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What Matters to You?

  • By Shannon O'Connor
  • 06/01/17

As the date for the June issue of College Planning & Management to go to print approaches, I’ve been thinking — with increased anxiety — about writing this, my first Editor’s Note. Despite being editor of CP&M for 15 years, I’ve remained behind the scenes for the most part, managing the acquisition and development of the content for each issue, guiding each issue through production, and sighing in relief each month when copies arrive in my office and I flip through one and don’t see any glaring errors. And of course, by then the next issue is well underway.

What I remind myself often as I’ve worked in relative obscurity is that the work I’m doing isn’t done in a vacuum. There are a lot of people who read CP&M. You share articles and issues with your peers, post comments or “Like” us on Twitter and Facebook, point people to and cite our website, reach out to our columnists and other contributors directly, contact our advertisers for products and services because you saw them in our pages, offer compliments and complaints, ask questions, provide ideas for articles and in other ways engage with us.

Please, don’t stop.

I invite you to contact me with your ideas on and for the magazine. What matters to you? What initiatives are underway on your campus that you would like to share with your peers at other institutions? What are you doing well? Also, what do you want to do better? Are there topics we’re not covering in CP&M that you think we should, that would help you in your day-to-day work? Let me know. What are your frustrations? What issues are on the horizon that you’d like to have information about? We’ll look into it for you and get some data to share.

What we do is important. What you do — creating the environments in which education is provided to students in order to help in preparing them to be capable, productive, successful citizens — is vitally important. Within the current atmosphere that hears some voices denigrating higher education as wasteful and unnecessary and sees local, state and federal budgets that make their first and deepest cuts to education, you continue to do your best work for your students. In return, I promise to continue to put together what I hope is a valuable resource for you in this magazine.

Let me know what matters to you, and how CP&M can help.

This article originally appeared in the issue of .

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