Wanted: Higher Education Leaders Who Produce

Larry A. Isaak, president of the Midwestern Higher Education Compact and chancellor emeritus of the North Dakota University System identifies the need for higher education to ramp up to massively larger levels of productivity:

The force of the need to educate many more millions is on a collision course with other forces confronting today’s campuses. The federal budget and many state budgets are constrained by present economic conditions and rocketing spending for defense, public safety, health care, human services and transportation. There likely won’t be a pot of gold at the end of the government budget rainbow for most colleges and universities to garner significantly more operating funds to accomplish what they are being asked to do. Plus, now — even more than earlier this decade — policy makers appear to be more opposed to continuous and significant increases in tuition and fees as a means to redress budget shortfalls.

As a result, productivity and affordability in higher education will take center stage just as accountability took center stage this past decade.

Online Archive of Public Policy Research Launched

Descriptive article here, about: A new resource of interest especially to strategic planners in higher education:Scholars and researchers interested in gaining a wide audience, including mayors, state legislators, and other policymakers, for their public policy scholarship can turn to the PolicyArchive (www.PolicyArchive.org), a free comprehensive, online archive of public policy research. PolicyArchive was launched this month by the nonprofit Center for Governmental Studies (CGS) in association with the Indianapolis University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) University Library.

The archive itself can be found here. Tip of the hat to SCUP Director of Education and Planning, Phyllis Grummon, for this link.

Engaging Higher Education in Societal Challenges of the 21st Century

This Special Report by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education was published April 22, 2008. The 11-page report is available on line in HTML and PDF. It is structured, following its front page, in sections labeled: "To Optimize Learning"; "Conjoining Self-Interest and Societal Purpose"; "Drawing the Strands Together"; and "Exercising Leadership.":

The challenge for the years ahead is to achieve a public agenda in an era of diminished public purposes. Many have observed that in the relative decline of policy as a motivating force, higher education institutions may choose priorities primarily from market considerations, setting agendas that seek to advance their own prestige and market position more than the fulfillment of publicly defined purposes. If markets have supplanted the force of policy per se as the primary drivers of higher education’s motivations, what actions will create the market that engages universities and colleges in solving the nation’s most important challenges? Any successful strategy must recognize that no single, centralized approach—no one 'market'—can enlist the energies and passion of higher education to achieve a particular purpose. Higher education in the U.S. rightly and productively proceeds from a system of incentives rather than control.