California's University System: What Went Wrong?

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

This look at what has happened to higher education in California since Clark Kerr's original Master Plan for Higher Education is definitely of interest to SCUPers. The author, Lisa M. Krieger, of Mercury News, lists the following as among the most critical factors during that time:

• Plummeting state support;
• No huaranteed funding;
• Continued expansion; and
• Little coordination.
  Fifty years ago this month, California promised a low-cost, high-quality university education for every qualified high school graduate in the state. But that promise — inflated by growing populations and academic aspirations — expanded beyond the state's willingness to pay for it. What went wrong? How did the university system that was long the envy of the world suddenly become the focus of angry street protests, overcrowded classrooms, soaring tuition and a monumental debate over whether the state can ever make good again on its groundbreaking mission?

While the recession turned a slow-brewing problem into an instant crisis, a Mercury News analysis of California's higher-education mess reveals that many factors drove the inevitable and ugly collision between the university system's ambitious and uncoordinated growth and the state's declining ability and desire to pay for it.

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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, Tempe, AZ - Step II and Step III

Managing the Enterprise on Limited Resources Using ERPs

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

Tim Goral of University Business examines the use of Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERPs) in the current economic climate by interviewing several campus leaders and some experts from the corporate world:

We’ve all heard the mantra: Do more with less. In the current economy, colleges and universities are continually being asked to be more productive and effective with ever-shrinking resources. A key to accomplishing that is to have a solid information system—an intergrated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that can help them toward that goal in numerous ways.

[And . . . ]

The other big difference is a fundamental shift in the way our staff is being used. When we had our legacy system, most of our development staff was in maintenance and repair mode. Now we’re almost completely out of that mode and looking at how to create value-adding projects for our university.

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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

Workshop: Linking Planning and Assessment in Higher Education: A Practical Guide

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

You could not find a better presentation or a better, more-informed set of presenters on this topic.

Audience: Planners new to the use of the assessment process in accreditation activities as a springboard to integrated planning

Abstract: This workshop focuses on strategies for effectively utilizing information drawn from a broad range of assessment activities. It goes deeper into the content found in the SCUP volume, Integrating Planning and Assessment in Higher Education: A Practical Guide (2006). Participants will identify the information that should drive the strategic planning process at a college or university and that provides the evidence needed to make more targeted decisions in the allocation of human and fiscal resources. The presentation will also highlight the linkage between assessment and planning as a critical compliance criterion among all regional accrediting bodies in the United States. The workshop will use a series of exercises throughout the presentation to interactively engage participants and reinforce the concepts and principles being presented. Each participant will receive a comprehensive workbook containing presentation materials and a list of resources for use upon completion of the workshop.

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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 24–26: Cambridge, MA - "Strengths and Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats"
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA - "Smart Planning in an Era of Uncertainty"
• April 7, Houston, TX - "Sustaining Higher Education in an Age of Challenge"

'Design Thinking' and Higher Education

Do you "bristle" at the thought of running a university more like a private sector business? Steven Bell proposes that instead you consider "design thinking."

Design thinking is no panacea for all that ails higher education. Resolving challenges such as low retention and graduations rates, escalating textbook costs, an over-dependence on adjunct faculty, lean budgets, for-profit competitors and myriad other problems will take more than a business as usual approach. However, higher education is not a business, and faculty and students will always respond caustically if they believe corporate solutions are being foisted on them by an unsympathetic administration.

This is where design thinking can make a difference. It's more than a short-term strategy for boosting profits. It's a roadmap for future-proofing one of society's most valued resources. And since it involves no acquisition of or investment in sophisticated new technology, only a desire to try a new way of identifying and tackling institutional challenges, it's right for the times. Those who want to engage with these ideas can begin with the Deep Dive video mentioned above or choose from a host of blogs written by experts in design thinking and user experience.

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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

Pursuing Needless Innovations

Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) argues for the value of "traditional" learning and matriculation, and wonders why America's elites don't seem to want the great education they got, for the rest of the population. (Here is the Zephyr Teachout essay that we think is the one he refers to. It's also worth reading. Ekman's essay is here, from University Business:

Most Americans today don’t harbor resentments against their alma maters. Nor is the popular critique of higher education mainly a matter of outrage over high tuition. Rather, the public criticism of colleges is, to a surprising extent, aimed at the educational experience itself.

Discarding the baby with the bathwater, Zephyr Teachout’s widely-circulated essay argues that the traditional classroom-based college will soon be replaced by online education, and that the differences in reputation among colleges will no longer matter. I don’t know where Teachout went to college, but her view—especially that a college’s prestige won’t matter—seems more wishful than realistic.

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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

New School Announced: 'The College for Working Families'

Yet another new thing in higher education, brought about by the financial crisis, the "first and only accredited degree-granting online institution devoted exclusively to educating union members."

Here's the press release and here's The New York Times' Steven Greenhouse writing about it:

The A.F.L.-C.I.O., the main umbrella group for the nation’s labor unions, announced on Thursday that it was joining with the National Labor College and the Princeton Review to create an online college for the federation’s 11.5 million members and their families.

The new college, tentatively named the College for Working Families, will seek to “expand job opportunities for its members by providing education and retraining in a way that’s affordable and accessible,” the founders said.

