Make Way for Millennials! How Today's Students are Shaping Higher Education Space

In an article written for Planning for Higher Education prior to the recognition of the financial crisis, SCUPer Persis Rickes explores their expectations and some issues relating to "amenities":

One of the key traits of Millennials is “specialness.” But when does the acknowledgement of a student’s specialness go too far? A recent Chronicle of Higher Education article described the “Club Ed” atmosphere at High Point University in North Carolina (Bartlett 2008). The amenities at High Point are numerous and unusual: a concierge desk, a gift card and balloons sent to each of the 2,000 undergraduates on their respective birthdays, kiosks offering free snacks around campus, and an ice cream truck with more free treats. The university’s slogan is “At High Point, every student receives an extraordinary education in a fun environment with caring people” (High Point University 2008, unpaginated Web source), and a Director of WOW! ensures that the fun never stops.

Just like their occupants, buildings have a generational locus. They are designed with the expectation that they may stand 100 years or more—the equivalent of five generations. But how can the needs of future occupants be realistically anticipated? Barely a decade ago, ubiquitous data jacks and desktop computers were the goal. Students toiled in electronic isolation; achieving the designation of “most wired campus” was an institutional badge of honor. Today, transparent technology is the norm for the current generation of “digital natives,” the Millennials who use technology to build a community that transcends time and space. However, this community also has a place in real time and space, a place where students learn, work, and socialize in groups, suggesting that walls may need to come down as frequently as they go up.

Financing Approaches for Funding Renewable Energy Initiatives

Writing in Business Officer, Michael Philips and Lee White show us how it is still possible, even in the face of the financial crisis, to fund alternative energy projects. Their subheads are: Clean Renewable Energy Bonds, Governmental Purpose and Private Activity Bonds, Endowment Fund Loans, Private-Sector Tax Incentives, Performance Contracts, Renewable Energy Hedge Agreements, Power Prepayments, and Financing Energy Security.

Across the United States, an increasing number of higher education institutions are pursuing large-scale renewable energy projects, in some cases as part of their commitment to achieving carbon neutrality under the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment (www.presidentsclimatecommitment.org). While many projects benefit from some grant or gift funding, very few are funded exclusively this way.

So, where does the rest of the capital come from? What financing structures are available to institutions that want to install solar, wind, geothermal, or biomass systems that can generate a sizeable share of their campus energy needs? And, how can costs be lowered by structuring deals with private investors? What follows is an overview of some of the more common and emerging financing sources and structures for campus renewable energy projects.

Sal Rinella Asks, 'Why Build the Way We Always Have?'

SCUP president Sal Rinella, of STRATUS-Heery, is the current guest blogger for The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Buildings & Grounds" blog. In a highly relevant piece, he writes:

I’ve spent over 35 years working in higher education, and there was a time when I would have seen this construction as an exciting development. But now, in a new century with all of its new developments, I have a different reaction — “Why?”

Why is it smart to invest so much in bricks and mortar when online and blended education are growing so rapidly? Why should a new campus be in a fixed location when there is increasing emphasis on community engagement? Why do we continue to build campuses on a model that creates a massive carbon footprint for construction and long-term maintenance when higher education seeks to play a leadership role in sustainability? Why can’t we take a page from the for-profit sector and create new campuses that leverage our natural advantages — price, quality, and reputation?

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It’s time that planners move into the new century when starting a new educational center, doing a campus master plan, or designing a new building. Let me offer two planning principles that should become guidelines: Stop considering classroom instruction as the rule and distance education as the exception. When doing a campus master plan or planning a new facility, give equal consideration to locations in the community and locations on campus.

Obama's Higher-Education Goal Is Ambitious but Achievable, Leaders Say

By Sara Hebel and Jefrey J. Selingo in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Before President Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, the White House compared the purpose of the event to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats during the Great Depression. But for higher education, Mr. Obama was more like John F. Kennedy when he issued the challenge in 1961 to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

This president’s goal was equally daunting: for the nation to have the world’s highest proportion of college graduates by 2020. “That is a goal we can meet,” he said to applause in the chamber.

But is it?

College and university leaders were clearly delighted that Mr. Obama dedicated so much time in his speech to higher-education issues, which had for years taken a back seat to elementary and secondary education in presidential addresses. But, by Wednesday, the enormity of the task that has long been on college administrators' wish list became evident again.

“It’s absolutely achievable, but it’s ambitious,” Hilary Pennington, director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s postsecondary program, said in an interview. “It’s a stretch goal.”

In November, the Gates foundation announced that it would spend several hundred million dollars over the next five years to double the number of low-income young people who complete a college degree or certificate program by age 26 (The Chronicle, November 21). Recognizing the difficulty of the task, the Gates foundation set a slightly longer time frame for its goal than the president did for his—2025 instead of 2020.

Ms. Pennington said President Obama’s speech might have helped in one of the biggest hurdles to achieving the foundation's goal of doubling college-completion rates: first, recognizing that a problem exists.

“The American public thinks that if you go to college, you finish,” she said. “The president has the unique ability to make sure we break through the noise and make people realize that many more countries are taking this more seriously than we are.”

Do Campus-Based 'Frills' Have a Future?

Subtitled "In an age of austerity, basic may make a comeback," this nice article by Jeffrey J. Selingo, managing editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, examines the growing clamor of those suggesting (or calling for) austere, "no-frills" 4-year degree opportunities:

Even as the nation's economy began to sputter early last year, two areas proved resilient to the cutback in Americans' spending: luxury goods and college degrees.

By the end of 2008, however, luxury stores had recorded the greatest decline in sales of any retail-chain category. Will high-priced colleges suffer a similar fate?

The most optimistic college presidents believe they will be spared a drastic enrollment decline next fall. But a growing number have fear in their eyes.

"I'm not convinced this is a two- to three-year disruption," says John A. Fry, president of Franklin & Marshall College, where tuition and fees are $38,630 this year. "There is a real shift here. People are going back to the basics."

Study Abroad Shifts in Troubled Economic Times

To cut travel abroad, or not. And if so, how? And how to "spin" it if you do? Elizabeth Redden surveys the state of this issue from conversations at the Forum on Education Abroad's fifth conference:

A conference session here on being proactive in economically reactive times attracted a (proactive or reactive?) crowd. 'The size of this audience, given the number of people here, shows that misery does love company, Stevan Trooboff, president and CEO of the Council on International Educational Exchange, said. . . . But one of the take-aways from the session was that misery isn't widely, or at the very least, equally shared in the field at this point. Fortunes seem to vary. In fact, many institutions are expecting increasing or at least flat study abroad enrollments in the near future—with the exception perhaps of some small private colleges that are hurting and are (proactively) attempting to keep their numbers down. . . . 'There's clearly an attempt by many of the private colleges already to limit or to restrict the numbers of students eligible to go on study abroad, and this is being done in a number of ways,' said Adrian Beaulieu, dean of international studies at Providence College, who, like his co-presenters Friday, had prepared for his talk by surveying colleges similar to his own (in this case New England private colleges).

