Assessing Student Goal Attainment

Working adult and professional students enroll in your program for specific reasons. These reasons are tied to concrete personal and professional goals. Whether we would agree with the judgments of a particular student, their legal and social status as adults confers a sense of finality on these judgments and an equal sense in which they are removed from our purview. How important are students’ goals to those who provide education services to them? Judging by our behavior, they are not at all important.We seldom capture them and, if we do, we fail to do so in a way that is measurable or plays a material role in the services we deliver to them.

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Are Public Universities Responsible for the Success of For-profits?

Runaway Inflation in a Recessionary Period

As predicted, public universities are increasing tuition this fall by double-digits, one as high as 17% and many in the 13-15% range. For the most part, these presidents have done everything they could to convince their legislatures that their budgets should not be cut. Now, having secured what they could from the taxpayers, they have no choice but to raise tuition to meet projected shortfall.

Or do they . . .?

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Do-It-Yourself Mystery Shopping

If you are a colleague, you already know how much importance I place on monitoring all aspects of service delivery, from marketing and enrollment to the management of alumni relations, and adjusting those functions based on what you learn through the monitoring processes. . . . Continuous quality improvement is not possible without continuous quality monitoring.

While every leader in higher education appears to agree with this statement, very few colleges and universities (I can count them on one hand) have comprehensive monitoring systems in place. As important as they are, the development of these systems ends up pushed aside by the latest crisis or even the press of daily business.

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Broader GAO Study Is Needed

In addition to examining the abuses of credit awards as proposed by the DoEd’s Inspector General and Congress, where there are abuses in all sectors, I encourage the GAO to conduct a full analysis of total taxpayer costs, direct and hidden, under the three major types of institutions. Much of the political agenda against the for-profits is being underwritten by a campaign of innuendo implying that the taxpayer is being ripped off by the for-profits. A GAO analysis will show otherwise.

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Barriers to Innovation Part I: Culture, Leadership, Management

For 16 years our firm's sole business has been facilitating innovation in higher education. We do this by working with senior decision-makers to develop not only the vision but to implement the concrete strategy necessary to achieve that vision. When I speak of "innovation" in this Executive Briefing, I am speaking of the growth, change, and improvement that leads to achieving all three pillars of the cheaper/faster/better platform.

These deeply involving longitudinal experiences have given me a perspective that is much different from what would have been available to me on the sidelines. The sidelines may offer vantage for critical potshots and simplistic solutions but the real environment of higher education is busier and more complex than critics realize.

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