Keeping student tuition and fees down is the top priority for 2017 selected by campus CFOs and other finance department administrators in a UB survey—yet tuition revenue and nontuition student fees are the biggest anticipated funding categories for the coming year. Among the 64 administrators responding, 70 percent say these fees will increase modestly or significantly, […]
Higher ed marketing leaders have to master the art of blending powerful and personalized customer experiences with the science of measuring and optimizing the impact of their initiatives. Yet many chief marketing officers haven't embraced their "inner data-lover self." Measurement is an afterthought at best, often checked off a busy to-do list via mindless reporting […]
As demographic, economic and market volatility continue to challenge higher ed's ability to enroll a sufficient number of students able to take advantage of the educational opportunities available, understanding and advancing your institution's value proposition should be at the top of the to-do agenda. A value proposition can be defined simply as the intersection between […]
Designed by the company Freight Farms, the hydroponic lettuce farm inside a shipping container at Stony Brook University in New York uses 90 percent less water than traditional growing methods to provide an acre's worth of leafy greens to campus dining halls. Students use farm-management technologies such as cloud-synced growth data and a smartphone app to control lighting. Underway […]
After years of working with multiple food service vendors and local restaurants, administrators at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh decided in January 2016 to bring fast-casual bakery chain Au Bon Pain to campus. The school's first experience with a national restaurant franchise, it was a 12-month process from the brainstorming phase to opening the doors […]
More than 40 years after it was established, Title IX continues to pose compliance challenges for higher education institutions struggling with sexual assault investigations. The University of Maryland recently made national headlines when its student government passed a $34 per student fee to support Title IX investigations of campus sexual assault and discrimination incidents. It […]
Open educational resources have grown over the last few years from one-off oddities in single courses to the basis of entire degree programs. Cutting out textbook costs for students tops the list of reasons administrators encourage faculty to develop and adopt these free—or very inexpensive—resources, also known as OER. Other enticements include immediate access for […]
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign processes approximately 543,000 point-of-sale transactions per month in its dining halls and on-campus restaurants for its 45,000 students. Visitors use a mix of dining plans and credit cards to pay for their meals. In January 2016, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign implemented Heartland OneCard, now part of the TouchNet […]
The University of Alabama's former president, Robert Witt, tasked the campus with both increasing enrollment and becoming more pedestrian-friendly in 2006. An extensive transportation system helped support both of those goals. Alabama partnered with First Transit, one of the largest private-sector providers of mobility solutions in North America, to implement an initial network of 17 […]
The need for infrastructure such as classrooms, student housing, dining and wellness facilities has never been greater at colleges and universities. Teaming with the real estate development community through public-private partnerships—commonly known as P3s—continues to gain in popularity as a way to get projects built on or near campus. Public-private partnerships are a form of […]