Beaker-Ready Projects? Colleges Have Quite a Few

There is lots and lots of money in the stimulus package for research, much coming through the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. NSF will use its extra dollars to dig deeper into funding already proposed research. Not quite clear yet what NIH will do:

The acting director of the National Institutes of Health begged university administrators on Wednesday to avoid even applying for stimulus money unless the universities planned to hire people almost immediately. . . . 'It would be the height of embarrassment,' the official, Dr. Raynard S. Kington, said, 'if we give these grants and find out that institutions are not spending them to hire people and make purchases and advance the science the way they're designed to do.' . . . Not a problem, the administrators said, in interviews. After working under flat federal research financing for years, scientists are ecstatic. 'This is a miracle, I think,' A. J. Stewart Smith, the dean for research at Princeton, said. 'It is redressing this terrible problem where the success rate for excellent proposals was very low.' . . . 'We're grateful for the money, but it's not such a large number that anybody's going to have to look very hard for good projects to fund,' said Leslie Tolbert, the vice president for research at the University of Arizona

Dissecting Obama's Message: Every American Goes to College?

From Doug Lederman at Inside Higher Ed:

Is it feasible for every American to have at least one year of postsecondary education or training? What would have to happen to make that possible? Would federal financial aid and other policies need to change? Would the distribution of students among different kinds of colleges have to change? . . . Those were among the many questions that college officials and higher education policy makers traded Wednesday as they contemplated the implications of President Obama's unexpected call in his Congressional address Tuesday night for a campaign to ensure that every American has 'at least one year or more of higher education or career training.' . . . [T]he president gave few details about exactly what he was proposing, forcing those seeking to analyze it to engage in a fair bit of tea leaf reading. They differed somewhat in their views of how much Obama's remarks departed from previous presidents' calls for expanding college opportunity; whether federal priorities and policies would be likely to change to achieve it (a question that could be partially answered today when the administration releases a first glance at its 2010 budget blueprint); and whether focusing more aggressively on getting those who've never been to college to get at least a little would conflict with the other goal the president laid out Tuesday night: 'by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.' . . . The overwhelming reaction of college leaders and others interviewed was elation, though . . . in the context of a trillion-dollar federal deficit—it [had] seemed likely that higher education would take a backseat to other priorities.

Research, Innovation, and Technology Transfer: Maybe We're Not Doing Such a Great Job?

Stephen Quake is a professor at Stanford University and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He writes, in a guest column for The New York Times, about inefficiencies in technology leverage, transfer, and licensing—and says it's broke, let's fix it:

In some quarters of academia there is a deep longing for a return to the ivory tower – that time when the university was disconnected from commercial interests and faculty members were unsoiled by the financial rewards that can be associated with their research.

I must admit that in some respects I share that nostalgia – it would be good for society if there were institutions to turn to for unbiased opinions on the questions that face society. However, it is also true that universities have turned away from the ivory tower model and have embraced a more engaged role in the commercial development of the discoveries of their faculty members.

***

Today’s university faculty is a diverse community of ivory tower researchers alongside inventors, innovators and entrepreneurs. I will discuss two consequences of this: first, what happens when a faculty member has a financial interest in his research, and second, how faculty inventions are commercialized.

***

Although some may still pine for the ivory tower, today’s universities are a swirling cauldron of research that cover the gamut from the esoteric to the applied, and function not only as scholarly institutions but also as engines of innovation. Universities should embrace their role as technology creators and maximize this process by facilitating the efforts of their faculty members. Our country’s economic future could depend on it.

In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth

Is the stimulus package, combined with the financial crisis, a blow to the humanities?

But in this new era of lengthening unemployment lines and shrinking university endowments, questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency. Previous economic downturns have often led to decreased enrollment in the disciplines loosely grouped under the term “humanities” — which generally include languages, literature, the arts, history, cultural studies, philosophy and religion. Many in the field worry that in this current crisis those areas will be hit hardest.

Already scholars point to troubling signs. A December survey of 200 higher education institutions by The Chronicle of Higher Education and Moody’s Investors Services found that 5 percent have imposed a total hiring freeze, and an additional 43 percent have imposed a partial freeze.

In the last three months at least two dozen colleges have canceled or postponed faculty searches in religion and philosophy, according to a job postings page on Wikihost.org. The Modern Language Association’s end-of-the-year job listings in English, literature and foreign languages dropped 21 percent for 2008-09 from the previous year, the biggest decline in 34 years.

“Although people in humanities have always lamented the state of the field, they have never felt quite as much of a panic that their field is becoming irrelevant,” said Andrew Delbanco, the director of American studies at Columbia University.

How Your Community Can Thrive, Even in Tough Times

Philip Myrick is one of two presenters (The other is SCUPer Ann K. Newman of Shepley ZBulfinch.) for the upcoming March 11 SCUP webcast, Placemaking on Campuses: Creating Destinations That Build Community:

2008 will go down in history as a turning point. Unexpected new events and ideas surfaced, changing the way we will lead our daily lives in the future. Financial turmoil abruptly altered the economic picture, forcing people to shift their thinking about everything from the household budget to global interconnectedness.

***

In our view, this is the way forward in an era of budgetary constraints. A bottom-up method of decision making offers effective and cost-efficient solutions to the economic, environmental and social problems around us. For Project for Public Spaces, this is more than a fashionable theory du jour—it’s based on three decades of experience building and repairing communities around the world using an approach we call Placemaking.

Placemaking is central to many of the powerful trends shaping the world today. The stumbling global economy, a vulnerable energy supply, and loss of confidence in far-flung markets are balanced by an upsurge of interest in things local: producing local food; promoting local businesses; preserving local character; protecting local open space and public places; finding meaningful ways to belong to a local community.

Need a College Loan? Ask Your Friends Online.

Somehow, we expect that to some people, using your social networks to get money for college might sound like, well, socialism. Hmm. This article specifically examines GreenNote's business model and use by students, as well as CollegeDegreeFund, CharityforDebt, and GradeFund. We've been using Kiva.org to make microloans in developing countries and this sort of feels the same.

As higher-education costs rise and families feel the squeeze on traditional sources for college funding, students are on the hunt for innovative ways to pay their bills. In addition to loan websites like GreenNote, other sites are cropping up where students can raise donations for college.

Easy money? What's the catch? Some of the gifts come in exchange for earning good grades or for performing nonprofit volunteer work. And so far, the aura of potential on these sites is much greater than the actual money flow. In the near-term, at least, it appears unlikely that enough donors or lenders will come forward to meet even a fraction of the clamor for cash.

In fact, traffic to peer-lending sites may be driven, in part, by a lack of information about resources available to students and parents, financial-aid experts say.

Some States Get Stimulus Whether They Need or Want It

Somehow, just somehow, we doubt that even a single governor will turn down the stimulus money. Anyone want to bet? :) This article illustrates the unevenness of the fiscal landscape from state to state and discusses some potential alignment issues between where the money will go and where it is needed:

Close to three-quarters of the money in the stabilization fund is designated for states to funnel to public colleges and school districts, which could use the money in various ways, including to restore budget cuts, prevent layoffs, or modernize facilities. The rest of the money in the bill will be given to governors to allocate to high-priority needs, which could include construction money for public or private colleges, and to the secretary of education to reward performance. President Obama is expected to sign the $787-billion stimulus plan on Tuesday.

The federal stimulus money that will be spent in states that are not facing a severe economic crisis could still play an important role in reducing unemployment rates if, for instance, the money from the stabilization fund were to be spent on modernizing college or school facilities, thus creating construction jobs. It could also help lessen the effects on colleges and schools of any budget cuts states might have to make down the road if their economic situations worsen.

