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As colleges and universities face the sobering realities of the economic crisis, one has to wonder: Is higher education approaching the perfect storm?

For many universities, funding allocations are at maximum levels, while some legislatures are already instituting significant budget cuts. Endowment levels for public and private institutions are questionable as economic woes curtail benefactors’ ability to give. And costs on everything from fuel to health insurance continue to increase with no end in sight.

Of all the fallout from the new IRS 403(b) regulations, probably the most important and pressing decision the regulations created for not-for-profit plan sponsors is how many active service provider relationships they want to have. The argument has been framed as a choice between exclusive single vendor relationships versus multiple vendor relationships. While plan sponsors struggle over this decision and examine the relative merits of both arrangements, plan providers are actively lobbying for an outcome that aligns best with their own solutions.

With all the Web 2.0 hype these days, it’s no surprise that student expectations of the web continue to swell. Is your institutional website living up to these expectations? Today higher education websites are more than just static pages. They are strategic assets for admissions and enrollment, advancement and fundraising, brand awareness, disseminating information such as news and safety alerts, and, now more than ever, they are strategic assets for social networking. Research shows that social networking is the most popular online activity among today’s internet users.

As branding initiatives in higher education have emerged and evolved over the past two decades, the media-outreach segments of the plans often continue to miss the mark. The reason? The campus professionals who are responsible for strategic communication are often relegated to a back-seat role in the process, or are left in the dark until the branding campaign is ready to be rolled out.

Educational institutions have very special requirements when it comes to security. They must maintain a difficult balancing act between open communications and secure networks while meeting the diverse needs of students, faculty, staff and alumni and their host of autonomous desktops, laptops, and handheld devices, all with limited IT personnel and budgets. To make matters worse, the movement toward Web 2.0 has driven more people and applications to the web where hackers lie in wait to take advantage of new vulnerabilities gained through the largely unprotected port 80.

The recent credit crunch that destabilized the mortgage market and leaked to student loans, along with a heightened public awareness of the impacts of student debt, has brought to light the very real need for student loan reform. As we watched the events of the past few months unfold, the higher education community has been forced to face the fact that the dislocation in the credit markets could pose a real threat to the delivery of student aid.

Jason Shaeffer expected that improving eLearning services at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco would lead to better recruitment of national and international students. What he wasn't quite anticipating was how much it would change the way students learn and pursue their passions.

Major curricular change?and the internal cultural shift required for such change to occur within higher education?is not easy. Over the past two years, the Villanova School of Business (VSB) has worked to reinvent its undergraduate program. The school has successfully achieved this objective, and now, in the fall of 2008, a bold new curriculum has been introduced to first-year students. The VSB community has learned a great deal from this experience, and still has much to learn as the new curriculum evolves.

We are entering the age of collaboration. Web 2.0 has gone mainstream. An entire generation of students is arriving in our schools and universities, for whom Facebook is their most important source of information and communications.

In the context of education, online learning is a “make-to-order” business whereas instruction through a traditional ground campus falls under the category of mass production. Applying this to business terms, online learning uses a “pull” strategy while traditional (residential) undergraduate education uses a “push” strategy.