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It’s no secret that universities across the nation are facing more challenges than ever before. Shrinking budgets are contrasted with higher costs and aging facilities. The government is getting more involved from a regulatory standpoint while decreasing its funding support for education. Demand is up, enrollments are all over the map and across the board, and graduation rates are down. It’s a roller coaster of peaks and valleys that leaves schools fighting for ways to cope, retain students, and help them graduate on time.

There are seven areas of oversight that trustees of higher education institutions should consider as fiduciaries. Mistakes in any of these areas can negatively impact the expected growth and risk profile of the portfolio, and in turn, the institution’s financial well-being.

Mistake #1: Not Tracking Total Investment Portfolio Performance

Although many campuses are tobacco-free, it would be rare to find 100 percent compliance among staff, faculty, and students. There are usually a handful of smokers huddled together in a corner, puffing away.

“We try to tell people to spread the word in a respectful way, to be friendly, be positive, and not forget you’re talking to a fellow employee or student,” says Patrick Hennessey, a member of the President’s Advisory Committee for a tobacco-free campus at Westchester Community College (N.Y.). The campus’ ban took effect Sept. 1, 2012.

Mention “teacher training” to the typical college professor and his eyebrow will raise like the wing of a raptor. Talons may follow.

College professors are experts in various disciplines—political science, mathematics, the biology of anthropology, the history of technology, and other disciplines from arcane to pedestrian. Teaching ability is universally presumed to accompany expertise in a discipline. Call it pedagogy by osmosis.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have captured the headlines in higher education in the past year. These new platforms were developed to enable both open access and large scale participation in online courses. Many top tier universities are joining the MOOCs bandwagon, afraid of missing an important piece of the Web-based phenomenon. It is our goal as educators to assess whether or not they can become a best practice in online learning.

Every teaching hospital and academic medical center knows that the process of becoming accredited and re-accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) is an arduous task. The ACGME is attempting to ease this burden by introducing a new accreditation model called The Next Accreditation System (NAS). The NAS introduces dramatic changes in the way the ACGME accredits institutions and graduate medical education (GME) programs, with the initial implementation of the NAS to start in July 2013, followed by complete implementation in July 2014.

Higher ed organizations are bracing for potential cuts in student loan funding and the trickle down of major cuts to agencies that support the bulk of institutional research and development.

• Loan limits would mirror those in the Direct Loan Program. New borrowers could borrow IDEA loans up to the combined amount they could have borrowed from the subsidized and unsubsidized Stafford programs for their academic level (except that total would all be unsubsidized.) Graduate and professional students who could have borrowed an additional amount above their unsubsidized Stafford eligibility under the Grad PLUS program would be able to borrow that same amount in additional IDEA funds.

A number of dining service management companies have used guest chef programs to spice up the dining experience on client campuses.

Bob Sempek at Treat America says bringing in chefs from other colleges, as well as from some of the consulting company’s business and industry accounts, has generated enthusiastic response. Students get to watch visiting chefs prepare gourmet fare, while the chefs get to travel a bit and enjoy a change of scene.

Every dining services operator aims to maximize cost efficiency, and that means saving money as well as producing revenue.

At UMass, Dartmouth, combining full-service and self-service dining under the management of Chartwells, has helped to reduce labor costs and improve efficiency, according to auxiliary services director Jeff Augustine.

“We are getting a lot more hours out of our labor and services for our students than we did with our previous vendor,” Augustine says.