Tough Times, Silver Lining: Builders Lower Their Bids

As Scott Carlson puts it, in this article, "Now is a great time for colleges to get bids on construction projects — if they have the money to pay for them." It's nice to know that someone we know will be saving money. Bottom line: Materials costs are going down and construction people are offering lower cost bids. But not everyone is in a position to benefit:

Over the past several years, colleges have endured eye-popping escalation in the cost of campus construction, with the budgets swelling by more than 40 percent in some cases. The increases resulted from similarly rising costs for energy and petroleum-based building materials, and from growing demand for staples like steel and cement amid a booming construction market, both overseas and in the United States. Construction firms consistently bid high because of the demand for their work and to cover the risk of escalating costs on materials.

But times have changed. As the financial, housing, and major-construction markets have headed toward meltdowns, those same construction firms are looking for jobs, even while the prices of energy and materials have fallen. The prices of essential construction materials like structural steel, cement, and lumber are all expected to decline through 2009, according to Engineering News-Record, a trade magazine for the construction industry, published by McGraw-Hill. Because of those declines, building costs are likely to go down slightly this year.

Cut-Rate Campus in New Hampshire

Wow. It seems like a bargain for students in New Hampshire. They can go to the Southern New Hampshire University's main campus for tuition of $25k or they can attend at the satellite campus in Salem for only $10k a year. No Olympic-sized pool, no rotating climbing wall, no 46,800-square foot food court. SNHU plans another satellite, and the State of Pennsylvania is considering some similar plans. Some say that it looks like "reinventing community college."

So what does $10,000 - comparable to tuition and required fees at a state school - buy? A full load of prescribed introductory courses in English, math, psychology, and history, intimate classes of fewer than 10 students, and built-in office hours with professors, so students don't drop out.

The only amenities at the Salem satellite: computer labs, vending machines, and a lounge with a stack of magazines and a chess board.

"It's not the mainstream college experience, but it helps keep your sights focused on your work," said Matthew Gambardella, an 18-year-old business major who commutes 40 minutes from his parents' home in Peabody.

Cornell Experts Discuss Colleges' Responsibilities During Hard Times

One doesn't think of Cornell University as being as subject to to the financial winds as, say, an HBCU. But that doesn't stop Cornell from convening experts to discuss the impact of the financial crisis on higher education in the United States, and Cornell in particular:

He said colleges should try to figure out ways to improve their productivity, but without cutting employees' salaries or increasing their workload. Technology might be one way to do that.

He also said colleges should do what they can to protect and preserve jobs. Cornell, he noted, is the biggest employer between Albany and Buffalo. "We have to try to manage the university to blunt the effect on the work force," he said. "It is important to look forward to what our state economy should look like when it emerges from the financial mess."

Colleges should also take a more active role in trying to help the country emerge from this quagmire, he said. First, colleges should pursue research that will bring tangible benefits to the economy, through technology transfer and marketable inventions.

Second, more academics should take prominent roles in helping to form public policy. "Universities have abdicated their role to think tanks in the past 20 years," he said. "The leaders at the universities have been relatively silent."

Community Colleges See Stimulus Bill as Bonanza for Their Students

Community colleges are pretty happy with much of the stimulus, especially the changes in how Workforce Investment Act money gets distributed. (Hint: faster.)

David S. Baime, vice president for government relations at the American Association of Community Colleges, said on Monday that the change would help community colleges cover the full cost of the education they are providing, which is much higher than the average tuition that the colleges charge, $2,400 per year. With the extra cash, the colleges could pay for equipment, curriculum packages, additional faculty members, and other needs. The change would be especially helpful for programs in some technical fields that are in growing demand but are much more expensive to operate than are general-education programs.

"At a time when the colleges are getting budget cuts … getting those expenditures covered by the federal government is really helpful," Mr. Baime said.

He added that the shift in how Workforce Investment Act money gets doled out would allow more money to be spent faster than with the voucher system. That factor is consistent with the goals of the economic-stimulus bill, which seeks to pull the economy out of recession by quickly pumping federal money into circulation. The exact amount of money that would go to community colleges, and how it would be spent, would depend on what institutions the local boards awarded grants to and what spending the they deemed eligible.

The Economic-Recovery Law: Winners and Losers

Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sara Hebel shares her list of winners and losers - within higher education, from the stimulus package. Winners include work-study students, students a low-cost institutions, students from low-income families, biomedical research, and people wanting to be trained at community colleges. Losers include students who use Perkins Loans, undergrads who want to borrow more than before, and . . . higher education facilities.

The $787-billion economic-stimulus legislation that President Obama signed into law this week contains large sums of money for students and researchers. But the final version of the plan excludes billions of dollars that Congress had considered giving to various higher-education programs. Here's a look at how the law, as enacted, produced both winners and losers.

$1.2B in Grants for Non-European Students and Scholars to Engage in Europe

Wow. The European Union has something as a stimulus package for its higher education institutions, who can now use funds from a billion-dollar+ reserve that lets the program, Erasmus Mundus, support non-European students studying in the EU. As well, it will likely assist European students in studying outside of Europe.

In the period 2004-2008, Erasmus Mundus and the Erasmus Mundus External Cooperation Windows offered more than 10,000 scholarships to students and academics from all over the world, with a combined budget of € 609 million. The programme offered the opportunity to third-country students to obtain a degree in Europe, and to academics to share know-how and to contribute to study programmes through teaching or research activities whilst avoiding the brain drain and favouring vulnerable groups. Thanks to these exchanges and through cooperation with non EU partner countries the programme also made a significant contribution to the enhancement of intercultural dialogue and to the sustainable development of higher education in third countries.

The Erasmus Mundus programme (2009-2013) will fully integrate the former 'Erasmus Mundus External Cooperation Windows' and continue to support partnerships between EU and non-EU higher education institutions as a basis for mobility among students and academics.

In Connecticut, Building Plans Hit the Skids

This article's "blurb" ends with a phrase that we all should be thinking about as we slash and burn budgets of various sorts: "The governor's budget freeze has put state school projects on ice, but [W]ill it really save money? (emphasis added) And SCUPer Nancy Tinker of Eastern Connecticut State University is interviewed to help make the point:

But that's not how Nancy Tinker, director of facilities, management and planning at Eastern Connecticut State University in Willimantic, sees it. Tinker says an extra year will make a big difference, because time is money — money lost — and in "no place is that more true than in the construction industry."

"In the long run, unless you cancel a project altogether, you don't save anything by delaying things," says Tinker. "It actually costs the taxpayers more, or the taxpayers get less than they could have for the same amount of money."

To prove her point, Tinker cites ECSU's planned $71.5 million fine arts building, a project she describes as "critical" to the school's stated goal of becoming the state's premier public liberal arts college. Planning for the fine arts center was completed in 2000, when the cost was estimated at $54 million; eight years later it has gone up by $17.5 million, or 32 percent.

"When they finished the [planning] in 2000, they didn't think it was going to take eight years to get to the next phase," says Tinker.

Performing to Make Money—Making Money to Perform

John V. Lombardi writes about the "endless Sisyphean task of explaining university finances to many audiences" and works hard to describe the difference between the "business model" and the "university model."

