Faculty

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME your human resources department explored new technology or brainstormed creative ways to maximize existing software? Many months ago? Last year? Maybe longer?

It's one thing to get the press to call on your institution's experts. It's another to make sure those experts truly feel comfortable in a media interview. How are institutions are getting the job done?

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.

SINCE WORLD WAR I, FORT ORD IN SALINAS, CALIF., HAD BEEN AN ARMY training facility and artillery target range. Today, 15 years after the army left, the property’s main feature is a growing regional university—California State University, Monterey Bay.

IN THE MEDIA, FINANCIAL aid coverage tends to focus on topics such as the tensions between funding merit scholarships versus need-based grants, the growth in student and parent borrowing, and the need to increase funding for Federal Pell Grants. Federal or state work-study programs get little focus.

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.”

IN 1990, THE ASSOCIATION OF American Universities predicted a dramatic shortage of PhDs by the early 21st century. Since that time, academia, industry, and government have had to compete for diminishing pool of doctoral candidates.

WHEN ANALYZING FINANCIAL AID strategies for our clients, one of the questions we always ask is “Are you at capacity?” For many institutions, this is a difficult question to answer, and often we hear different answers from different corners of the campus.

Yale University’s Sharon Kugler just hired a coordinator for Muslim life. Another of her program coordinators recently searched out a kosher-Chinese food restaurant in surrounding New Haven.

DO ANY OF THE FOLLOWING campus disputes sound familiar to you?

--An academic department chair is struggling with warring factions among the faculty who do not get along and are engaged in petty in fighting.