Colleges on the Brink

Colleges on the Brink
Author: Charles M. Ambrose
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2023-12-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1475873271

Colleges on the Brink is about the financial crises many colleges are facing in the post-pandemic era and how they can be resolved. The tools described require changing how colleges spend money while still maintaining core academic values. Ambrose and Nietzel discuss the conditions involving financial exigency and other major budget overhauls, and they outline how to maximize the likelihood institutions can regain financial health. The challenge these colleges face is to come back from the brink and become leaner, financially stable institutions, ready to provide the education students need.

Liberal Arts at the Brink

Liberal Arts at the Brink
Author: Victor E. Ferrall Jr.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2011-03-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0674263391

Liberal arts colleges represent a tiny portion of the higher education market—no more than 2 percent of enrollees. Yet they produce a stunningly large percentage of America’s leaders in virtually every field of endeavor. The educational experience they offer—small classes led by professors devoted to teaching and mentoring, in a community dedicated to learning—has been a uniquely American higher education ideal. Liberal Arts at the Brink is a wake-up call for everyone who values liberal arts education. A former college president trained in law and economics, Ferrall shows how a spiraling demand for career-related education has pressured liberal arts colleges to become vocational, distorting their mission and core values. The relentless competition among them to attract the “best” students has driven down tuition revenues while driving up operating expenses to levels the colleges cannot cover. The weakest are being forced to sell out to vocational for-profit universities or close their doors. The handful of wealthy elite colleges risk becoming mere dispensers of employment and professional school credentials. The rest face the prospect of moving away from liberal arts and toward vocational education in order to survive. Writing in a personable, witty style, Ferrall tackles the host of threats and challenges liberal arts colleges now confront. Despite these daunting realities, he makes a spirited case for the unique benefits of the education they offer—to students and the nation. He urges liberal arts colleges to stop going it alone and instead band together to promote their mission and ensure their future.

Higher Education on the Brink

Higher Education on the Brink
Author: Alicia B. Harvey-Smith
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 141
Release: 2022-02-28
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1475856644

Higher education as we have known it has now and forever dramatically changed and so must the previous models that we once held dear. Leaders must take a fresh look at how their institutions design, implement, and measure practices in strategic enrollment management and expand the model, as never before. Higher Education on the Brink: Reimagining Strategic Enrollment Management in Colleges and Universities combines strategies for enrollment enhancement with significant support for development of alternative revenue streams for overall sustainability and growth. It introduces a new model for launching highly engaged strategic planning processes for colleges and universities. With current, real-world examples, the book details how colleges can be guided by integrated strategic planning processes to recalibrate efforts that yield key results. The major difference in this work is an exacting focus on organizational culture and each facet that defines it. As colleges and universities place new focus on strategically re-imagining higher education and their role in it, Higher Education on the Brink will serve as a guide for determining what difficult questions need to be asked and how to answer those questions in a manner that will position the college for the future with support from the college community, generating increased opportunities for student and operational success.

The Real World of College

The Real World of College
Author: Wendy Fischman
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2022-03-22
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0262046539

Why higher education in the United States has lost its way, and how universities and colleges can focus sharply on their core mission. For The Real World of College, Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner analyzed in-depth interviews with more than 2,000 students, alumni, faculty, administrators, parents, trustees, and others, which were conducted at ten institutions ranging from highly selective liberal arts colleges to less-selective state schools. What they found challenged characterizations in the media: students are not preoccupied by political correctness, free speech, or even the cost of college. They are most concerned about their GPA and their resumes; they see jobs and earning potential as more important than learning. Many say they face mental health challenges, fear that they don’t belong, and feel a deep sense of alienation. Given this daily reality for students, has higher education lost its way? Fischman and Gardner contend that US universities and colleges must focus sharply on their core educational mission. Fischman and Gardner, both recognized authorities on education and learning, argue that higher education in the United States has lost sight of its principal reason for existing: not vocational training, not the provision of campus amenities, but to increase what Fischman and Gardner call “higher education capital”—to help students think well and broadly, express themselves clearly, explore new areas, and be open to possible transformations. Fischman and Gardner offer cogent recommendations for how every college can become a community of learners who are open to change as thinkers, citizens, and human beings.