Universities are indeed business enterprises, we can explain. They earn and spend money, they produce and sell a wide array of products, and they compete for student customers and high quality faculty employees. They produce teaching and research, they require students and faculty, and they judge their performance on the quality work both perform. Most people in our audiences will recognize all this as more or less appropriate and right. Then we come to the money.

Universities, we can tell them, are revenue engines with a business model fundamentally different from our corporate colleagues. The business world constructs enterprises to produce and sell products or services with the goal of making money. A successful business earns a profit that it distributes to its owners. The business measures its success by the amount of money (or value) created for its stockholders or owners. This is simple. If the business cannot make the product and sell it for a profit, it stops making that product and makes a different one that it can sell at a profit, because the point of the exercise is the profit not the product.

In the university however, we do something different. We engage in an intense and focused search for money so we can produce teaching and research (with all of its associated benefits). The more money we can generate the more and the better teaching and research we can do. The purpose of the money is to purchase quality teaching and quality research and support a quality university environment. We compete with each other not to make a profit but to acquire quality. We define the successful university by the total amount of quality it can accumulate (demonstrated by its products) within its boundaries.

The ‘Business Model’ Is the Wrong Model

Does this fall into the "never waste a crisis" mode? As we focus on cutting budgets, are we inevitably falling into what Peter Katopes thinks is the wrong model for our campuses, the "Business Model?"

College ought not to be merely a place where someone learns “skills” and racks up credentials, but rather an environment and an experience in which students learn, in addition to history and literature and mathematics, also how to begin to navigate the adult civilized world in an adult, civilized, and responsible manner. Their naïve assumptions about life and nature should be tempered by the rigors of discourse, debate, and discussion. Higher education should be training for life as it is — not as it is imagined by the child’s mind.

When colleges adhere to the “business model” they create dangerous expectations for their students and do no service to the larger community.

Currently the nation faces an economic crisis the likes of which most of us have only had nightmares about. We as a nation have the lowest savings rate and highest personal debt of any industrialized nation. We have been taught for more than 30 years that we are entitled to get what we want when we want it. The sub-prime horror has been a result of a sense of this entitlement which pervades society at all levels: the top, the middle, the bottom.

It is time that our colleges return to their traditional mission of educating the populace for the long haul. And that means teaching them to live and serve within a context of responsibility, prudence, and care.

Harvard Slows Its Growth in a Boston Neighborhood

We don't know if this is going "from eating brie to cheddar," but even Harvard University is finding that the financial crisis has an impact on its expansion plans into the Allston neighborhood:

The university is reviewing its plans for a four-building, $1 billion science center in Allston, which is across the Charles River from the Cambridge campus. It was scheduled to be completed in 2011.

The university plans to finish the complex’s foundation and build to ground level, but plans after that are uncertain.

“As we approach the end of the current construction phase,” the university president, Drew Gilpin Faust, said in a letter to the Harvard community, “we will examine whether economic conditions are enough improved to allow us to continue construction, or whether to reconfigure the building in ways that yield either new cost savings or new space realization, or whether we need to pause construction.”

Economy Hits Hard on Black Campuses

While your campus might be cutting back from eating brie to cheddar, at HBCUs "you might not have any cheese left." A New York Times reporter finds that HBCUs may be having a more difficult time with budget and resource cuts that most other institutions:

Clark Atlanta University, citing an “enrollment emergency,” laid off 70 faculty and 30 staff members this month and canceled physical education classes. Spelman, an Atlanta college for women that is among the wealthiest and most prestigious historically black colleges, has eliminated 35 staff positions and is projecting a $4.8 million deficit next year after a decline in its enrollment.

Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Ala., announced campuswide salary reductions and a furlough program, among other cuts, last week. Tennessee State University in Nashville, where enrollment is down 10 percent from last year, has eliminated 52 positions and is considering a reduction in scholarship money.

Colleges and universities of all kinds across the country are facing shrunken endowments, decreased giving and government cutbacks, and many have reduced their payroll and list of classes. But historically black institutions have two significant disadvantages when it comes to weathering hard times: smaller endowments, which mean heavier reliance on tuition and fees, and a higher proportion of disadvantaged students who are now facing a credit crunch when they apply for loans.

New Tool - GradShare: A Graduate Student Community

Quite a few SCUPers are not only working professionals, but also involved in being a graduate student, working toward some additional degree. Even if you're not, and you just work with or need to understand graduate students, you might enjoy GradShare, a "Graduate Student Community," that intends to create and collect a lot of the resources and information that might have kept some of us who are now permanently ABD in the game long enough to complete that doctorate, had our department, advisors, or graduate schools provided something like this.

Frankly, we don't see language on the site saying it is limited to only graduate students, and we think it could be a useful site for anyone who frequently does some literature search or other research. If it becomes a successful and active resource, it could in fact help share some of the burden of academic advising shouldered by administrative professionals in graduate schools. In these days of everyone doing more with less, that should be welcomed. If you can, please share this information with a graduate student or graduate school staffer.

One more new Web-based tool is Deadline Due, a beta of a very simple and easy to use tool that claims to return to you a perfectly formatted Harvard Reference for any complete book title of ISBN number you feed it.

H. Sapiens Digital: From Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom

This article in SCUPer James Morrison's innovate, journal of online education, will be of interest to SCUPers. After all, whatever we do to handle the financial issues we have, we'd better do it with the best possible understanding of our students. Viewing the article requires a (free) registration:

As we move further into the 21st century, the digital native/digital immigrant paradigm created by Marc Prensky in 2001 is becoming less relevant. In this article, Prensky suggests that we should focus instead on the development of what he calls "digital wisdom." Arguing that digital technology can make us not just smarter but truly wiser, Prensky describes how tools that give us access to more information and enhance our analytical powers will both reshape what wisdom is and give us the power to be wiser. These tools, whether they come in the form of complex simulations or databases or even from implanted tools that help us process information as it arrives, enhance our thinking power. The digitally enhanced person who will emerge from these developments, homo sapiens digital, differs from today's human in two key aspects: He or she accepts digital enhancement as an integral fact of human existence, and he or she is digitally wise. Digital wisdom is exhibited both in a considered use of digital enhancements to complement innate abilities and in the use of enhancements to facilitate wiser decision making. In an unimaginably complex future, Prensky argues, the unenhanced person, however wise, will not have the tools of wisdom that will be available to even the least wise enhanced human.

More Work-Study Student Jobs!

Here in the SCUP office, we find that the 8-12 work-study students we employ each semester are a very useful productivity tool which help to maximize what we can get done with your membership dues. For example, the students are solely responsible for populating and keeping up to date our list of college and university plans, which currently has 734 hyperlinks to strategic and campus plans, and provides Carnegie Classification and other data about each institution for which we have found plans. The last time Congress approved more than a billion dollars in work-study money was 2001. A pot of $200M that is funded by the stimulus package law signed this week could push that total back over $1B in 2009. If it does get spent that way, that creates enough dollars for an additional 130,000 to be funded. More here.

The additional $200-million is intended to help colleges provide more Work-Study jobs for students, but the situation is not quite that simple. Colleges match the Federal Work-Study money on a 25-percent-to-75-percent ratio, so they can take the government funds only if they have the institutional aid dollars to supplement them. Colleges have to pay Work-Study students at least the federal minimum wage, and more if required by state law. The federal minimum wage is scheduled to increase from $6.55 to $7.25 in July. Some of the new money will be absorbed by this increased cost at affected campuses.

