With the pool of high school graduates decreasing, national and global competition increasing, and the need to invest in new technologies and approaches growing, many universities and small colleges alike are struggling--not just to thrive, but to survive. In this challenging environment, mergers and consolidations are often viewed as options of…

Columbus Preparatory Academy (CPA) was a school in Academic Emergency and in jeopardy of being closed in 2007. In 2016, CPA was ranked "Excellent with Distinction" and has been the top-ranked academic school for five consecutive years. There have been many "how-to" books written about how to turn schools around, but few…

The 50th anniversary of the creation of "Foxfire" magazine and the Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center merits the question of how that innovative program of teaching and learning influences education today. Despite its troubled history, the program continues to exist and won the 2015 Georgia Governor's Awards for the Arts and Humanities…

Reexamination of change management strategies has recently come under direct scrutiny in both the realm of the academic and the professional due to the significant shift of brick-and-mortar institutions to virtual organizational structures. As such, the examination of the management of change requires direct inquiry into several defining factors:…

Press reports and industry statistics both give incomplete pictures of the outcomes of the Great Recession for U.S. four-year colleges and universities. To address these gaps, we conducted a statistical analysis of all articles that appeared in Lexis-Nexis on a sample of more than 300 U.S. colleges and universities during the Recession years. We…

In June 2011, the Souris River flooded the city of Minot, North Dakota, destroying schools, businesses, and more than 4,000 houses. District administrators, staff, and teachers responded creatively to provide continuity for the students over a two-year period while three schools resided in temporary locations. The author details how the schools…

In 2007, Walter P. Webb Middle School faced a crisis. One evening in January, the superintendent at the time held a meeting at the school in Austin, Texas, to let students, parents, teachers, and community members know that at the end of the academic year, their school would close. Thanks to a new state law focused on accountability, the…

It is no secret that since the fall of 2008, fiscal managers have been making tough decisions. The trend is consistent among economic sectors, including education. In their efforts to stem budget shortfalls, school administrators and business managers are cutting programs and eliminating teachers. School librarians in particular are struggling in…

This paper intends to describe the recent experience of a small, rural, two-year technical college. After four decades of success, the college had found itself in a difficult situation with a substantial loss in enrollment and diminished state and local support, coupled with low campus employee morale. In response, the college team closed ranks…

When officials at tuition-driven Fisk University raised the veil of secrecy a few years ago surrounding the university's financial condition, the details they laid out were less than encouraging. The Nashville-based university, home of the historic Jubilee Singers, was losing several million dollars a year and had not received any major private…

Being a college CIO these days must feel a bit like juggling chain saws with one hand while holding a donation cup in the other. It's unlikely to end well, yet it represents the new normal in IT. While campus clients--from administrators to faculty and students--expect the usual raft of tech services, the IT budget simply can't deliver. In this…

Another calendar year is ending without any clear signs that the financial situation is likely to improve for schools and universities across the nation. Four years into this economic drought, education institutions of all sizes from coast to coast have been forced to close facilities, increase class sizes, eliminate programs, postpone building…

Dana College (Dana.edu) was dying. A corporation was willing to buy it. However, Dana did not teach in the main, 21st century technical skills which is true of most little liberal arts colleges. Dana's demise first came in cuts for faculty in terms of benefits (Manghan, K. 1/16/2009). The entrance of the federal government was an attempt to stop a…

In difficult budget times, especially at state colleges and universities, honors programs might seem too easy for budget-cutters to reduce, cut, or lose in the shuffle of administrative reorganization. Recent years have been financially perilous and hardly an easy time for honors programs or colleges to increase budgets. Using Western Carolina…

In her biography about her horticulturalist father, Jonathan Baldwin Turner, Mary Turner Carriel wrote the following of Turner's quest to fence prairies; words that may also serve as an allegory for present-day libraries: What he could have done to tempt the pioneer from his home in the East to settle upon the fertile lands in the West. The first…