Vocation. This is a word with deep and important significance. Liberal Arts. This is an ideal of education with an equally deep set of meanings. Liberal arts colleges already do a great job developing a diverse group of socially responsible, critical thinkers, but they must start guiding students to their true vocation. For liberal arts […]

Watching preschoolers play on touchscreen devices makes it clear that the future college students of America are of the connected generation. Unfortunately, I fear today’s teaching methods are ill prepared to embrace this new type of learner. Higher ed must embrace game-like learning just as progressive Silicon Valley companies have, or risk bored, disengaged, unprepared […]

John T. Delaney is the new dean of American University’s Kogod School of Business, effective July 18. Delaney, recently dean of the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business and the College Business Administration at the University of Pittsburgh, oversaw a 20 percent rise in enrollment and an increase of $4.5 million in annual giving […]

This FutureShock is the third in a trilogy of commentaries on the for-profit (private sector) higher education industry and the implications of an increasingly complex and skeptical regulatory environment. In this piece we focus on the emergent, some say irreversible, megatrend turning private sector schools, colleges, and universities into nonprofits and vice versa. Consumer activist […]

Colleges and universities have been slowly but persistently transforming their traditional classroom spaces into rooms that facilitate active learning. How should classroom technology adapt to these changing spaces? The purpose of technology must be to facilitate better learning and higher student engagement. Many institutions are moving toward the flipped classroom model because it puts students […]

There’s a special relationship between decision-makers and benchmarking in higher education. Whether in information technology, marketing or even academics, rarely does anything get done before knowing what other institutions did. In higher education, benchmarking data is often one of the first steps on the path to action. Digital marketing isn’t an exception to this rule. […]

Two students were expelled and dozens more disciplined when a video emerged last March of the University of Oklahoma’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter singing racist songs with lyrics about lynchings. In the fall, the University of Missouri saw numerous protests over the treatment of black students and the failure of administrators to address the problem. […]

Alumni. That’s what alumni association magazines should, to a much greater extent, be about. At least they should if we want them to do better at marketing the university. Marketing is not the only purpose of these publications, of course. But the alumni magazine can be a powerful marketing tool that doesn’t conflict with its […]