College and university classrooms, curricula, and credentials have always been an ideological battleground of clashing values and perspectives that shift the answers to the question of what the learning environment should be. A crucible moment of legislative attacks on diversity initiatives, congressional interventions into university leadership,…

Universities are facing increased pressure to support educational change. But how can leaders promote change in a sustainable, scalable manner? Historically, many efforts have relied on either top-down policy shifts or bottom-up grassroots efforts in isolation. Instead, the authors focus on a "middle-level" approach that centers on the…

Indian River State College (IRSC) transforms lives by offering high-quality, affordable, and accessible education online and on five campuses located on the southeast Treasure Coast of Florida. Between 1988 and 2000, IRSC took the initiative to rally the communities IRSC serves around innovations to stimulate economic development and to prepare…

A typology of budget-driven program reviews is categorized by two variables: the locus of responsibility and the timing of the review. When a budget-driven program review is first implemented during a crisis, the range of financial and administrative options are high, yet buy-in and match to mission are low. When a budget-driven program review is…

Vertical transfer from community college to a university offers a promising, although unrealized, pathway to diversify STEM disciplines. Studying how successful transfer-­receiving universities support STEM transfer students can offer insights into the institutional practices that promote transfer student retention and success. Using institutional…

In the fall of 1981, author Peter Ewell, President Emeritus of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS), moved to Boulder, Colorado to direct a project funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation entitled "Using Information on Student Outcomes to Improve Program Planning and Decision-Making." Before this point--not…

The higher education community faces a wave of challenges. Concerns about affordability and costs have led to questions about the value of higher education to students and society. State and federal funding has been cut or has failed to grow as need has ballooned. Pressures to innovate clash with calls for preserving tradition. Values of academic…

The higher education accountability efforts of the past decade have placed pressures on universities to more rigorously evaluate the quality and outcomes of their programs while the emergence of new methodologies, from big data approaches to business analytics platforms, have also expanded ways of measuring the quality and return on investment of…

Philip H. Knight, co-founder of Nike, Inc., pledged $400 million to Stanford University last year (Gioia, 2016; Stanford University, 2016a). The gift will partially endow a $750 million fund intended to support 100 graduate students per year, with awards typically lasting for three years. The resulting Knight-Hennessy Scholars program will be the…

The most recent research on college-student learning in the US by respected scholars such as Richard Arum, Josipa Roksa, and Ernest Pascarella suggests that the nation's means of ensuring academic standards in US colleges and universities are not working effectively. Like US K-12 education and health care, the US higher education system is…

Adrianna Kezar recently sat down with Chancellor Tim White of the California State University system to discuss, among many other things, the newly released California State Graduation Initiative and what it will take to enact it. The key commitments of the initiative are: (1) hire more tenure-track faculty; (2) develop engaged advising; (3) solve…

A startling number of students arrive at the doors of colleges and universities lacking the essential skills and knowledge required to succeed there. If given the proper tools and supports, the great majority of these students would be able to achieve their goals in and outside of the classroom. But most of them are shuttled off to developmental…

In November 2012, the US Department of Education published its first-ever "fully articulated international strategy." Its two strategic goals are to strengthen US education and advance the international priorities of the US through increasing the global competencies of students, learning from other countries, and engaging in education…

These are exciting times in American education. While higher education has been preoccupied with its own challenges, its colleagues in K-12 have been adopting new standards, building new assessments and curricula, and redefining success for America's schools. For decades, the end-goal and primary success measure of most school systems was high…

In this article, Sheila Schulte and Rahul Choudaha state that recruiting international students is costly but rewarding financially and academically, so the loss for an institution if these students are not retained is considerable. The authors describe the results from an NAFSA study that revealed many international students leave or consider…