New York's Nyack College has a plan in place to retain adult students.
While increased enrollment is widely regarded as a positive development, understanding ways to manage the influx of additional students, providing a high-quality educational experience, meeting academic goals, and staying within budget requires administrators and architects to minimize new construction and maximize existing space.
The congested college and university marketplace means that every presidential communication must further institutional branding and messaging. Contemporary presidents are the public “face” of the institution, and competition for audiences’ attention has never been fiercer.
In an age when digital has become such a key channel, the colleges and universities that embrace this concept will outpace those that don’t. It’s not a financial question anymore, a bifurcation of the haves and have-nots; it’s more of a mindset issue. While having the vast resources of a major institution certainly helps, it doesn’t matter how much money you throw at a website project if it’s not seen as the central hub of your overall communication efforts. And if it isn’t used as a chance to engage an inclusive set of stakeholders from across campus, it’s a huge opportunity missed.
Higher education has already taken a leadership role in climate mitigation — that is, preventing climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions — as displayed by the 660 signatory campuses of the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) who have collectively reduced net carbon emissions by 25 percent in just five years. Now, higher education must take the lead in climate adaptation — preparing for and responding to the impacts of climate change.
So, why have smart campuses found sustainability such an attractive value proposition? In short, because our customers are demanding sustainability, because it saves money, and because higher education’s ethical license to operate is at risk if we don’t respond to a society beset with myriad unsustainable ailments.
Here's how Cedar Rapids Community School District and its team produced a $44.5 million, sustainable headquarters, capable of a 50 percent energy savings, on schedule and below budget.
Many smaller liberal arts institutions don’t even have secondary server rooms as backups. If an earthquake or flood destroys the single primary server room on campus, an institution won’t be able to issue paychecks or deposit tuition payments. New students won’t be able to register. All of the data stored in the learning management system will be inaccessible to students as well as professors. School may well be over for the year. Because the results can be so dire, more and more schools are building secondary server rooms for disaster backup.
Increasing numbers of colleges and universities, however, are adopting more of a change-agent, upstart mentality. Schools such as the University of Rochester, Duke University, and Case Western Reserve University are prime examples of institutions that are finding ways to circumvent the go-slow approach that long has characterized American higher education. The processes and technologies that these institutions develop find their ways into the marketplace as business ventures. And the creation of these technologies leads universities to beef up their own hiring.
Educators have been less successful in providing access for American students. Access creates the pathway that makes choice possible. Ideally, education should be a series of seamless transitions between various levels and complexities of learning. What has happened in America, however, is that access has become a fundamental stumbling block for students seeking to learn and to advance themselves.
Old dogs are learning new tricks as adult students return to colleges to enhance their careers or springboard into new ones. However, to attract these dedicated, engaged scholars, there's one question you should definitely not ask.
Following the enormous destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina and other disasters over the past decade, institutions have placed higher emphasis on disaster recovery and business continuity planning, testing, and execution. Business continuity plans are built on a foundation of processes, people, information, technology — and perhaps most importantly, assumptions. Whatever the level of careful planning now in place, we must continue to reassess all of these elements. And whatever was in place before November 2012, Superstorm Sandy forces a careful, objective, and immediate reconsideration.
Naturally, when education leaders learn that they have significant gaps in their organization's crisis plans, they want them to be corrected immediately. The problem here is that it can often take six to 18 months to do this in a cost-effective way.
How do you build your team within a culture that the existing senior administrative staff has embraced and protected, and significantly, that may well have defined the senior team more than the team has defined the culture? What happens in those first months when you are the outsider on your own team?
This holistic PACT model is fundamentally different than most programs as it provides one person as a "go-to" source, thereby eliminating the frustration that students experience when assistance is fragmented into segregated silos, such as singl