And even if a college does offer more Work-Study jobs, it might do so by converting regular on-campus student jobs into Work-Study ones. That would help students with financial need, but it wouldn't mean a net gain in the number of jobs. Even so, that is the route some colleges will take, said Mark L. Lindenmeyer, assistant vice president and director of financial aid at Loyola College in Maryland. After all, many financial-aid offices want to give priority to needy students.

Streamlining Financial Services: Doing More with Less

University Business magazine has a series of webinars which, after their live transmission, become available to be watched and listened to for free, in a set of archives. The most recent in that series is titled Streamlining Financial Services: Doing More with Less. (You'll need to create a UB Online identity in order to access the archives.) It was transmitted live on February 12, 2009:

In these days of tight budgets and increased student enrollments, streamlining back office financial operations can save time, money and manpower. Join Casey McGuane, SVP and Chief Services Officer at Higher One, and financial specialists from two universities in a discussion of how institutions are successfully delivering a higher level of service through electronic tuition and fee payment and automated refund disbursement. Presentations by: Tim Goral, Editor, University Business Magazine - Moderator; Casey McGuane, SVP and Chief Services Officer, Higher One; Dr. Carol Probstfeld, VP of Business & Administrative Services, Manatee Community College; Karen Pettit, University One Card Administrator, Eastern Kentucky University

How the Crash Will Reshape America

Richard Florida takes a 30,000-foot view of large-scale changes in the US due to the financial crisis. "The crash of 2008 continues to reverberate loudly nationwide—destroying jobs, bankrupting businesses, and displacing homeowners. But already, it has damaged some places much more severely than others. On the other side of the crisis, America’s economic landscape will look very different than it does today. What fate will the coming years hold for New York, Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas? Will the suburbs be ineffably changed? Which cities and regions can come back strong? And which will never come back at all?":

If there is one constant in the history of capitalist development, it is the ever-more-intensive use of space. Today, we need to begin making smarter use of both our urban spaces and the suburban rings that surround them—packing in more people, more affordably, while at the same time improving their quality of life. That means liberal zoning and building codes within cities to allow more residential development, more mixed-use development in suburbs and cities alike, the in-filling of suburban cores near rail links, new investment in rail, and congestion pricing for travel on our roads. Not everyone wants to live in city centers, and the suburbs are not about to disappear. But we can do a much better job of connecting suburbs to cities and to each other, and allowing regions to grow bigger and denser without losing their velocity.

Finally, we need to be clear that ultimately, we can’t stop the decline of some places, and that we would be foolish to try. Places like Pittsburgh have shown that a city can stay vibrant as it shrinks, by redeveloping its core to attract young professionals and creative types, and by cultivating high-growth services and industries. And in limited ways, we can help faltering cities to manage their decline better, and to sustain better lives for the people who stay in them.

But different eras favor different places, along with the industries and lifestyles those places embody. Band-Aids and bailouts cannot change that. Neither auto-company rescue packages nor policies designed to artificially prop up housing prices will position the country for renewed growth, at least not of the sustainable variety. We need to let demand for the key products and lifestyles of the old order fall, and begin building a new economy, based on a new geography.

What will this geography look like? It will likely be sparser in the Midwest and also, ultimately, in those parts of the Southeast that are dependent on manufacturing. Its suburbs will be thinner and its houses, perhaps, smaller. Some of its southwestern cities will grow less quickly. Its great mega-regions will rise farther upward and extend farther outward. It will feature a lower rate of homeownership, and a more mobile population of renters. In short, it will be a more concentrated geography, one that allows more people to mix more freely and interact more efficiently in a discrete number of dense, innovative mega-regions and creative cities. Serendipitously, it will be a landscape suited to a world in which petroleum is no longer cheap by any measure. But most of all, it will be a landscape that can accommodate and accelerate invention, innovation, and creation—the activities in which the U.S. still holds a big competitive advantage.

TQM, Blue Ocean Strategy, and More - at Rio Salado CCollege

Rio Salado College is recognized as a leader in many ways. In fact, we included it in an article about innovative business practices written by SCUP leaders for the late summer issue of Community College Journal (unfortunately not available on line). This resource describes some of the ways which Rio plans for and achieves innovation, with an emphasis on staff development processes:

Rio tends to evolve and incorporate business practices through staff development offerings. It is common for the college to use aspects of different business models that can be applied to workplace practices. Laura Helminski, chair of the communications department, explains, “It [the full scope of business models] becomes too rigid for us if we do every piece of a concept. We have found that some of the mechanical and statistical aspects slow us down, so we focus on the softer, people-oriented aspects.” She further states, “It’s not a pure approach, but we think it’s working. People tell us they believe we’re on to something! It feels right for us.”

...

Staff development programs provide a means by which community colleges can implement strategic initiatives that center on supporting the effective integration of college vision, mission, purpose, and values. The use of staff development programs to support strategic objectives allows community colleges to develop program offerings based on society’s needs; provide high-quality, flexible, and affordable education to our customers; and support student success in a continued commitment to positive social change.

How Do Students Use Google Applications?

More Google! Last fall, some Google staff hit the road in a 1970s bus and visited a bunch of college campuses to introduce students to some Google Apps and see what their reactions were. Everyone involved had a great time, and following the various Google Blog posts on this not only helps you understand the current state of Google Apps, but lets you see the amazing uses talented students can put them to. It's also interesting to observe the way Google, as a company, is interacting with students in what seems to be a long term marketing strategy for its products and services.

This is a nice review of the restored Art & Architecture Building at Yale University, written by Michael J. Crosbie. You should be able to read it all, but to enjoy most of the images you'll need to be an Architecture Week subscriber:

The Yale Art and Architecture building in New Haven, Connecticut, designed by legendary architect Paul Rudolph and completed in 1963, is now close to how its architect intended it to be, after a 45-year journey through celebration, fire, indifference, and abuse.

One of the most iconic architecture school buildings in the world, the object of a love-hate relationship with those who have known it, has found new repose amid a complex mixture of adoration, restoration, and exhilaration.

The restoration of Rudolph's masterwork, and the addition of an adjoining building for the art history department, are the work of New York architect Charles Gwathmey, a former student of Rudolph's who actually worked on the original building. The $126 million effort was guided by Yale's architecture dean, Robert A.M. Stern, who as a Yale student in the 1960s gave tours of Rudolph's concrete castle of architecture.

The Multi-Dimensional Nature of Emergency Communications Management

Someone has been paying attention for the past couple of years, and this new article from EDUCAUSE Review is either a must-read or a must-bookmark:

Within an incredibly short period—perhaps less than twenty-four months—the need for emergency preparedness has risen to a higher level of urgency than at any other time in the history of academe. Large or small, public or private, higher education institutions are seriously considering the dual problems of notification and communications management when potentially life-threatening events confront a campus environment. . . . On the one hand, there seems to be a growing tendency toward violence; on the other hand, an increasingly rich collection of notification, communications, and management tools can assist in mitigating the impact of these situations. . . . [t]he rich variety of tools and solutions leads to two important questions for colleges and universities to consider. First, how can these technologies be best leveraged to benefit emergency notification services? And second, what are the implications of all of these options on emergency communications management policies and operational procedures? We define an emergency notification system (ENS) as a specific technical service designed to achieve mass notification in the event of an incident demanding such an action. Emergency communications management (ECM) refers to the policies, procedures, and operations acting in concert with an ENS.

