With the rising cost of higher education a challenging reality for students and educators, affordability is being addressed by legislation on both state and federal levels. For example, institutions are being urged to explore cost savings for students via provisions in the Higher Education Opportunity Act. At Grand Rapids Community College (Mich.), our bookstore operator partner, Follett Higher Education Group, approached us about their Rent-A-Text program.
Articles: Enrollment & Retention
11/1/2010
Clery Act Turns 20
Law makes continued strides in enhancing campus safety
After the murder of their daughter in her residence hall room in 1986, Howard (now deceased) and Connie Clery pushed for a federal law to strengthen campus crime awareness and personal safety. November 8 marked the 20th year for the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act.
11/1/2010
A recent, unsuccessful effort by Senate leaders to provide a path to citizenship for children who were brought to the United States illegally sparked debate over the provision among financial aid administrators. The provision, commonly referred to as the DREAM Act, would allow the children of illegal immigrants to earn citizenship through higher education or military service.
11/1/2010
Gov. Mitch Daniels recently implored Indiana's public college trustees to maximize efficiencies and cut administrative costs. Instead of coming to the "Statehouse asking for more money," as he stated, trustees should "stay back at the school and find ways to be more efficient with those dollars." As the president of Indiana's largest public college, I applaud the Governor for acknowledging how critical it is to manage costs as our state faces serious budget challenges.
10/1/2010
Higher Education Hiring
Colleges and universities are where the jobs are.
Amid all the gloomy head-lines about furloughs, layoffs, hiring freezes, and early retirement, one employment trend report offers a glimmer of hope.
10/1/2010
Given the multiple goals and multiple players involved in developing and managing endowed scholarship funds, there are lots of opportunities for communication gaps, poor service, and less than optimal use of the funds. In an ideal world, endowed funds and annual gifts given for scholarship support would be used to take the place of unfunded aid in the offers made to students, freeing unfunded (and therefore unrestricted) resources for other purposes.
10/1/2010
In 1999, the North Dakota University System coordinated a roundtable discussion inviting its board of directors, K-12 administrators, employers, and others to address their expectations of the university.
"It was a landmark event in North Dakota's higher ed history," explains Michel Hillman, vice chancellor of academic and student affairs at NDUS in Bismarck, which has 11 campuses. "What was recommended was a consistent set of accountability measures."
10/1/2010
Bill Tyson has been advising colleges and universities on getting media attention for more than 30 years through his firm Morrison & Tyson Communications. Now he's taken some of that knowledge and put it into Pitch Perfect: Communicating with Traditional and Social Media for Scholars, Researchers, and Academic Leaders (Stylus Publishing, 2010), a how-to guide for thoughtful communications planning that can increase the likelihood of national media coverage.
10/1/2010
College graduates are used to hearing from their alma maters with requests about donations and to cheer on the school athletic teams. But lately, alumni from a growing number of institutions are hearing the sounds of alumni offices retooling themselves to offer an unprecedented array of services and programs.
10/1/2010
This morning I was re-reading this issue's Money Matters column on endowed scholarships. In discussing the sometimes restrictive criteria these awards carry, Kathy Kurz illustrates one of her favorite examples. The award "required potential candidates to submit an essay about what their Italian heritage meant to them," Kurz writes. "Winners of this award then had to attend a ball in their honor, and the cost of a gown or tuxedo rental was more than the value of the scholarship!"
10/1/2010
There are scholarships available for just about anything these days. In addition to endowed scholarships for students with names such as Zolp, Scarpinato, Gatling, Baxendale, Hudson, Thayer, Downer, Bright, and Van Valkenburg, many organizations offer awards for specific talents or interests.
9/1/2010
A recently enacted state law requires all institutions in the California State University and University of California systems -- plus community colleges that maintain student housing facilities -- to provide students raised in foster care with priority campus housing year-round. Luckily for these schools, they've gotten a head start on providing housing and other support services for this group.
9/1/2010
In a previous column published in the June issue of University Business, I shared a few anecdotal examples of how universities and colleges had started to use online analytics to inform their marketing and communications decisions. Unfortunately, there was no available data on analytics usage across institutions at that time. I decided to survey practitioners, thus testing my hypothesis that a change of attitudes in higher education toward web and social media analytics was required.
9/1/2010
It seems like a geological age ago when admissions officers considered themselves educators first and foremost, with a penchant for interacting on a personal basis with adolescents, their parents, and professional counselors in the high schools.
9/1/2010
It took one determined program director, two tries, three years, and much collective brainpower—but at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, today's interior architecture program students can earn a bachelor degree in three years rather than four.