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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

While You're Changing Things, Think About Making the Change Last

This is a thoughtful resource and well worth reading with regard to any institutional planning, not just in the area of its focus: Student services. The author, Robin P. Krakowsky is senior vice president of administration, Johnson & Wales University. Writing in Business Officer, she notes that he found plenty of specific information about the vast changes in student services that have been made on many campuses in the last 20 years, but little about how to sustain those changes once made. He undertook some research and serves up results, analysis, and a model:

The resulting “Model for Sustaining Change in Higher Education Administrative Student Services” (see table) describes the primary and secondary factors that help make change a reality as well as the related commitments and actions that sustain the changes over time. A discussion of the model's application will come later in this article . . .

Not surprisingly, the elements most relevant and critical for supporting continuous improvement, increased effectiveness, and sustainable change center on people and the organizational culture. These three primary factors fall into three categories: leadership; human—both managerial and individual; and cultural.

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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

ECAR Study: Institutional Data Management in Higher Education

The EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) has issued a new report, Institutional Data Management in Higher Education, based on a previous survey. It should be of interest to planners and others who collect, manipulate, analyze, or use institutional data for decision making. If your campus is an ECAR subscriber, you should be able to download the entire report. Even if not, you can access the Table of Contents, Key Findings, Roadmap, and the Survey Instrument. ECAR describes the report in this way:

This 2009 ECAR study of institutional data management examines the policies and practices by which higher education institutions effectively collect, protect, and use digital information assets to meet academic and business needs. Importantly, it also explores the impact of the "data big bang" on colleges and universities and the way information technology (IT) organizations deal with it. While the overall guiding concept is data management, the definition of data management that informs this study refers broadly to information assets in digital form. The study takes a multipart approach that includes a literature review to examine data management frameworks and definitions and to define issues and establish research questions; consultation with higher education IT administrators and data management experts to identify and validate survey questions; a quantitative web-based survey of EDUCAUSE member institutions that received 309 responses, 78% of which were from the institution CIO or equivalent; qualitative interviews with 23 higher education IT leaders and staff; and two case studies, one examining a sensitive data risk reduction initiative at the University of Virginia, and one concerning Chronopolis, a multi-institutional grid-based project for the long-term preservation of research data.

[more]

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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

New Book: An Evil Side to 'Positive Thinking'?

As one who found the book, Who Moved My Cheese?, to be incredibly condescending, Kerry Howley's review of Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, is sufficient to ensure that this blogger will find that book and read it. The review is published in Reason and we found it via The Chronicle of Higher Education's Arts & Letters Daily. If you purchase the book through this link at Amazon, SCUP will receive a small percentage of the purchase price.

Ehrenreich weighs down her argument with dubious chains of causation and ponderous overstatement, but her central point still shines through the mess. Platitudinous happy-talk seems so harmless that most of us barely notice it, yet it can be a burdensome, even bullying, attempt to enforce emotional conformity.

Ehrenreich is always interesting, always comes from a politically progressive perspective, and the processes by which she comes to conclusions are often easy to disagree with. But she makes unique and thought-provoking observations about our culture.

We think a planner would find her observations about the ubiquity of positive thinking, and its "cultural pressure so totalizing we sometimes fail to notice its existence," of interest in organizing and observing stakeholder meetings, focus groups, and the like.

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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

Small-College Presidents Hear Tips on Building a Leadership Team

Writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Robin Wilson reveals some of the shared leadership stories of the 255 small college presidents who met recently via the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC). Scott Jaschick of Inside Higher Ed also attended this conference and reports on it here. Wilson focused on top level leadership team challenges and Jaschik writes more broadly about the issues discussed.

From Wilson's account:

Most valuable, the presidents said, was to seek senior leaders who can think about the work of the whole institution, rather than be sidetracked by devotion to their own special areas.

"You want people who can take that big picture and give up something they normally would have fought for in their own area—because it's in the best interests of the institution," said Susan C. Scrimshaw, president of the Sage College.

From Jaschik's account:

"Is there an economist in the house?" Paul Hennigan, president of Point Park University, jokingly asked the question of a group of college presidents gathered here at a meeting of the Council of Independent Colleges. While there was one economist among the presidents, he seemed as worried as everyone else about the impact the economy was having on their institutions.

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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

Purpose-Driven Organizational Planning: The P-GOATS Model in Practice

This League for Innovation Leadership Abstract by Stan Brings, describes a a distinctive institutional community college planning model with a step-by-step guide:

Using the P-GOATS model for organizational planning may seem like an oversimplification of a task that can seem overwhelming. Whether considered from a reductionist perspective or a constructivist perspective, the structured, systematic approach makes P-GOATS a practicable approach. The logical construction of the model and its organized implementation make it understandable to the diverse populations that make up community college stakeholder groups.

The P-GOATS model for organizational planning improves effectiveness by structuring the work of the college. It improves efficiencies by identifying gaps and redundancies and providing opportunities for leveraging and optimizing college capacities. But perhaps its greatest and most important outcome is its effect on the individuals who make up the college. Providing security and a sense of certainty by establishing a direct connection between their work and the purpose of the college will yield dividends beyond those quantified for effectiveness and efficiency.