To help institutions answer these two questions and also to provide insight into the basic parameters of emergency communications in higher education today, the Steering Committee of the EDUCAUSE Net@EDU Converged Communications Working Group (CCWG)1 (http://www.educause.edu/ConvergedCommunicationsWorkingGroup/13524) recently sent a short survey to a group of carefully selected colleges and universities.2 The objective was to discover the nature of the work being accomplished at these institutions. The responses to this survey also helped to inform two case studies, prepared by the CCWG Steering Committee, on ENS and ECM solutions at Virginia Tech and the University of Iowa.

Shovels Ready? At Ease!

We can't get at the precise final language of the House and Senate compromise on the stimilus package, but while there is lots of money in it - in various places - for higher education, the dollars intended for "shovel ready" renovation and upgrading projects seems to have turned into something like a handful of snowflakes in July: Some general dollars given to state governors to do with as they wish, without a restriction saying that they can't use them for upgrading facilities. One anonymous SCUPer writes to us:

Amazing as it is that the President, House of Representatives and a majority (albeit a simple majority) in the Senate wanted to fund nearly $16 billion for school construction, this stimulus opportunity was collapsed into the state stabilization funding *an increase of $6.6 billion in lieu of K12 funding and an increase of $3.4 billion to states in lieu of the higher ed facility funding. But the school districts will have to fight with the states over whether or not it gets spent on school construction, because there is no mandate to spend it in this way.

Few of the SCUPers we have spoken with today believe that much of those dollars will do anything but help governors do a slightly better job of balancing their budgets. Whether any of the dollars end up in facilities renovation depends pretty much on whatever system is currently in place within each state, and many governors have already shown their readiness to cut off building projects to move dollars elsewhere.

As one SCUPer commented this morning, "There's something in there (or not) to make just about anyone angry."

Will the Financial Crisis Derail the New GI Bill?

We've been following the new GI Bill with great interest, as it was made into law and as it now gets implemented. Megan Eckstein shares what she has learned about some provisions of the law that make some administrators uneasy about their ability to fully implement it:

Under the program, created through the GI Bill that was signed into law last summer (The Chronicle, September 24, 2008), the federal government will match, dollar for dollar, any financial aid that colleges provide to veterans above the cost of the most-expensive public institution in that college's state. The general provisions of the GI Bill provide military personnel and recent veterans with enough aid to attend the most-expensive public college in the veterans' home states.

Advocates of the new program, known as the "yellow-ribbon program," worry that veterans' ability to afford the colleges of their choice would be limited if many colleges decide they cannot find the money to chip in to cover veterans' education costs.

Before they can decide to what extent they might be able to participate in the program, college administrators are waiting to see details of final regulations, which are expected sometime next month. The institutions are particularly interested in finding out how the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs will determine what the most expensive public institution is in each state and what fees would be counted toward that total.

Downturn Threatens the Faculty's Role in Running Colleges

We keep hearing the phrase "Never waste a crisis," and that seems to be running through everyone's heads these days. Robin Wilson describes how some faculty are concerned that the current crisis will be leveraged to decrease the faculty's role in higher education governance:

Professors are losing their grip. Tough economic times are leading administrators to propose swift changes that short-circuit faculty governance, long a prized principle that gives professors wide-ranging authority over educational matters.

The results, faculty members say, are hastily conceived plans that reorganize academic programs, decrease professors' roles in shaping the curriculum, and jeopardize tenure applications — all done with little advice from the faculty, in the name of saving money.

. . .

"A decline in resources has made administrators more interested in becoming independent movers and shakers," says Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors.

The Politics of Travel: Who Should Stay Home?

As you might expect, we at SCUP are absolutely certain that you and your campus will benefit tremendously from your attendance at higher education's premier planning conference in 2009 - SCUP-44 in Portland, OR, July 18-22. That's why we read with great interest this item from an anonymous vice president for government relations from a university in the midwest. Our favorite line is "My institution has nearly an annual budget of $700-million. Our travel budget is — well, no one knows." More:

There is little in the intricate world of a university that seems simpler than banning travel. The university would simply stop paying for mileage, airline tickets, hotels, tips, taxi rides, meals, and spa visits. (Just kidding about the last one.) However, in truth, the way that travel expenses are paid at a university is incredibly complex.

First, athletic departments get a pass. Teams play away games and coaches go on recruiting trips. Neither of those can change. But after sports, whether a division of the university can cut back on its travel costs comes down to, well, money. Let's examine the connection between travel and money office by office.

The development office (also known as fund raising or "institutional advancement") gets the next free pass.. . . "Wait a minute," a provost might say, "what about my researchers?" . . . The provost might add: "And what about my publishing faculty?" . . . In the scheme of things, travel is a very small portion of a university budget. My institution has nearly an annual budget of $700-million. Our travel budget is — well, no one knows.

Budget Crises, Academic Change: A Fable

This essayist reads like he's been around the block a few times. Reading this article, while at times it may seem unpleasant, provides - if nothing else - some of the jaundiced perspective on planning and planning processes that you might expect to hear from many in any constituency:

Budget reduction processes offer special opportunities for change. In public universities, these moments of fiscal challenge prompt government representatives, coordinating boards, and other responsible observers to tell us to take advantage of the crisis to restructure the university and achieve better efficiency and accountability. The state may give us a mid-year budget cut and ask for a strategic realignment of our work, as if the university operated on a week by week cycle.

Most of us respond politely, even though we know nothing of the kind is possible. By December, every university has already spent about half of its budget and it has made commitments for much of the rest. If it is to give money back to the state, it must find it by scrounging around in supplies and expenses, canceling travel, postponing purchases of new computers, and perhaps not hiring some adjuncts and increasing class sizes. But strategic realignments? Not a chance.

...

Finally, the president creates a strategic and accountable realignment for the institution by cutting a little here and a little there, abolishing a program that has no supporters in the legislature and ready-to-retire tenured faculty, and eliminating building maintenance funds to avoid laying off any faculty.
The public relations office describes these moves as creative and visionary change, and the press hails the president as a wise and profound academic leader who has accomplished these fine things in an effective and accountable way without damaging important academic functions of the institution. Although the president knows that the campus’ deteriorating physical plant will become a major issue for the future, she also knows that she will be somewhere else when that happens.

And so ends the fable with a budget crisis averted, and a change process achieved.

New Book: Turnaround: Leading Stressed Colleges and Universities to Excellence

University Business "Future Shock" writers James E. Samels and James Martin have published a new book which "outlines how board members, presidents, and administrators can identify their institutions’ weaknesses, implement plans for improvement, and mitigate existing damage."

Rather than jumping too quickly to a new, expensive degree program or an expanded marketing campaign, experienced campus leaders working to mitigate risks learn to gauge early on if mission has been considered in any substantive way. As Sandra Elman, president of the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, wrote, without a commonly understood vision across campus, “a weakened institution is likely to flounder and make arbitrary decisions that go unchallenged.” Placing mission first in a turnaround process focuses the leadership team on the institution’s core principles that should drive new program development, personnel hiring, and strategic marketing.

...

