Outsourcing, Insourcing–and Everything in Between

Plesae scroll down to your SCUP Link, below this notice about SCUP–45.

Oh, no! You won't be getting a printed SCUP–45 Preliminary Program in the mail this year. Instead, SCUP is going green and regularly updating this digital version (PDF), which you can download at any time.

Check it out! You don't want to miss higher education's premier planning conference, and your one chance this year to assemble with nearly 1,500 of your peers and colleagues: July 10–14, Minneapolis.

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SCUP Link

Can we keep up with the demands of Millennials? Is a broader variety of outsourcing part of the answer? From University Business:

Today, nine out of 10 colleges are outsourcing a broad variety of non-academic functions including recruitment, admissions, financial aid, and, impressively, creating virtual communities of distance learners connected through laptops, PDAs, and, increasingly, mobile communication devices. These same students have increasingly accessed distributed student services for three simple reasons–convenience, timeliness, and interactive communication–read as engagement.

Though it may seem counter-intuitive for our generation, these millennial students find satisfaction in instantaneous recognition, feedback, and advisement. Unlike their older brothers and sisters, these students are seemingly intolerant of commuting, parking, and waiting in line for class registration. Instead, they want a virtual, convenient one-stop admissions, enrollment, and student support experience, delivered through the wonders of digital connections with the campus of their choice.

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SCUP's Planning Institute: Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers while you engage in one of the three SCUP Planning Institute Steps. In addition to being offered on demand, on campuses to teams of campus leaders, the institute steps are also offered to all professionals at varying times and venues. Currently scheduled are:

• May 22–23, Ann Arbor, MI - Step I
• July 10, Minneapolis, MN - Step I (in conjunction with SCUP–45)
• October 2, Ann Arbor, MI - Step I
• January 21–22, Tuscon, AZ - Step II and Step III

'Must-Have' From Pew: Millennials Are Really Different

A must-have for college and university planners. The Pew Research Center is out with a brand new study of Millennials. You'll find the Executive Summary here, with plenty of links, including to a PDF download of the entire report.

Related, the SCUP Portfolio: Make Way for Millennials: How Students Are Shaping Learning in Higher Education. In it, many SCUP authors write about Millennials and how they are shaping campus facilities and programs.

From the Pew Executive Summary:

They are more ethnically and racially diverse than older adults. They're less religious, less likely to have served in the military, and are on track to become the most educated generation in American history.

Millennials are on course to become the most educated generation in American history, a trend driven largely by the demands of a modern knowledge-based economy, but most likely accelerated in recent years by the millions of 20-somethings enrolling in graduate schools, colleges or community colleges in part because they can't find a job. Among 18 to 24 year olds a record share -- 39.6% -- was enrolled in college as of 2008, according to census data.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

ACUHO-I's 'Talking Stick' Magazine

The Association of College and University Housing Officers International (ACUHO-I) is one of SCUP's sister associations in the Council of Higher Education Management Associations (CHEMA). It's one of those associations which have a dual role on campus, each half of which needs to be integrated with the other, but often presents different issues: Housing facilities and the programming for student life that relates to student housing.

It's magazine is called Talking Stick, and past issues are available for review through a clickable online PDF file. The November-December 2009 issue is here. Among the articles in this issue is They're Back by Neil Howe and Reena Nadler. It's about Millennials, and how more senior staff on campus can best help them adapt (and adapt to them) as work colleagues, now that they've graduated and are no longer students. If you're finding yourself working with Millenials, this is a good read. If your interests or responsibilities relate to student housing, it's worth browsing through Talking Stick's back issues.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

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

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This article was published in January 2009 in the second of two themed issues of Planning for Higher Education. SCUP members most likely have print copies, and can also access the articles from SCUP's website. In order to bring it out and make it available to everyone, we have assembled all of the articles into this digital (PDF) SCUP Portfolio.

When it comes to building student housing, the stakes for universities and colleges have never been higher. From competing for prospective students and environmental bragging rights to contesting for space on the typical campus, institutions face a fundamentally different landscape than they did when housing previous generations of students. A national sampling of student residential projects and housing data provide some indication of emerging trends. Universities and colleges will increasingly look to the campus edge (even in difficult environments), will challenge themselves to build sustainably (even where budgets are tight), and will partner or compete with private developers in a variety of contexts. These emerging trends are set against the already-established trend that finds students enjoying—and expecting—more luxurious accommodations than were once typical.

