbers backwards. In fact, just glancing at a photograph of urban scenes led to measurable impairments, at least when compared with pictures of nature.

"We see the picture of the busy street, and we automatically imagine what it's like to be there," says Berman. "And that's when your ability to pay attention starts to suffer."

Ten Reasons Why Colleges and Universities Undertake Campus Master Planning (And How to Align Your Campus Planning Effort to Best Address Them)

This article is from the July–August–September issue of SCUP's journal, Planning for Higher Education. SCUP members can access it at no charge from within the SCUP website. Others can purchase a PDF for immediate download here.

by Michael S. Rudden
Aligning the campus master planning effort to address specific questions of why you are planning in the first place will ensure that your planning effort is successful by the terms that you define.

Citation
Michael S. Rudden. 2008. Ten Reasons Why Colleges and Universities Undertake Campus Master Planning (And How to Align Your Campus Planning Effort to Best Address Them). Planning for Higher Education. 36(4): 33–41.

Solutions for the Design-Versus-Budget Challenge

This article by Ellen Kollie is blurbed: "How do you get everything you want — and need — in the design of new facilities when the project budget doesn't match the shopping list? The answer comes from the experts who are in the trenches daily. They've seen technology and space requirements increase and budgets decrease, and they have at their ready an arsenal of tools to assist administrators."

Many administrators will only complete one new building in their professional lifetimes. This factor, coupled with the enormous number of decisions that must be made, make it even more difficult to come out ahead in the design-versus-budget challenge. In closing, Meadows returns to the plan-early-and-thoroughly approach that his team uses: “We know what we want when we come to the table. We’re not a leaf in the wind. If you’re not clear on what you want, the consultant will drive the situation and make the decisions for you. That’s not where you want to be.”

Construction Waste: It's Not Just Trash Anymore

Of interest:

Don’t throw away that construction and demolition waste. Along with the changing worldview that there is no “away” in “throwaway,” routing waste to the landfill is also expensive. Treating waste as an asset, the Institution Recycling Network (IRN) helps projects divert waste to end markets that pay for the material. With its “waste miser” paradigm, the company provides a single point of contact to manage recyclable materials on construction and demolition projects. Mark Lennon, a principal at IRN, discusses the process, challenges, and benefits of construction and demolition recycling with John Oberlin, HEALTHCARE DESIGN online editor.

***
Oberlin: Can a healthcare system actually make money from its construction and demolition waste?

Lennon: It would be rare that they would make money, but in terms of dropping money to the bottom line or the total impact on a budget, it’s the same thing to save $50,000 as it is to make $50,000. It all goes to the bottom line.

Tools: Should You Twitter? Some Mini-Case Studies

Here in the SCUP office, we have found instant messaging to be an amazing useful and core communications tool. We are also experimenting a bit with Twitter, and also with Yammer (which has a little more security on it). That's why we found this article to be interesting:

As of October 2008, Twitter was used by more than 3 million people according to Twittr, a search engine for Twitter accounts.

***

[and its used for academic planning:] “It’s become a very tight little community of members who bounce ideas off each other, share fun things, use each other for any sort of questions,” says Petersen. At Penn State, all that connectivity through Twitter eventually led to a daylong professional development event last August. The new Learning Design Summer Camp was almost entirely designed by this community.

***

Twitter also has a small but growing following among the higher education web and communication community, as indicated by the early results of an online survey I administrated in October 2008 about different web services targeted to this community. When asked about their communication channels of choice to receive professional development information, 19 percent of the 540 responders (all professionals working in higher education), named Twitter as one.

The Real Costs of Fast-Track Construction

From one of our favorite writers, Julie Sturgeon, comes this nicely-done article, "Finished in a Flash."

The drivers behind this popularity are intuitive. “When you’re trying to do a big project, you really do have to go fast because you make a lot of assumptions about your financial climate and the availability of the labor force,” Merck says. UCF’s addition sprung up in a mere four-and-a-half years, from the request for bids for design and construction in August 2003 to the opening of the final piece, the arena itself, in April 2008. “If it had taken us another two years, I’m not sure we would have finished given the current financial situation,” he adds.

***

That’s why the word “compromise” becomes the project watchword. It goes without saying that administrators must give up the luxury of leisurely approval times. At UCF, it meant Merck needed to take possession of a residence hall in January and let it sit empty for six months for the sake of keeping the rest of the complex on time. (Even with the subsequent operating costs, the construction savings on this timetable reduced the cost in the end, he says.)

