The numbers should unsettle enrollment professionals: College and university enrollment rates have decreased for each of the last four years and nothing indicates a reversal anytime soon. A look at recent headlines reflects this trend: Mary Baldwin College in Virginia and Notre Dame of Maryland University in Baltimore each saw a drop of 5 percent […]
The world of online learning has significantly changed the landscape of higher education over the last decade. In a survey by the Instructional Technology Council (ITC), 94 percent of student respondents said their online courses were equivalent or superior to traditional courses, indicating improvements in both online pedagogy and delivery methods. Fred Lokken, a member […]
The founders of George Washington University could not have anticipated that, almost two centuries later, the institution’s prime location in D.C.’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood would be a developer’s dream—and a golden opportunity for the university. Their major venture, a mixed-use retail, residential and office development called Square 54 and completed in 2011, has close to […]
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 […]
Almost everybody ranks colleges these days—old stalwarts like U.S. News & World Report, influential upstarts like Washington Monthly and click-baiting websites that measure everything from campus sustainability to most attractive students to coolest mascots. William Destler, president of Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, even found his university named one of the "geekiest" in […]
After six colleges and universities in the Boston Consortium launched a self-insurance program in 2012, healthcare costs at Wheaton College ceased their upward spiral. Health premiums at the small liberal arts college had been increasing by 7 percent annually, but now costs have remained flat for the past four years. “We’ve changed the trend line […]
In his book, Breakpoint: The Changing Marketplace for Higher Education (Johns Hopkins Press, 2015), Jon McGee says higher education is in the midst of an extraordinary transitional period that has significant implications for how colleges understand their mission, their market and their management. McGee, vice president for planning and public affairs at the College of Saint […]
Officials at the University of Missouri in 2012 looked at the business troubles of its academic press and decided the most prudent path forward was to shut it down. The community disagreed, lobbying against the closure, and the university recanted. The whole affair emphasizes that academic publishing is not about dollars, but about the proliferation […]
Students at Western Gover- nors University, an exclusively online higher ed institution, get a free lesson in responsible borrowing that is paying dividends many years beyond graduation. In the two years the Utah- based institution’s Responsible Borrowing Initiative has been in place, student loans have been reduced by $250 million, according to Bob Collins, vice […]
In the ongoing debate over the rising cost of higher education, collaboration frequently emerges as a proposed path forward. Despite the allure of savings and efficiencies, efforts to follow the strategy often fall victim to both conceptual and implementation flaws. Two institutions, a higher education association and private liberal arts college, have managed to navigate […]
