Who Are They, and What Do They Want?
I walked into a room full of freshmen the other day and we exchanged blank stares. They looked at me as if to ask, “Who is this guy?” Simultaneously, I was asking myself, “Who are these people and what do…
Category Government
Personal Responsibility
I know I will be accused of being old fashioned and out of touch with reality and if so I admit it, but here it is. The position of a university regarding sexual crimes, a growing campus concern, should be…
Home Schooling
In a free society it is essential that education, however procured, produce people who can dream, think, and accomplish. Exploration and discovery are the roots of freedom and the foundation of egalitarian republics. “I suppose it is because nearly all…
Partnerships between Universities and Community Colleges
Universities serve the same purpose as community colleges, differences are matters of degree. (Pun intended.) “People look at me like I’m crazy when I say that our greatest partnership here at Ohio State should be with the community colleges.” Gordon…
Distance Education Buyers Beware
Distance education programs can offer quality and academic intensity, but they also can be shams. As the Latin warning caveat emptor suggests, those contemplating distance education or satellite campus study – even on-campus programs – need to ask the right…
Our Universities: Sharp Focus
Universities serve many purposes each defined by varied constituents and always based on individual desires and perceptions. This complexity requires that students and families and institutional leaders all appreciate how critical a sharp focus is. Without it no one is…
Our Universities: State Funding
Effective institutional leadership puts a clearly focused mission at the center of every funding decision. And in every organization that seeks to serve people, resources are directed toward that mission. Higher education is opportunity capitalized through thoughtful, rewarded-when-successful risk in…
Our Universities: Bureaucracy is not a Substitute for Excellence
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. No bureaucracy in public service or private enterprise ever starts out as anything but a step towards fairness and excellence. Yet, time and power jointly contrive to pollute legitimate ordering principles. …
Our Universities: Student Debt Problem a Myth?
Some try to defuse the increasing costs of college and subsidized student debt as an overreaction. Can that be? “Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people.” Wendell…
Our Universities: The Necessary Future
Universities can sustain the status quo, asking students to absorb higher levels of debt while begging statehouses for more money and turning faculty into day laborers. It’s a failed strategy though and change must occur. “Gonna change my way of…
Our Universities: Stakeholders on Student Debt Plan Need to Put Skin in the Game
The basis for President Obama’s action to cap student loan responsibility at 10% of earned income for 20 years (10/20 plan) is that education is a public good and the public should pay for it. Parts of the public, employers…
Our Universities: Accountability to Students
Universities and lenders must be more transparent regarding costs, opportunities, and likelihoods of success to students. “Greater personal choice, individually tailored services, stronger local accountability, greater efficiency – these are all central to the new direction of travel we have…
Our Universities: Meal Tickets to the Middle Class
Universities perpetuate a misconception about an education — that it guarantees anything separated from the person who claims to have one. Many know a “Harvard Man” or a Wellesley Woman” who can’t tie his or her own shoes. Character, ability,…
Our Universities: Vocational Education
The idea that all college students are the same or that there is only one way to prepare for a productive work life is harmfully wrong. High school to college to career works for some. High school to work to…
Our Universities: The Greatest Challenge
Threats to higher education come not primarily from shady lenders, crass bankers and bureaucrats interested in turning government-subsidized, student-borrowed, dollars into operating capital, elected officials who want to use educational systems for personal gain, but from a bevy of educational…
Our Universities: “The Sins of the Father”
Political leadership reflects the dreams and nightmares of the electorate. Voter-sanctioned tolerance and expectations percolate into public leaders of every strain, including university presidents. For university leaders, moral authority or its lack, settles into the hearts, minds and souls of…
Our Universities: The Graduate Albatross
Student debt recently surpassed total credit card debt. Payments can be delayed through graduate school enrollment; and the accrual of more debt. “Making loans accessible to millions of the previously unbankable customers is a noble goal. Getting them hooked to…
Our Universities: Awash in Bad Paper
Students borrow too much. What’s worse, the institutions they borrow too much to attend, borrow too much. A ferocious cycle is created: endlessly optimistic and apparently never satisfied. “Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience; you…
Our Universities: The Blame Game 2.0
(Spring Break) This column was originally published on March 26, 2010. With modest modification here it is again. Too often we lose touch with the concept of locus of control, personal responsibility and accountability, and the power of individuals to…
Our Universities: Ethics
Universities, to their demise, confuse what they think they can get away with, and what serves their true mission. Moreover, institutions seem to believe they can be known by something other than their actions. Shortsightedness in spades. “Values are like…
Our Universities: Academic Market Forces
The marketplace of higher education is special, unique, and provides something unlike any other enterprise. But, it is a marketplace nonetheless. Universities are subsidized by the state and therefore are obliged to respond to the social and economic needs of…
Our Universities: A Canary in the Mine
The future of higher education is intertwined with the future of the economic health of our states and nation. The two are inseparable, and our universities are barometers. We need to face challenges head on. “The problem is not that…
Our Universities: Bankruptcy – Financial and Moral
Bankruptcy is a form of renewal available to those who have tried to do something worthwhile but failed. If borrowing power is earned by experience and potential performance thank God for bankruptcy’s protection. If borrower or lender enter into a…
Our Universities: One Size Fits One
Standardized measures never capture the essence of anything, although they provide dimensions: length, width, and depth – descriptions — but not essence. Tests, grades, and performance measures devoid of dreams and desires are gibberish. Measures are frail rhetoric and detrimental…
Our Universities: Function and Finance
