Unless you live in a cave, you’ve seen the alarming headlines highlighting “exploding” college costs and “crushing” student loan debt. Because the media is trying to grab readers’ attention, these articles often use the most startling cases of these serious problems without providing context needed to fully understand the complexity of these issues. A simple internet search reveals the prevalence of these types of articles.
Here are just a few recent headlines:
At The University of Vermont, a small public research university, officials had realized that mobile would become very important to our stakeholders. It was 2007 and mobile adoption rates had begun to skyrocket. Smart phones had begun to proliferate nationally and at the institution, which has an average combined enrollment of 12,500 undergraduate, graduate, and medical students.
Whether it’s facing a modest or mega fundraising campaign, or an institution is between campaigns, having the most effective person leading the advancement effort is important for success. But, until now, there’s been little research on the characteristics of an effective chief advancement officer.
As any administrator with presidential aspirations knows, fundraising goes along with the institution-leading territory.
It’s a fact that Webster University (Mo.) President Beth J. Stroble knows well. “When I arrived in the summer of 2009, one of my goals was to successfully close the campaign,” she says of “Webster Works,” which concluded about $1.5 million beyond its $55 million goal.
In the midst of the debate in Congress over whether or not to double interest rates on Federal student loans in July comes another hot-button aid issue—states are running out of aid money altogether. At the end of March, the Illinois Student Assistance Commission (ISAC) announced it would need to suspend making Monetary Award Program (MAP) awards for FAFSAs filed on or after March 14.
Social media gurus and CRM providers share a vision for a future where CRM and social media go hand in hand. But the idea is in its early stages.
Last August, when a 5.8-magnitude earthquake shook Virginia, people in offices up the East Coast were reading about the quake before they felt their desks not-so-mysteriously begin to wobble. How? Chalk it up to another feat of Twitter (by this time it had already helped topple unruly regimes in the Middle East). During the earthquake, users tweeted at a rate of 5,500 tweets per second, with 40,000 tweets hitting Twitter timelines and TweetDecks in just one minute.
Today’s financial aid director wears many hats: counselor, manager of budgets, supervisor, implementer of regulations, and keeper of data, to name a few. As the role of financial aid director has become increasingly complex and challenging, so has filling this position.
Life can be insanely busy for students and non-students alike, especially near the mid-point of the semester. Rapid changes in technology have only managed to accelerate the pace even more with tweets and Facebook posts competing for our attention. Add in a few energy drinks or Starbucks lattés, and a formula has been created for an environment consisting of go, go, go with little time for pause and reflection.
After a somewhat slow start, higher education institutions are increasingly taking advantage of social media to market themselves and keep constituents aware of what they are doing. A recent social media adoption study conducted by the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth shows usage rates are increasing steadily in every year. For example, university Twitter usage jumped from 59 percent in the 2009-2010 school year to 89 percent in the 2010-2011 school year.
A couple of years into the initial, silent phase of Loyola Marymount University’s fundraising campaign, Dennis Slon stepped into his role as senior vice president for university relations and the chair of the board of trustees confided something about the campaign’s $300 million goal. The previous campaign had finished in 1997 and raised $144 million. So when the board first discussed more than doubling that goal this time, “there was a lot of intake of breath,” Slon explains.
As new high school graduates anxiously await acceptance letters from their favorite colleges, many will start to plan for this new chapter in their lives by seeking student loans and financial aid to pay for it. After running the gauntlet of qualifying for loans and assistance, many will forget all about it.
Published at the end of January, the Noel-Levitz study on the mobile browsing behaviors and expectations of prospective students provided this list of six items considered to be the most valuable content for mobile experiences: academic program listing, cost/scholarship calculators, calendar of important dates and deadlines, specific details about academic programs, application process summary and online applications forms.
What difference can a year make? When it comes to the mobile web in higher education, it seems that it’s all it took to switch gears and respond to the needs of an increasing mobile user population on campuses—and elsewhere.
The roughly 9 million students who rely on subsidized federal loans will see interest rates double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent on loans borrowed after July 1. It’s just the latest chapter in the nearly 50-year saga of the federal government trying to determine the appropriate rate for these loans.
