Helicopter parents celebrate commencement with pride and increasing expectations of their kids’ academic achievements and career preparedness. These lofty expectations are justified – given degree inflation, spiraling tuition and fees, and mounting family debt. Naturally, parents want to believe their children’s college and university experience will translate into gainful employment and career advancement. As helicopter […]
Being recognized as a “beautiful campus” goes beyond just having curb appeal. In fact, institutions that are consistently chosen for so-called “most beautiful college campuses” rankings put a lot of resources and effort into demonstrating a correlation between campus aesthetics and academic reputation. For many, that commitment is paying off. The allure of an attractive […]
A pair of draft horses often plows the campus farm at Sterling College. Sterling does have tractors—its agriculture students have to learn how to use all varieties of equipment—but the energy-saving horses are just one step in the Vermont school’s extensive and award-winning sustainable dining program. The farm produces about 20 percent of the food […]
Snow College’s latest travel policy included new, logical restrictions. For example: Employees would be reimbursed only for for hotel stays on days that matched an event’s agenda, and they could no longer expense a first-class airline seat. The Utah college got lots of comments—about three-quarters of them negative—when the regulations were posted for a 30-day […]
What types of people at your school are not saving for retirement? Young employees? Low-income earners? Maybe single parents with children? Several years ago, Linda Nilsen needed to know. As the executive director of benefits and compensation at Princeton University, she analyzed the non-savers—about half of the school’s 6,000 employees. To her surprise, there were […]
Valerie Smith, current dean of the college at Princeton University, has been named the 15th president of Swarthmore College (Pa.). Smith has been the senior officer responsible for Princeton's undergraduate academic program, including all aspects of the curriculum, undergraduate research and the residential college system. She recently chaired a committee that studied the academic and […]
Colleges and universities miss a significant opportunity to capture the attention of their primary web audience—teens and young adults—when their websites aren’t designed to perform well on mobile devices. A 2014 study of 200 public and private schools in New Jersey and Pennsylvania found that more than 70 percent of those institutions did not have […]
A public healthcare crisis thrust Southern Methodist University into the spotlight in September when a Liberian man visiting Dallas was diagnosed with the Ebola virus. The hospital where Thomas Eric Duncan was treated and later died—Texas Health Presbyterian—is less than four miles from SMU’s campus. It’s a facility where students are transported for emergency medical […]
Albert Einstein once said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” If he had spoken these words today, one might think he was speaking about deploying digital signage on the campus of Princeton University. Unlike other investments in technologies that may provide a campus with ubiquitous wireless […]
Tom Fitzgerald, CEO, E&I Cooperative Services There’s no denying it: today’s higher ed administrators are facing enormous financial challenges. As tuitions have steadily increased, revenue from the state and federal government has continued to drop. Student loan debt has reached epic proportions, eclipsing the $1 trillion mark in 2011. According to the Princeton Review, college […]