The 'Ownership' of Learning and Web 2.0+

Interesting thesis: Instead of building stuff (learning IT) we want, how about using stuff the students already use?

When using software applications supported by the university or college, students are not driving. They are in another iteration of the classroom that is owned by the teacher. The teacher is driving. Some institutions have tried to get around the no-own, no-learn conundrum by creating a non-institutional-looking portal named "My [something or other]." These institutions understood the problem: If technology is owned by the institution, it is no more liberating to the mind than the teacher-owned classroom.

***

It's time for a model of co-discovery I read about recently where students all choose a Web site for the class to try out and evaluate. The teacher didn't know which site they would choose so the students owned the choice and the site they had chosen. The students didn't know how the site could be used for teaching and learning. So, both teacher and students needed to learn from each other. They chose a number of sites during the semester and succeeded in using a few but discarded most.

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America

Made to Break is a book that should be pretty interesting to read, in light of the recent emphasis on sustainability. You can buy it at Powell's the world-famous bookstore in Portland, where you'll be joining other SCUPers next July for SCUP–44!

And here's an interesting thought: We often hear about masters degrees being obsolete a short time after graduation. On the other hand, we don't "throw away" education when it's obsolete, it's what we build new knowledge on top of and within.

If you've replaced a computer lately--or a cell phone, a camera, a television--chances are, the old one still worked. And chances are even greater that the latest model won't last as long as the one it replaced. Welcome to the world of planned obsolescence--a business model, a way of life, and a uniquely American invention that this eye-opening book explores from its beginnings to its perilous implications for the very near future

Made to Break is a history of twentieth-century technology as seen through the prism of obsolescence. America invented everything that is now disposable, Giles Slade tells us, and he explains how disposability was in fact a necessary condition for America's rejection of tradition and our acceptance of change and impermanence. His book shows us the ideas behind obsolescence at work in such American milestones as the inventions of branding, packaging, and advertising; the contest for market dominance between GM and Ford; the struggle for a national communications network, the development of electronic technologies--and with it the avalanche of electronic consumer waste that will overwhelm America's landfills and poison its water within the coming decade.

History reserves a privileged place for those societies that built things to last--forever, if possible. What place will it hold for a society addicted to consumption--a whole culture made to break? This book gives us a detailed and harrowing picture of how, by choosing to support ever-shorter product lives we may well be shortening the future of our way of life as well.

Should You be Worried? What Can Your Campus Do?

Robert Shireman, executive director of The Institute for College Access and Success tells us that "there has not been one case of a student or parent who can't get the federal loan they are eligible for." But that doesn't mean there aren't problems to address:

I suggest a different solution to help the dependent students who genuinely need additional loans. College financial aid officials should have access to a substantial, but not unlimited, pot of additional loan funds to allocate to students who face exceptional circumstances as determined by the college. The additional loan funds should be available to colleges that, overall, do a good job of preventing students from having to take out a lot of loans. This approach respects the professional role that financial aid officials play in assessing students’ needs and family situations. It provides them with a tool they can use for those cases, while preventing schools from broadly taking advantage of students and of the federal government.

In the midst of this economic disarray, it would have been reasonable to expect that the student loan system would be in shambles. That is why editors keep assigning reporters to write stories about people who can’t get loans. But the real problem is not a lack of access to student loans. It is much bigger than that. The challenge is to make sure there is an affordable place in college for students from all backgrounds, in the face of growing financial need, increased demand for higher education, and underfunding at the state and federal levels.

The Credit Crisis Goes to College

National CrossTalk features some fairly in-depth reporting on pertinent higher education issues. This one appears to have been written before the current financial crisis, but does take a good look at students', parents', and administrators' experiences with the prior (and ongoing) credit crunch for student loans:

As academic 2008-09 began, 130 lenders, including 27 of the industry’s 100 biggest-volume originators, had folded their federal-loan businesses. In addition, 31 providers had quit offering private loans. (These counts come from Mark Kantrowitz, who tracks the student-loan industry on his website, finaid.org.)

Disruptions continued into the fall semester, which found thousands of students waiting weeks for promised loans, or scouring for back-up lenders after their old reliables left them hanging.

