Clouds that emerged throughout 2017 are hanging over the heads of campus administrators, posing potentially huge impacts to higher ed as a whole. Just a few of the significant national developments include: the proposed $9 billion in cuts to the U.S. Department of Education for fiscal year 2018—which if implemented will affect Stafford Loan financing, […]
Samuel Merritt University in Oakland, California, needs more space. Students learn in makeshift classrooms at a local medical center and lack a campus to call their own. Instead of building one, officials came up with a new solution to meet the institution's needs: Share a campus with another college in Oakland. This fall, Samuel Merritt […]
In the fall of 2015, Muhlenberg College President John Williams asked if I would teach a copyright law course to interested undergraduate students. While at Harvard Law School, he and his wife Diane had taken an online course titled CopyrightX, the brainchild of Harvard professor Terry Fisher. President Williams was very excited about the course, […]
While relying less on student tuition and fees is the ideal situation for many higher ed institutions, it's not surprising that finance administrators anticipate tuition revenue as the biggest funding boost for 2018. Other areas with a starring role in additional funding projections are student fees and advancement income, from both philanthropic and corporate donors. The 66 […]
There's no question that recent graduates are leaving college with more student loan debt. More students are taking out loans and they're borrowing larger amounts. But apocryphal stories about students owing $100,000 or more coming out of college don't represent the reality for most borrowers. In 2015, roughly two-thirds of student loan balances were $25,000 […]
"No margin, no mission!" is how one respondent to UB's 2018 Outlook survey of campus leaders described the high stakes involved in raising more tuition revenue, non-tuition revenue and fundraising dollars in 2018. Controlling costs is one of the top two institutional priorities noted by the survey's 72 president, chancellor and provost respondents. Nearly 6 […]
We asked: What are your predictions, hopes and concerns for 2018? Administrators and experts who have recently contributed to UB answered. A link to each contributor’s recent column appears under their name. “College students are wired to think about their future. Higher education must start early to create meaningful career development experiences for students by […]
An increase in technology spending is the gift that about 4 in 10 campus technology administrators are unwrapping to start the new year. Sixteen percent of the 96 respondents to a UB survey, however, must deal with a decrease in spending. The top area getting significant investment in 2018 is academic technology. One respondent (from an […]
Our discovery of new pathways to healthy living and learning begins in Methuen, Massachusetts, a city with a proud heritage in industrial manufacturing. Today, Methuen – with affordable housing, quality healthcare, an aspiring public school system, and youth athletic activities – is an increasingly attractive gateway from Greater Boston to the south and the White […]
Community, faculty and student engagement are important components of college and university strategic and facility planning. But many traditional methods of gauging opinion or gathering input—such as surveys or town hall meetings—are flawed and can be misleading, often being disproportionately influenced by the loudest or most negative voices. In this web seminar, presenters discussed the […]