In reviewing summary recommendations from the book's core chapters on board leadership, the presidency, academic strategy, and the work of the cabinet, five areas emerge as central to turnaround success: clarity of mission, financial stability, infrastructure health, accreditation transparency, and engaged board, executive, and faculty leadership.

Each of these areas must be integrated into the overall turnaround plan for the institution finally to achieve and sustain stability, but we caution readers to realize that even in the face of a major enrollment decline or budget deficit, or the sudden defection of the president, there will remain multiple ways to address the institution’s most pressing problems. Thus we synthesize key strategies of approach and lessons learned with the understanding that they conclude a practitioner’s handbook designed to provide solutions for campus leaders who are contending with a broad scope of overlapping and ingrained weaknesses.

I Smell the Death of Education Approaching?

This article by Scott Jaschik covers a recent address by Ohio State University president E. Gordon Gee to an ACE audience. It's interesting in and of itself, but even more so because of the many interesting comments by readers posted in reaction to it. The first comment starts out, "I smell the death of education approaching," and it gets even more interesting in later comments. From the Jaschik article:

Noting that the United States created land-grant colleges in the middle of the Civil War, E. Gordon Gee told his fellow college presidents Sunday evening that the current economic crisis is no reason not to consider bold and far-reaching reforms of the institutions. “I am calling for intentional upheaval at our colleges and universities just when fiscal chaos already places us on the edge,” Gee said here at the annual meeting of the American Council on Education.

The choice for higher education, he said: “reinvention or extinction.”

Gee didn’t dispute the seriousness of the economic crisis facing colleges, calling it an “ever-worsening fiscal quagmire.” But he said that higher education must resist the “first instinct” of such situations, “to hunker down, hide out, take refuge in the fox hole, and wait for the storm to pass.” The situation is sufficiently dire, he said, that colleges need to “reconfigure ourselves,” rather than simply trying to restore lost funds.

Specifically, Gee suggested that colleges abandon their traditional devotion to disciplines, rethink the way faculty members are hired, and embrace a more central role for community colleges in higher education.

Michael Oakeshott and Educational Change

Twenty years downstream of Michael Oakeshott's publications of The Voice of Liberal Education, British-born conservative thinker Andrew Sullivan has published his 1989 dissertation, about Oakeshott, titled Intimations Pursued. In this blog post, Alan Contreras writes about some of Oakeshott's ideas, reflected upon in the realities of 2009:

The notion that students can ever again work their way through college at public colleges is entirely unmoored from the facts. At Oregon public universities, with which I am familiar, a student who could earn a year’s tuition by working 20 hours a week in 1965 would have to work 46 hours a week all year today to cover tuition. How, exactly, can students who spend all their time working or worrying about how and where to borrow more money be expected to focus on learning?

Yet there will be no more state subsidies sufficient to reduce the cost of public colleges. That era has been fading for fifteen years; in another fifteen it will be of interest only to academic historians. It is not that our elected officials lack good will: here in Oregon good will, and good decisions by elected officials, are easy to come by, even exemplary in recent years. Resources, however, are not easy to come by, and never will be again. The parents of today’s students are shocked at the cost of college, but the children of today’s students will live with it from birth and their parents, in school today, will have no illusions whatsoever.

We need more colleges of quality that are committed to offer their programs for very low fees, with an endowment that is designed to allow this forever and trustees who are committed to build and maintain such an endowment to that end. We need to recognize that government financial aid in meaningful amounts is over, as an effective large-scale policy. Governments are not going to have the money. That means that students will have to borrow increasingly onerous amounts or not go to college. Student loans in the amounts now required are not financial aid, they are financial oppression.

Using Quaker Principles to Budget in Tough Times

Most of us are involved in budget cutting exercises. We're looking for new revenues and we're looking for ways to cut expenses. Kent John Chabotar, president of Guilford College, writes about using heritage Quaker principles in budget planning and decision making processes:

In good times and bad over three decades, I have been involved in college financial decision-making as a faculty member and administrator. Whether it was at wealthy institutions like Harvard University or Bowdoin College, places of moderate means like Guilford College or public institutions like Michigan State or the University of Massachusetts, budgeting always involved not enough revenue and too many expenses. Frequently, trying to achieve a balanced budget was equivalent to trying to get 10 pounds of sugar in a 5-pound bag.

Those decisions have become far more difficult in the present economic maelstrom as revenues have deteriorated along with the stock market and tax base and expenses, especially for financial aid, threaten to skyrocket. The difficulty multiplies if the institution uses participatory budgeting processes in which the community from faculty to students gets involved.

Now I lead a college that uses principles from our Quaker heritage to make many decisions including the strategic plan, long range financial plan, and annual budget.

Emergency Management Forum: Sharing Information, Promoting Dialogue

The Emergency Management Forum, among other things, runs a top-notch series of interactive events on a wide range of aspects of crisis and disaster planning and management. Each event is live and interactive, as well an archived version is available to all, as well as transcripts. Each session is reviewed and rated, so you can see which your peers thought most highly of. We can't recommend these events highly enough.

The Best Idea Yet for Greening Campus IT

The anonymous sustainability blogger (Who is in charge of his campuses' ACUPCC work), G. Rendell, has a new idea:

Now there’s a better idea. It will take a while to work the details out and even longer to get the infrastructure in place, but it’s basically a flash of brilliance. So much of the electricity consumed on campus goes into various electronic appliances (using the term in its broadest sense). Each of them has its own, individual power converter, and the simple act of converting the AC to DC accounts for about 20-30% of the electricity used. But remember, we have to convert the power from high-voltage AC because that’s what we have available in every office.

Meanwhile, campuses are installing solar arrays and wind turbines and other means of generating electricity. Solar panels generate low-voltage DC, which has to be converted to high-voltage AC before it can get fed into the campus electrical network. Wind turbines can generate AC or DC equally well, but the more voltage they’re required to generate, the more wind you need. (See where this is going?)

Why not have a separate electrical network across campus, which delivers appropriate low-voltage DC to offices and (maybe) residence halls. There’d need to be standards worked out, but even if some voltage step-up or step-down were required some of the time, the losses would be far less than in the AC-to-DC scenario we’re now facing. And campuses are locales where a separate network could (relatively) easily be installed. And DC could be generated effectively and efficiently on more campuses than can AC. And the DC network could include significant power storage to smooth out the power available, as well as a (centrally converted, larger scale hence more efficient) feed from the electrical grid to assure power availability even at the end of long stretches of sunless, windless days and nights.

Share and Share Alike: Shared Services Partnerships

Article here, it includes several useful case studies:

Some higher ed institutions partner with other schools, but a number of shared services partnerships are in place that connect several campuses of the same university or college system. Either way, the benefits can be significant, especially when it comes to containing costs, and it’s likely that more IHEs will be doing this kind of sharing in the future as a way to keep budgets in check.

The strategy has some challenges as well as advantages. Experts in the field have noted that intracampus partnerships in particular can be fraught with cultural and political issues. Sometimes the amount of governance and oversight required isn’t worth the money saved or the relationships fostered.

Despite the potential glitches, administrators have found that—depending on the project—it can be worth the effort. For administrators looking to undertake a shared services partnership or streamline one that’s already in place, the following rules can help in making the most of the arrangement.