The Engaged University: Northern Kentucky University

From 7,500 to 15,000 students in 10 years, with a goal of 26,000 by 2020, Northern Kentucky is moving at high speed, with a focus on its relationship with its surrounding community. Learn more in this National CrossTalk feature:

What has put this once-provincial campus on the higher education map is its seemingly single-minded push to improve the lot of its surrounding region. It’s not some vague pledge. (Nor is it purely altruistic; if the public university helps the community, this perfectly reasonable strategy goes, the community will stand behind it.) A lynchpin of a regional development plan Votruba and others at the school coauthored, NKU has promised to help create some 50,000 new, high-paying jobs by 2015 and also help to double the number of Kentuckians with bachelor’s degrees to 800,000, as a means of supplanting the state’s traditional economic mainstays of coal-mining, horse-breeding, bourbon and tobacco, with advanced manufacturing, finance, healthcare, business services, and technology. That’s the reason for the push to boost enrollment—and the attraction, it seems, for rising numbers of arriving students.

Understanding More About Geothermal Systems

Even if you're not in facilities planning, you may want to be a bit more knowledgeable about "geothermal." If that's the case, this brief article by Bill Johnson (PDF), from Facilities Manager, is for you.

[T]he rising cost of energy has your institution focused on improving energy efficiency on campus. Now it’s up to you and your fellow campus facility managers to create mitigation strategies. One such strategy might be right there under your feet. Ground source geothermal energy enables us to tap into the earth’s stored renewable energy for heating and cooling facilities. Proper application of ground-source geothermal technology can have a dramatic impact on the efficiency and financial performance of building energy utilization (30%+). At the same time, using this alternative energy resource can provide significant contributions to an institution’s carbon reduction goals. How can you take advantage of this potential energy source to meet campus carbon footprint reduction goals, capital budgets, and return on investment?

This article reviews the state-of-the-practice and the kinds of engineering and programmatic expertise that are required to properly scale geothermal applications up to the institutional level and provide optimized benefits. Some pitfalls of poorly-designed systems are described, and approaches to avoid these are presented. But first, the big picture on geothermal systems.

Enterprise Risk Management: Learning to Harmonize

By Shulamith Klein, Michael Mandl, and Stephen Sencer, this is one of two related articles in the December issue of Business Officer:

To manage for potential threats, Emory University worked from the most basic operational level upward to fine-tune a strategy that’s now part of its overall planning process.

Over the past two years, Emory University, Atlanta, has built an enterprise risk management system tailored to the higher education environment. The process, which involved more than 100 staff and faculty, was a useful and productive experience for Emory, and the resulting ERM system is now integrated into our planning and evaluation of administrative issues. It is not perfect, it does not rely on outside consultants, and it does not use three-dimensional cubes. But, it does constitute a significant step forward in Emory's ability to manage its risk, prepare for adverse occurrences, and ensure that senior management is communicating with those in the field about key issues facing the university.

The ERM process began at Emory when a number of developments, some national in scope and others unique to our campus, focused attention on corporate governance. On the national level, notorious corporate governance failures such as Enron and WorldCom had heightened scrutiny of all large corporations, including nonprofits. In addition, several higher education institutions had been publicly criticized for failing to handle adverse events effectively, with the allegedly inadequate response gaining as much or more attention as the underlying event.

Risk Management: Ensemble Performance

By William G. Shenkir and Paul L. Walker, this is one of two related articles in the December issue of Business Officer:

Enterprise risk management orchestrates an approach that includes all areas on campus. Together, rather than solo, leaders evaluate and plan for the impact that unexpected events might have on the institution’s objectives.

In today's uncertain world, college and university leaders must deal with complex risks that can potentially have substantial effects on an institution. Safety and security, natural disasters, and conflicts of interest are some of the more well-known areas, but risk is inherent in many other decisions made on campus. Academic leaders need to be aware of the hazards facing the institution's programs and operations; they also need information about the potential risks embedded in opportunities that may present themselves.

In the private sector, many businesses are implementing a relatively new approach to managing risk: enterprise risk management. This article highlights the major elements of ERM and relates the process to decision making in academia.

Changing the Game: The Federal Role in Supporting 21st Century Educational Innovation

This item comes from our favorite email newsletter (PDF), the Scout Report:

The Brookings Institution has had a long-standing interest in the American system of education, and this thoughtful 73-page report takes a close look at how the federal government might best intervene in this particular area of American society. The report was released in October 2008, and it was authored by Sara Mead and Andrew J. Rotherham. In their report, the authors suggest that the federal government should create a new federal Office of Educational Entrepreneurship and Innovation within the Department of Education. The general premise behind such a policy idea is that such an office would "expand the boundaries of public education by scaling up successful education entrepreneurs, seeding transformative educational innovations, and building a stronger culture to support these activities throughout the public sector." The report contains eight chapters, an executive summary, and a set of conclusions. [KMG]

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