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Recent events have understandably triggered a flurry of crisis preparedness efforts at colleges and universities across the country. Many of these institutions are today breathing easier now that they have incident response plans the size of phone books resting in drawers or populating intranets. They feel confident that in an emergency they can evacuate parties at risk in a timely organized manner — perhaps.

Things are changing rapidly in our society and economy and on campuses. The status quo has starting to become more of the status qua. What was once truth, fact, or really more belief and certainty are being replaced by new realities. And those realities have even started to be felt on college campuses where we all worked so hard not to let change in even though we felt perfectly at ease telling everyone what they needed to change.

Look around a college campus today and you will be hard pressed to find a student walking around without a cell phone, MP3 player or other wireless device. With students being more on the go and tech-savvy than ever, the days of disseminating information by posting campus news on the doors of dormitory bathroom stalls and community bulletin boards are quickly coming to a close.

In the fallout of significant budget cuts at public universities, it's difficult to see a bright spot. Programs are being eliminated, salaries are frozen, faculty furloughed, and institutions with a strong history of serving their communities are forced to make bone-deep cuts. There is, however, a solution that can help us navigate through this crisis and we're seeing it at work: private, market-driven institutions of higher education.

Higher education has become an online service industry. Students submit — and colleges accept or deny — applications online. Parents pay tuition on the web. Schools post curricula and students select courses and manage their college experiences via portals. Professors publish websites listing syllabuses, assignments and office hours. Classes, tests, and research can all be conducted online. Online services are now a necessary and expected part of campus life.

Colleges and universities have long competed for students, faculty, and funding through academic excellence, research success, and athletic prowess. Now, they have a new arena for competition—the size of their carbon footprint. This is a way to measure an aspect of environmental impact through determining the amount of carbon produced by the institution and its activities. Schools wanting to distinguish themselves for being “green” now have hard numbers to back up their claims.

The “cloud computing” trend of replacing software traditionally installed on campus computers (and the computers themselves) with applications delivered via the internet is driven by aims of reducing universities’ IT complexity and cost. While today’s “cloud powered” higher education institutions can gain significant flexibility and agility, the corresponding migration of their sensitive data into remote, worldwide data centers--the “cloud” itself--introduce profound legal, compliance, and political issues.

Twenty years ago, projectors had three "guns," weighed between 80-120 pounds, were the size of a coffee table, and took a crew of technicians a couple of days to install and converge. They were dim, expensive, and finicky machines, but the one advantage they had over today's bright, ultra-portable, and inexpensive projectors was that you could come into the classroom or lecture theater and pretty much count on still finding them, on the ceiling, where they were yesterday. Theft wasn't an issue.

As we look across the landscape of private liberal arts education in the United States, we understand that change comes slowly. Recently there have been a spate of writings about the need to develop more creativity in the graduates of our colleges, and in the faculty and the way they teach at those smaller institutions. Howard Gardner of Harvard writes about the five minds necessary for the future; one of them is “the creative mind.”

Just a few short years ago, Brad J. Ward was finishing up his BA at the University of Illinois-Springfield and working in Residential Life. He was playing around with the web, and as an internal communications tool, started a website that featured photos, videos, events, and ongoings of the dorm wing he supervised. When admissions marketing saw it, they tested it as a tool to give prospective students an authentic lens into campus life. Prospects ate it up, and Ward landed himself a job in admissions marketing at UIS.