The Cost of Innovation: Teaching and Learning and the Bottom Line

We enjoy Richard Ekman's essays in University Business magazine:

Graduates should be expected to demonstrate that they can learn through a variety of formats: lecture, seminar, independent study, internship, guided research, and online course. Lectures aren’t inherently bad, and seminars aren’t inherently good. An education received entirely through any one instruction mode doesn’t prepare students for the many ways in which information is received and must be presented in the postgraduation world.

The most effective forms of instruction are sometimes inexpensive, and the least effective are sometimes very expensive. We are all familiar with courses that use internet-based exercises in which the online material is simply a static textbook to be consulted and read online. Except for faster searching, the technology’s capability is not exploited for any of its distinctive features—dynamic capabilities for simulation or modeling, use of images (especially moving images), sound mixed with text, or graphical representation of complex data. A student learns little in these courses that couldn’t be learned equally well from a printed book.

Paper-Based Computing: Not What You Think

This article by Charles Hannon in EDUCAUSE Quarterly is subtitled, "Another new technology demands we work together to plan the future—or be caught unprepared when the inevitable issues arise."

We agree with that sentiment: Faculty have a great deal of control over their lectures, lecture notes, and slides. A coming wave of recording devices and other classroom technologies—this time wielded by the students—will test this control and force serious conversations about how we can best help students learn, what it means to own an idea, and what we mean when we talk about developing a community of learners on campus.

The harbinger of this wave is the Livescribe Pulse smart pen, created by an MIT engineer and initially aimed directly at the college student market. The smart pen points a tiny camera at specially marked paper,1 captures what is written, and converts the writing to PDF files and plain text in what is being called paper-based computing. The pen comes with microphones that capture audio and software that synchronizes it with the written notes. A student can replay an entire lecture at a later time, either by interacting with the written notes or through a computer. The pen’s software also makes it easy to share recorded class sessions with other students at the Livescribe website or through Facebook.

How different is the functionality of the smart pen from existing technologies? It certainly is not the first recording device to turn up in the classroom—students have been asking permission to use recorders for years. The concept of electronic notes that can be shared among peers also is not new; students have been bringing their laptops to class for over a decade, and few faculty proscribe the sharing of notes. At many colleges, the floodgates appear to be already open, with faculty making their course materials available electronically, from posting simplified notes to a course website to streaming video and slides of every moment of the class meeting.

Because it is so easy to create, reproduce, and distribute digital content, new technologies such as the smart pen will bring to the foreground issues that have always existed just under the surface of our everyday practice. It is one thing for faculty to provide students a copy of their PowerPoint slides or allow them to share notes or record a lecture. It is altogether different for students to create word-for-word digital text and audio transcriptions of a semester-long course. It can be heartening to see a small group of students pooling their notes and meeting to discuss difficult concepts, but imagine a top student posting a highly accurate digital transcript of a semester’s worth of intellectual work to a Facebook page. The realities of digital content, combined with the popularity of social networking sites, make this new environment one that we need to shape with clearly thought-out and articulated policies.

The Challenge of Establishing World-Class Universities

We think very highly of the work of the Center for International Higher Education, especially its journal. But there is a related series of podcasts, too. This recent one sounds good:

Dr. Jamil Salmi is coordinator of the World Bank’s network of tertiary education professionals, and is the principal author of the Bank’s Tertiary Education Strategy entitled “Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education.” A Moroccan education economist, Dr. Salmi has provided policy and technical advice on tertiary education reform to a wide variety of governments. He has also guided the strategic planning efforts of several public and private universities in Colombia, Kenya, Mexico, and Peru. Most recently, Dr. Salmi has completed work on a new book, The Challenge of Establishing World-Class Universities, to be published by the World Bank in February 2009.

Embedding Nature in the Built Environment

The designers among us will want to read this article. We wish we had time to follow the links in it.

In a recent Yale University podcast, Steve Kellert, professor at the university's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and editor of the book The Biophilia Hypothesis, speaks of biophilia as an essential part of sustainable design. The general concept of sustainable or green design focuses on minimizing or avoiding the harmful effects on the natural environment. Kellert's argument is, “that [it] is necessary but not sufficient to achieve sustainability. That if you achieve that effect in a building—a hermetically sealed skyscraper where people are working in windowless environments—that won't be sustainable because basically those environments do not produce physical and mental wellbeing.” (http://www.healthcaredesign magazine.com/YalePodcast)

Because physical and mental wellbeing is top concern for a hospital, exploring the biologically based bond between humans and nature is especially important in these environments where medical technology and products seem to be an antithesis to nature.

Digital Research Tools

Here in the SCUP office we are constantly on the search for new tools to use to make our woork go better and faster. We are vigorous users of instant messaging, Google Documents, and we're seeing if Twitter or Yammer can make us more productive. Here's a new resource that lists a ton of digital research tools that might help you with your job and its dwindling budget:

As more and more scholars grow interested in the world of digital research, this tremendously useful wiki will be one that they will tell their colleagues about. Created by Lisa Spiro, the director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University, this collaborative wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Visitors can browse through topical headings that include "Authoring", "Blogging", and "Data Mining", among others. Within each heading, visitors can read short descriptions about each resource. Under the "Types of Tools" section visitors can search for specific tools that can help them collect data, edit images, make a dynamic map, and so on. Additionally, visitors can sign up to join the wiki here and also learn more about Spiro and her other projects. [KMG]

Copyright 2009 Internet Scout Project - http://scout.wisc.edu

Survey and Questionaire Tutorial

Yep, we know everyone thinks they know how to write a survey or a questionaire. It's like "marketing," which everyone also thinks they know how to do.

What are the important factors to consider when designing a survey? Would it be best conducted via telephone? Or would it be better to have a face-to-face meeting? These are but a few of the topics covered on this site created as a public service by the StatPac group. Visitors can elect to download the entire report on survey design here, or they can just click through the topics that interest them. Each topic includes a brief discussion of its relative importance, and the areas covered include questionnaire length, time considerations, question wording, and sampling methods. It's a thoughtful and helpful resource overall, and it's one that might be put to good use in an introductory statistics course in college. [KMG]

Copyright 2009 Internet Scout Project - http://scout.wisc.edu

Inside the GPS Revolution: 10 Applications That Make the Most of Location

You only have to very quickly skim through this brief article on things that GPS is letting you do with a cell phone to start coming up with your own ideas. When, for example, can we start taking attendance with GPS? Did you know that you could scan a barcode with your smart phone and it could not only tell you how much it costs, but other locations nearby (or online) where the same product is available, perhaps for less money? Did you know you could tell it that when you are in certain locations, its ringer should stay off? DId you know you can tell it to understand where you are in a place where you don't always feel secure and it can, then, when you "shake" it , it "take[s] a picture, turn on its speaker, and dial 911 (or another emergency number) . The app announces each of these steps out loud so a would-be assailant can hear what's happening and give up." This is really only the beginning of this kind of stuff.

AASHE 2008 Proceedings

If you are interested in SCUP's forthcoming What Governing Boards Need to Know: Environmental Sustainability as a Strategic Policy Issue webcast, you will be interested in this SCUP Link as well.

We were pleased to be able to participate in the 2008 conference of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) last fall. We are doubly pleased that even those who could not attend can enjoy video of several of the great plenary sessions by Lester Brown, Van Jones, and Peter Senge. And triply pleased that more than 150 slide sets, posters, and other materials from presenters are available to the world on a proceedings website.