Appropriations as an Afterthought

Sometimes it's lonely on campus, being a planner. Start planning now to attend higher education's premier planning conference for 2010, SCUP–45, July 10–14 in Minneapolis, where you can network and converse with more than 1,000 of your peers and colleagues.

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More from Inside Higher Ed:

With college lobbyists awaiting action on student loan reform, passage of 2010 spending bills get little attention. Here is a quick review of what's in them.

Projecting Sustainability

Sometimes it's lonely on campus, being a planner. Start planning now to attend higher education's premier planning conference for 2010, SCUP–45, July 10–14 in Minneapolis, where you can network and converse with more than 1,000 of your peers and colleagues.
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In the Getting to Green Blog section at Inside Higher Ed:

Isn't all teaching either political, social, or economic advocacy? How is it that some consider advocating for change while teaching to be a bad thing?

Rice at a Crossroads

From Inside Higher Ed, Rice at a Crossroads:

Baylor College of Medicine has become something of a Rorschach test for Rice University faculty members. Some look at the institution down the street and see a top tier medical school that could be enveloped into Rice at a bargain basement price. For others, Baylor is a financially beleaguered institution that will at best drain resources from Rice, and at worst suck it down like an anchor.

The Mystery of Faculty Priorities

From an Inside Higher Ed article:

"Remler, associate professor ofpublic affairs at Baruch College of the City University of New York, and Pema, an assistant professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School, decided to review the literature and economic theories that might explain the reasons more colleges and departments are encouraging their faculty members to focus on research, at the expense of teaching time. And they found an abundance of theories, some of which may overlap and some of which may conflict with one another. The authors suggest that higher education would benefit from figuring out just why this phenomenon has taken place, given its expense in money and faculty time."

Read the article:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/28/nber

We also have a link to the full report:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14974.pdf

Where is the Distance Education 'Tipping Point'?

When do the realities of having a lot of students doing distance education change your institution, and how? Cerro Coso Community College administrators (That school is past the 50 percent mark) led a discussion recently at the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD) meeting. Among the important impacts: Faculty Hiring and Training, Local Ties, and Technology Infrastrucuture.

"What do we change -- if we change anything?" said Dylan D. Mattina, director of information technology, in introducing the session. "This is something that many institutions will have to deal with at some point."

Mattina and others from his college discussed several of the choices colleges need to make as they reach either 50 percent or some other critical mass where the institution is changed by the success of its distance offerings."

Read the full article here:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/26/distance

Peace in Accreditation Land

Writing in Inside Higher Ed, Doug Lederman summarizes recent happenings in "accreditation land" this way: "In stark contrast to 2007, federal negotiations over accreditation rules end in accord, overcoming dispute over student learning outcomes that might have derailed the proceeding[s]."

"Those issues were on the agenda again as another panel of negotiators completed several months of work on accreditation at an Education Department office building Tuesday, but with a dramatically different result (and dramatically less drama). The college administrators, higher education lobbyists, accreditors, state officials and others around the conference table -- including Education Department staff members -- reached "consensus" on a package of 16 regulatory proposals to carry out changes Congress made in legislation to renew the Higher Education Act last summer. (When such negotiating sessions end with "consensus" among the parties on a package of regulatory changes, a federal agency is bound to propose them as is; when no consensus is reached, the agency can essentially do whatever it wants.)"

Read the full article here:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/20/accredit

Leveraging Crisis for Competitive Advantage

This essay gets filed under the heading of "Never waste a crisis," this author examines whether institutions are just "weathering the storm" or engaged in significant realignment. He finds that private universities have a competitive advantage in circumstances like the one we are in now.

University competition is a game played on the leading edge of institutional behavior, not at the center. The optimal strategy is to move money from the less productive trailing edge to the more productive leading edge. Executed consistently over time, this strategy delivers an ever-increasing leading edge of highly competitive quality that pulls the center of the university’s operations relentlessly forward towards higher standards of performance. The financial crisis cycle provides periodic opportunities to move more money from the trailing edge for investment in the leading edge. Those institutions that take advantage of these crises benefit greatly.

What’s a Financial Aid Director to Do?

This article by Doug Ledermen featured in Inside Higher Education discusses the Financial Aid problems that many Financial Aid offices have recently come under fire for. Ledermen brings up many pertinent issues on the topic including how many Financial Aid offices have conflicting compliance troubles.