Clear communication regarding value and cost in higher education is more important than ever. College presidents and financial analysts agree — mission focus is essential. “In general, higher education does not know how to speak for its interests. It offers…
Our Universities: Bureaucracy and Morality
Bureaucracies create and sustain a moral perspective. “If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won’t.” Hyman Rickover ___________________________________________________ Effective bureaucracies — vision directed guidelines and processes — are…
Our Universities: Fifteen Dollars a Week
The loan industry has a dubious impact on higher education. It advocates, unknowingly or deceitfully, that a college degree is always an excellent investment. It helps shift focus to cost as a measure of everything, away from quality, value and…
Our Universities: Stewards — not Wards — of the State
State funding has its place but too much might create organizational laziness, leadership ineffectiveness, and unattainable expectations. Unbridled dependence morphs into a form of gluttony. “The more subsidized it is, the less free it is. What is known as `free…
Our Universities: A Cacophony of Concerns
Increasing college costs and decreasing employment opportunity have produced an avalanche of studies regarding the value of college degrees. Sometimes more information is not better. A “back to basics” understanding would be valuable to all. “Nowadays people know the price…
Our Universities: Micromanagement
Real leadership liberates, never limits: it unleashes people to work with passion. Effective universities recognize that strength in academic programs exists on the ground, with engaged faculty, staff, and students working towards common university goals. Good managers empower their employees…
Our Universities: Boards, Leadership, Politics
Public university boards, and the presidents or chancellors they appoint, have a delicate line to walk between the political realities of contemporary higher education and the academic realities of effective universities. The nexus of politics and academics is not always…
Our Universities: Everyone Must Have a B.A. or B.S.?
We have begun to hold a readily visible evidence of education, the degree or certification, as valuable in and of itself. But these are emblems too often having little to do with knowing something or having the ability to do…
Our Universities: The Power of Two – Ideas and Ideology
Universities, especially public universities, have a responsibility to leave ideology behind and focus on ideas. This does not mean that ideology is not valuable to individuals, but it should take a back seat to ideas at universities. In too many…
Our Universities: Locality and Vitality
Fourth in a Series on Research Research creates interest and value for a university and its locale. “This atmosphere of excitement, arising from imaginative consideration, transforms knowledge. A fact is no longer a bare fact: it is invested with all…
Our Universities: Research Matters, Absolutely
First in a Series on Research Learning creates ideas grounded in the past but hopeful for the future. History is the basis for discovery, and it relentlessly repeats itself absent new ideas and insight: Forward focused investigation and research. When…
Our Universities: The Morality of Cost and Value
Universities systematically misrepresent the value of a degree. All degrees may have some value, but how much, to whom? University leadership should help students decide what works for them and why. The idea that any degree under any circumstances has…
Our Universities: Serving the Public Good
Service from universities to the extended community always has value. The best universities have codified a service imperative into their mission statements and are committed to providing insight and ideas to the community through individual students, faculty, and staff. “The…
Our Universities: Community College Innovation
The work of higher education is fairly simple. Teachers teach, students learn and benefits accrue; individually, corporately, and socially. As student abilities, backgrounds, needs, and aspirations change, so too must our approaches to teaching. Or, there will be no learning.…
Our Universities: Governance
Governance — leadership in a word — in the froth of forces at work in a contemporary public university seems unattainable. The job of mayor and Governor is becoming more and more like the job of university president, which I…
Our Universities: College Towns
Tenth in the series, Follow the money From Boston to Austin and Oxford, Mississippi, to West Lafayette, Indiana, big and small, prosperous or starving, universities are married to communities, for better or worse. When one hurts, both do. “The relationship…
Our Universities: Elitism
Our universities exist to educate and separate. Education is essentially a process of separation. Ignorance is separated and eliminated through insight. Students willing to submit to the process of an education should have the opportunity. This is a social obligation,…
Our Universities: Money and the Big Picture
Seventh and final in a series on state funding for higher education Value in higher education will make more thoughtful and careful students out of those in attendance. People will be asking why ever more frequently. Leadership better have good…
Our Universities: Resource Flows
Sixth in a series on state funding for higher education If we measure the value of an educational institution solely by the number students enrolled, the number of degrees produced, the research dollars garnered, the books written, the paintings or…
Our Universities: Faculty and Resources
Fifth in a series on state funding for higher education Chester Dunning, an acquaintance of mine, understands the value of faculty work in a free society. He is quoted in a WSJ piece, Putting a Price on Professors: Mr. Dunning…
Our Universities: For-Profit, or For Purpose?
Fourth in a series on state funding for higher education The human drive to create profit, the Internet and other technologies, are endeavoring to transform higher education. And in part, they have. But digital interaction alone will never be a…
Our Universities: Financial Aid and Its Impact on State Support
Third in a series on state funding for higher education Addressing how the Monetary Assistance Program (MAP) is affecting the students of Illinois, the IBHE Task Force observed: The first issue is the increasing demand for financial aid. More students…
Our Universities: Rising Tuition – Causes and Effects
Second in a series on state funding for higher education Historically, while state contributions to the total operating budgets of universities have increased as a percentage of all spending, tuition has remained a roughly stable percentage of all operating costs. …
Our Universities: Declining State Resources
First in a series on state funding for higher education A fear held by many is that decreasing state support will lead effectively to privatizing state universities. And while a few million dollars is a pittance to a large research…