The higher education press has been filled recently with stories about abrupt firings of presidents and other senior executives at universities and colleges across the nation. What was once an infrequent occurrence now seems a weekly, almost daily event. Speculating on the reasons for this trend—financial pressures, decreasing enrollment, board dissension or the injection of […]
As colleges and universities find new ways to partner with each other to improve services and reduce costs, the idea of sharing an LMS is starting to gain traction. For instance, selecting and sharing a learning management system was key to an online teacher training and certification partnership established in 2017 between the schools of […]
Career center staff spend a lot of time encouraging students to access available supports, but they may need to work even harder to serve international students. A recent survey by World Education Services (WES) found that more than 40 percent of current international students had not yet used campus career services. Among international student alumni who […]
Academic fraud accusations create a myriad of challenges for colleges and universities. Many questions arise. What violations of a rule, regulation or statute occurred? Who was involved? Did anyone turn a blind eye? Unfortunately, most universities are not skilled at answering these questions in a fair and timely manner. Conducting such investigations is difficult and […]
The Lumina Foundation has been pursuing the goal of recognizing and accepting for-credit microcredentials and learning experiences for several years, through their Connecting Credentials effort and the proposed framework they launched back in 2015 (http://connectingcredentials.org/). This framework seeks to define an architecture wherein competencies can be defined in structured sets that can lead to microcredentials that […]
When the finance team at Wofford College in South Carolina wanted to show it could support a slightly higher than average tuition increase, advanced financial software was on hand to make the case to the board of trustees. “We loaded historical sticker prices for Wofford and our peers into the software and then made a […]
Empowering underrepresented sectors in higher ed doesn't stop with recruiting a diverse student population. Yet, in many cases, institutions are not creating a more inclusive atmosphere for top female and minority administrators by paying them as much as their white, male peers. In fact, just 11 of 2,279 institutions responding to a recent survey from […]
The closure of Amazon’s virtual bookseller at UMass Amherst underscores once again the need for campus stores to diversify services. It also highlights ongoing efforts by administrators to reduce the cost of course materials through online textbooks, open educational resources and other initiatives. “I don’t think anybody assumes Amazon isn’t a pretty sharp outfit,” says Bob Walton, […]
More first-year students, having never shared a room at home, expect a greater degree of privacy—for academic and emotional reasons—than did freshmen of even the recent past.
Ask higher education insiders about the traditional pathway to the Presidency and they will tell you it goes through academics – typically stepping up from the role of Chief Academic Officer. Times have changed and new roads to the Presidency are emerging. According to the American Council of Education's American College President Study 2017, […]