"Financial aid and lending officials in New York are far from alone in facing potential uncertainty over which requirements to abide by. More than a dozen state attorneys general have adopted their own codes of conduct, and virtually any student loan provider — and any college that enrolls students from New York — is technically covered by the SLATE law.

“If you have 5 or 10 or 15 different standards that institutions are being held to, that enormously complicates their efforts to comply, and results in the possibility of significant confusion,” says Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education. “At the end of the day, everybody is further ahead if the standards, rules and procedures are clear and widely understood.” (One university’s recent stab at comparing the differences among the many proposals out there can be found here.)"

A Worldwide Test for Higher Education?

Doug Lederman writes, in Inside Higher Ed, about a quiet move to explore implementing a worldwide student learning outcomes assessment for higher education. Not everyone is happy with the idea; the comments section is quite lively.

[T]he Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has convened a small group of testing experts and higher education policy makers who have met quietly in recent months to discuss the possibility of creating a common international system to measure the learning outcomes of individual colleges and university systems, along the lines of the well-regarded test that OECD countries now administer to 15-year-olds, the Program for International Student Assessment.

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[SCUPer] Trudy W. Banta, a professor of higher education and senior adviser to the chancellor for academic planning and evaluation at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, said she believed that it would be extremely difficult to design one measure that could apply “across the many cultures, languages, institutions” that are part of the OECD universe. Beyond those practical concerns, though, Banta, who has written in Inside Higher Ed and other publications about the limitations of standardized measures of learning, expressed a more philosophical concern. “I’m afraid that everybody is looking for a silver bullet, a magic potion, that will tell them about quality” in higher education. “The latest tool in that arsenal is a standardized test,” which inevitably results, she said, in oversimplified measurements of institutions’, or in this case potentially countries’, success or failure.

Faculty Communication 101: What They Didn't Tell You in Chair School

In this article from Inside Higher Ed, Elia Powers interviews former administrator and faculty member, Christopher J. Loving, about the programs he has designed "to help those working in academia better communicate with each other":

When I talk to faculty who are in a “safe” place, I still hear their innocence, their curiosity, their compassion. If you’re in a department that isn’t as healthy as it could be, all these people who are cynical and arrogant create conversations that look realistic and authoritative, and they require thick skin. They flame each other in e-mail, insult each other in faculty meetings and tell and demand more than listen and invite.

Going Global 101

The article, "Going Global 101," is from Inside Higher Ed by J. Michael Adams and Angelo Carfagne:

There is no single path to creating a global university or a global curriculum. In fact, what you do is actually less important than how you view what you are doing. In other words, if you believe it is vital to prepare the next generation as world citizens, your methods will spring from that fundamental mindset. Innovations will arise from the imperative. And innovators are building tremendous programs throughout the country that spread knowledge of other countries and cultures, convey appreciation for the rich diversity and interconnected nature of our world, and instill intercultural competencies.

Community Colleges: 'Going Residential"

This article, "Going Residential," is from Inside Higher Ed by Jennifer Epstein. It is a nicely done review of a number of institutions which have implemented or are implementing student residence life at the community college level:

Of the 1,100 colleges represented by the American Association of Community Colleges, 233 public colleges and about 40 private colleges offer some on-campus housing to their students. Norma Kent, the association’s spokeswoman, said that although “nobody’s documented the full picture, it is our sense that there is increased interest and growth” in campus housing at community colleges.

“With more traditional-age students enrolling at community colleges for a variety of reasons, colleges and students seem more receptive to on-campus housing,” she said. “They want that college experience.”

Campus Accountability Projects - Good Article

This new Inside Higher Ed article is a nicely comprehensive look, with lots of links out to documents and other articles, at two new accountability proposals: One from NAICU (National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities) and one from a collaboration between AASCU (American Association of State Colleges and Universities) and NASULGC (National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges). Here is a PDF document containing a "mock up" of a report from "Accountability University" demonstrating the AASCU/NASULGC initiative's Voluntary System of Accountability. Here is NAICU's Consumer Information Template.

We know that former SCUP visiting board member, John Hammang, a senior AASCU official, has been instrumental in developing the AASCU/NASULGC initiative.

P.S. Here is a link to similar coverage by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

P.P.S. If you are interested in this article, you may be interested in taking a look at SCUP's resource page regarding Academic Planning and if your interest is related to the accreditation process, you are surely interested in the SCUP book, Integrating Higher Education Planning and Assessment: A Practical Guide.