Citation
John Martin and Mark Allen. 2009. Students in My Backyard: Housing at the Campus Edge and Other Emerging Trends in Residential Development. Planning for Higher Education. 37(2): 34–43.

CLICK HERE for the full text of Students in My Backyard: Housing at the Campus Edge and Other Emerging Trends in Residential Development

Struggling College Students are Having an Even More Difficult Time

Are they "doing more with less" or "doing less with less"? This USA Today article examines the longer walks (free, the bus costs money), the changes in diet (less soda, more canned tuna), and other ways students are changing behaviors - and briefly mentioned programs at a number of schools to allow students with unpaid tuition to stay enrolled, and to freeze or limit increases to tuition:

The Community College of Denver has offered a food bank to students for more than 10 years, but in the past year there been a significant increase in its use, says Jerry Mason, director of student life: "We are actually having trouble keeping up." The student government has doubled its annual funding from $3,000 to $6,000 to help with the increased demand, he says.

Federal financial aid applications filed nationwide for this fiscal year increased by 9% compared with last year, a projected 1.2 million more applicants, according to Department of Education data.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

'Millennial' or 'Net Generation' Students and Their Impact on the Development of Student-Centered Facilities

This is the first of two themed issues of SCUP's journal that examine both the evolving student and the changing learning and living experience. This first issue focuses on key questions surrounding today's students: What do we know about them? What can we observe in their lifestyle and learning tendencies that would have an impact on learning experience design perspective? In the second issue, we will investigate how higher education institutions are responding to these changes. . . . To accomplish this purpose, we strive first to create a broad understanding of this context of change. We then explore the changes in programs, physical facilities, and environment that have and are being planned in response to these trends.

Read the full article here. Then use this blog's capability to comment or share additional, related resources. Thanks.

From the October–November–December 2008 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, 'Millennial' or 'Net Generation' Students and Their Impact on the Development of Student-Centered Facilities, v37n1, pp. 5-6, by John A. Ruffo. You can read the entire article here. It is an introduction, by Guest Editor John Ruffo, to the overall concept of this two-part, themed issue of Planning.

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

Why Professor Johnny Can't Read: Understanding the Net Generation's Texts

From Mark Mabrito and Tebecca Medley, in innovate: journal of online education, comes this more academic and thoughtful version of the cyclic news item about how differently some of the youngsters are communicating:

One way of better understanding Net-Generation learners is to examine the texts they create on online social networking, blogging, and image sites as well as in virtual worlds. Mark Mabrito and Rebecca Medley explore the nature of Net-Generation texts as a reflection of the cognitive differences between this generation's students and their older instructors, discuss the unique challenges this group of learners may present for instructors who do not share their technological immersion, and suggest the means by which such challenges may be overcome. To accommodate the needs of the Net Generation, Mabrito and Medley suggest that faculty must reconsider traditional pedagogy and integrate more innovative ways of instruction for this significantly different population of students.

Designing Buildings and Spaces for the Cellphone Generation

SCUPer Mary Jo Olenick was the March guest blogger for The Chronicle of Higher Education's Buildings & Grounds Blog. Now she takes her turn in a live, interactive "brown bag" on the Chronicle website on Thursday, May 22 at Noon Eastern time. Why don't we join in? You could continue this discussion F2F in the AT & IV, Learning Space Design roundtables at SCUP-43 on Monday and Wednesday mornings.

Architects and planners who design for colleges must be aware of how today's students live and how their social networks function. Before cellphones spread across campuses, for instance, students relied on common gathering spaces for both planned and spontaneous meetings. Now that just about every student has a cellphone, though, students have much less need for lobbies and atriums — they can track down their friends instantly. And generous public spaces will not encourage social interaction if there's a stigma attached to being seen without your friends (you should at least be seen talking to them on your cellphone). So should that space be devoted to some other use? What other new priorities for planners and architects have been prompted by the cellphone generation? Are traditional notions of the college campus due for a radical rethinking?

Frontline: Growing Up Online

PBS' Frontline's website for its program, 'Growing Up Online', includes many resources beyond the full program that was broadcast on television. But it also includes the full television program in streaming video format. Those of us who've lived through the last 15 years or so in higher education have been astonished by the changes. But the next ten years may be even more transformative in terms of the the expectations and capabilities of our future students.