The Soul of a University

The Soul of a University
Author: Chris Brink
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2018-07-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1529200369

What is the role of a university in society? In this innovative book, Chris Brink offers the timely reminder that it should have social purpose, as well as achieve academic excellence. The current obsession with rankings and league tables has perpetuated inequality and is preventing social mobility. This book shows how universities can – and should - respond to societal challenges and promote positive social change.

Changing Course: Reinventing Colleges, Avoiding Closure

Changing Course: Reinventing Colleges, Avoiding Closure
Author: Alice W. Brown
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 117
Release: 2011-12-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1118275365

Institutions of higher education are constantly facing economic challenges to their survival. Nowhere are the challenges greater than in small private colleges and universities across America. None of these colleges can assume that its stability is assured in perpetuity. No thriving college is immune from unforeseen disaster, just as no struggling college is irreversibly destined for closure. This issue presents stories of colleges in crisis and considers what makes the difference between a college that closes and one that nearly closes but manages to remain open. It offers a range of revealing, hard-won experiences of college presidents who led their campuses in times of crises. Some colleges found no way out, and their stories offer lessons that are just as valuable as the stories of colleges that reinvented themselves and survived. This is the 156th volume of the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series New Directions for Higher Education. Addressed to higher education decision makers on all kinds of campuses, it provides timely information and authoritative advice about major issues and administrative problems confronting every institution.

The College Stress Test

The College Stress Test
Author: Robert Zemsky
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2020-02-25
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1421437031

Those interested in and responsible for the fate of these institutions will find in this book a clearly defined set of risk indicators, a methodology for monitoring progress over time, and an evidence-based understanding of where they reside in the landscape of institutional risk.

The Gig Academy

The Gig Academy
Author: Adrianna Kezar
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2019-10-29
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1421432714

Why the Gig Academy is the dominant organizational form within the higher education economy—and its troubling implications for faculty, students, and the future of college education. Over the past two decades, higher education employment has undergone a radical transformation with faculty becoming contingent, staff being outsourced, and postdocs and graduate students becoming a larger share of the workforce. For example, the faculty has shifted from one composed mostly of tenure-track, full-time employees to one made up of contingent, part-time teachers. Non-tenure-track instructors now make up 70 percent of college faculty. Their pay for teaching eight courses averages $22,400 a year—less than the annual salary of most fast-food workers. In The Gig Academy, Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott assess the impact of this disturbing workforce development. Providing an overarching framework that takes the concept of the gig economy and applies it to the university workforce, this book scrutinizes labor restructuring across both academic and nonacademic spheres. By synthesizing these employment trends, the book reveals the magnitude of the problem for individual workers across all institutional types and job categories while illustrating the damaging effects of these changes on student outcomes, campus community, and institutional effectiveness. A pointed critique of contemporary neoliberalism, the book also includes an analysis of the growing divide between employees and administrators. The authors conclude by examining the strengthening state of unionization among university workers. Advocating a collectivist, action-oriented vision for reversing the tide of exploitation, Kezar, DePaola, and Scott urge readers to use the book as a tool to interrogate the state of working relations on their own campuses and fight for a system that is run democratically for the benefit of all. Ultimately, The Gig Academy is a call to arms, one that encourages non-tenure-track faculty, staff, postdocs, graduate students, and administrative and tenure-track allies to unite in a common struggle against the neoliberal Gig Academy.

The End of College

The End of College
Author: Kevin Carey
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2016-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1594634041

"The rise of the internet, new technologies, and free and open higher education are radically altering college forever, and this book explores the paradigm changes that will affect students, parents, educators and employers as it explains how we can take advantage of the new opportunities ahead"--

The Innovative University

The Innovative University
Author: Clayton M. Christensen
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2011-06-24
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1118091256

The Innovative University illustrates how higher education can respond to the forces of disruptive innovation , and offers a nuanced and hopeful analysis of where the traditional university and its traditions have come from and how it needs to change for the future. Through an examination of Harvard and BYU-Idaho as well as other stories of innovation in higher education, Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring decipher how universities can find innovative, less costly ways of performing their uniquely valuable functions. Offers new ways forward to deal with curriculum, faculty issues, enrollment, retention, graduation rates, campus facility usage, and a host of other urgent issues in higher education Discusses a strategic model to ensure economic vitality at the traditional university Contains novel insights into the kind of change that is necessary to move institutions of higher education forward in innovative ways This book uncovers how the traditional university survives by breaking with tradition, but thrives by building on what it's done best.